tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80333164441023917742024-03-13T20:10:29.191+00:00Bethany BlackMusings arguments and gig reports from your favourite Goth lesbian transsexual vegan recovering alcoholic and drug addict sceptic rationalist atheist comedian chameleon and caricature.Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-38112041926698567372014-03-04T14:57:00.001+00:002014-03-04T15:32:57.502+00:00If I opened my heart there'd be no room for air.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I sat up all night on Sunday watching the Oscars, I studied film and old habits die hard. Most Stand-up comics wanted to rock stars, I didn't, I wanted to be a director.<br />
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After I left university I took an idea that I'd had and extended it into a feature film and spent 2 years trying to write it and get it made, I got training, I got the Prince's Trust to agree to fund me if I could get the rest of the funding in place, I wrote a business plan that made the bank agree to part fund me and then... Well then I gave up, because to be frank the film I'd written was shit. It was awful, it was wish fulfilment bollocks, my way of dealing with the bullying I'd faced at school, the alcoholic paranoia that I was going through and a way to focus my rage.<br />
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It was a few months after that when I was working a shitty data entry job in my home town of Chorley and thinking "Is this it? Is this what I do now for 48 weeks a year for the next 50 years until I retire and then have a few years to myself before I die? Fuck. That." and I started looking for a new outlet, and comedy, the one thing I really wanted but I thought I couldn't ever do became the last thing on my list of creative outlets and I gave it a go.<br />
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These days I make my living making people laugh and I'm really good at it, and that's why I can stay up all night on a Sunday without having to worry about getting up for work the next day.<br />
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There's always the worry that I'll not be able to stay awake mind you, but fortunately the first Oscar went to Jared Leto, so the ensuing fury kept me awake for the rest of the show. It was helped along by various people on twitter getting all happy that he won. I wasn't happy. For the record I'd much rather Jonah Hill to have won. <br />
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My reason for not wanting him to win is fairly simple. His character in Dallas Buyers Club was a poorly researched mix of stereotypes which could have been handled much better, and could have been played better by a trans actor. They would have pulled the director up a lot of the things that were unbelievable about the way Leto played the role.<br />
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I also disliked the character as it was there to fulfil the dominant narrative of the femme trans woman who's essentially a gay man pretending to be what they think a woman is, who is there to be made fun of, and who is there, in the end to be pitied.<br />
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It's one of the reasons I know that no matter how good I get at what I do I'll never make it big in a mainstream way. I don't follow that narrative. I'm not femme, I don't sleep with men, I'm not a tragic figure.<br />
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I went off to sleep, and then woke up at 10am a good hour earlier than I'd normally wake up, and a good 3 hours before I should have woken up, so I spent all of yesterday feeling exhausted, and angry.<br />
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I was happy to leave my anger from the previous night behind, but it seemed a storm was brewing on the horizon and lots of people were talking about Leto's Oscar and it seems, a some people who felt the way I did about the character (all of them trans) and lots of people who disagreed with our point of view (All of them cisgendered)<br />
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So the day was spent fighting, and not in the usual internet fighting way of "hmm I disagree with their point, I should say something massively unforgivable and end it with a death threat" kind of way, but in the tiring, depressing, shame fuelled way when you're trying to argue with people who you like, who are on your side normally, and you're fighting with them about your right to exist, about your right to not have to deal with prejudice, about your right to be treated equally, you know, like a human being.<br />
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On top of that having to deal with people who seem to think "straight" is the opposite of "trans" becomes tiring too, having to explain that being trans, isn't, as Rayon is portrayed, about being so gay you want to be the opposite gender. Like trans is the gayest of the gay, I mean, I am <b>very</b> gay <i>and</i> trans, but not in the way that they think. The opposite of transgendered is cisgendered. If you are born relating to your body and it's primary and secondary sexual characteristics then you're cisgendered. Both come from the Latin, trans meaning on the opposite side to, cis meaning on the same side as.<br />
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By far the largest group who got angry about people criticising Leto's character were cis gay white men. And I get it, I really do, if you belong to a minority who's been persecuted and things have got better, you like to think that it's got better for everyone equally, and that's not the case. When someone starts telling you that maybe you're not persecuted as much as you think you are and there are people who are worse off than you then your ace up your sleeve is taken from you and it feels like being attacked. You get all hot, your heart rate increases, you don't like to think of yourself as a bad person, so you rewrite the story, it's their fault, they're being over sensitive.<br />
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It's so easy to do, and it's natural, it's how our brains work. I get it I really do, I've been called out a number of times, including yesterday when I said something that was horribly racist, I didn't realise it at the time as it wasn't even within my thought process, and someone angrily called me out on it. I did all of those things for about 5 seconds, then I thought about it rationally and went "Yep, they're right, I've fucked up. I should apologise and never do that again." Just like that. Same as my policy on forgiveness, if someone's genuinely sorry, I'll forgive them straight away. It's incredibly tough to do something so simple, but then the right thing is most often the most difficult thing to do in a given situation.<br />
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The whole experience just let me know that whilst people are accepting of trans people, they don't get it. And that's okay, but when you don't get it, don't try to tell me that I'm in the wrong about it. I live with it, every day.<br />
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And living with it and dealing with the inside of my head can sometimes be a full time job. It's 14 years since I came out to friends and family and started my transition. Before that I spent 21 years trying to hide that disphoria that I felt in my own body from everyone including myself. The shame I felt at feeling this way. I'd drink and it'd take away the thoughts of my problems for the first part of the night and then bring them back as obsessions and the hang overs would bring that existential agony and horror as it would be all my head was filled with.<br />
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As a teenager as my body began to change I hated myself, I hated being trapped, I hated having to pretend to be a boy at school, failing at it in a way that neither I nor anyone else really got and getting bullied for it. I got beaten up regularly, I had other kids cut my hair, call me names and make my life hell.<br />
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I found my body so alien to me that I couldn't be naked if at all possible, I'd get changed in the dark or under my bedclothes I couldn't look at myself in a mirror unless I was fully clothed.<br />
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The only representations of anyone I saw who were like me were people who's narrative was that they were unhappy, sad people who were to be ridiculed and pitied, who had come out and were disowned by their family, attacked in the street and lived lonely lives.<br />
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When that was the option if I came out, for the longest time trying to live this lie was easier.<br />
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Eventually that option was preferable and I came out.<br />
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The world's changed a lot in the last 14 years and I'm proud of the part that I've helped to play in that.<br />
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When I first transitioned I was told that I should never tell anyone if at all possible that I was trans because that was dangerous, I was criticised by people in the community when I said that I didn't want to hide in another closet. People told me that would be the only thing that people thought about.<br />
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To an extent I know that they're right, even allies do that. When I got sexually assaulted by a male guard at Copenhagen Airport last year almost EVERYBODY assumed that it was because I was trans, like, that wasn't even a question. Other trans people went down that line too. It wasn't, it was because the way that security is set up at Copenhagen Airport sexual assault of women by male guards is so common that it's not even considered an issue by the security team or the local police.<br />
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The reason everyone assumed that it was because I was trans was because I'm open with my family and friends about being trans, so they assume that everyone who meets me in the street knows too, some do some don't but the assumption that everyone does and that's the reason for every bad thing that happens is hurtful.<br />
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When I took part in a panel discussion on Gender Identity last year it caused a stink and I got a lot of hassle, one thing that came from a cisgendered "ally" was that I was unsuitable to talk about gender identity because I was too privileged, and one of the reasons for that was because I had "passing privilege" meaning I don't get read as trans, which maybe I don't as much as some, but I do more than others, when complete strangers go "Are you a bird or a bloke?" in the street to me I'd count that as not "passing" When audience members ask me the same thing, when little children at the swimming baths or in changing rooms go "Mummy why does that man not have a willy?" it doesn't feel like it, When guys in bars come over and tell my friends "you know that's a man right?" and point at me, or just stare and then laugh in my face, it doesn't feel like I "pass"<br />
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Every day is a fight, every single day, and that's without having to deal with people who are on my side, but don't get it telling me I'm over reacting expecting a decent representation of people like myself somewhere in the media.<br />
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The stuff I've been through not only in my first 21 years of trying to pretend to be male, but in the 14 years that have followed have affected me in a way that makes every day difficult to get through. I'm much happier now, my life is sweet, I'm comfortable in my own skin, I've got an awesome girlfriend who loves me very much, and a job I love that makes me really happy.<br />
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But still I find it difficult to go out of the house, I find it difficult because even after 14 years there's a part of my brain that goes "people are going to read you as male and you're going to get attacked", every time I open my mouth I expect everyone to turn around and stare at me for the booming male voice that comes out of it. A part of my head is still always surprised when I'm not misgendered, as I always expect it.<br />
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When it does happen and someone calls me sir or says "He" to me the shame and embarrassment just makes me want to die, to burst into tears and go somewhere dark and never have to interact with people again.<br />
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I'm surprised that my girlfriend loves me, I'm surprised that I've got a girlfriend because the whole of society has been sending me fairly open messages that people like me are unlovable.<br />
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I can't get on public transport because as a teenager and through the early part of my transition, buses and trains were the places where I was most likely to get attacked.<br />
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I also know that people are going to ask me questions that they wouldn't think of asking other people, I get asked about my genitals a lot by complete strangers in a way that I'm sure they don't do to cisgendered women. "So, have you, you know... had the op?" A hello would have been nice rather than going straight in with that, these days when they do that I ask when the first day of their last period was, what age they started menstruating and whether they suffer with vaginal dryness. <br />
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These are all the things that are constantly going on in my head when I take part in the world and it's so easy to just withdraw, or not talk about these things and so mostly I don't. I know that I come across as a bit odd to people when I meet them, a bit awkward, a bit weird, I know this, this is a hangover from everything I've been through. It's anxiety inducing, it's depressing, it regularly gives me suicidal thoughts, and that's the reality of having to fight this fight every single day of my life. The internalised transphobia and trangst that's a result of dealing with the world can be awful.<br />
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In spite of all this though, I've got an amazing life, I love my life and I'm happy. I'm proud to say I'm trans, and I wouldn't want to be cis. It's a part of who I am, not the whole of it, but it's given me opportunities and experiences I could never have dreamed of otherwise.<br />
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I'm not part of the "angry trans mob" that occasionally gets whipped up on twitter, but whenever I do get angry I'm automatically lumped in with that. Being overly sensitive it's called. Rather than what it actually is which is wanting the same things as everyone else, to be treated with the same respect as everyone else, to have the same opportunities as everyone else.<br />
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The thing is we don't, we're right at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to this. We're the one minority group that it's still okay to make fun of, and we've had enough, for the first time in history we've been able to get together and have a voice, and we're starting to use that voice to highlight the way things are wrong with how we're treated, yes we get it wrong sometimes, but we're still years behind the rest of the LGBT movement.<br />
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The character who Jared Leto played felt badly researched, it felt like a stereotype, to be laughed at, to be pitied. Yes, it increases visibility, yes, it shows that we've moved a way forward that a character like this could win an Oscar, but the character was all wrong, and that's the issue.<br />
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There's a scene in an episode of South Park where Randy has said the N word on national Television and Stan is trying to tell his black friend Token that he "gets it" and eventually getting to the end of the episode where he realises that he doesn't get it, he can't possibly get it and all he can hope for is to learn. This is what yesterday felt like to me, banging my head against a wall and feeling like my experience wasn't considered valid by people who haven't a level of understanding about the issue involved.</div>
Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-57329335966850831972013-11-20T09:58:00.003+00:002013-11-20T09:59:51.759+00:00Winter stripped the blossoms bare, a different tree now lines the streets, shaking it's fists in the air<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">To everyone posting links to The Express's story that it's going to be the coldest winter for 66 years, a few things to consider:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Firstly, it's the Express. I'm not saying you should take *Everything* they say with a pinch of salt, but they haven't had a front page in 16 years that isn't about a conspiracy behind Princess Diana's death, "New" information on the Madeline McCann case, items that either cause or cure cancer, or Weather. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Secondly, what would a newspaper who regularly prints stories claiming climate change is a hoax gain by claiming that it's the coldest winter on record? (Odd that people who claim a cold snap, or even one cold winter means climate change is a hoax, using that particular pseudo-scientific technique you could easily say that a hot day in the summer proves it.)</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Thirdly, this is the long range forcast that they've interpreted as "Worst winter for 66 years with 100 days of snow!!!!": "December 2013</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">December looks like being an unsettled month with no one particular pattern dominating the whole of the proceedings. During more settled phases of weather, frost and ice can be expected, perhaps severe with regards to frost. There will be a risk of sleet and snow, generally across northern and north eastern areas, with perhaps some southerly incursions, although anything sustained here is unlikely. Milder weather will be in evidence with wet and windy episodes, although around the festive period to the north and north east, perhaps conditions cold enough for a scattering of snow showers, making for a White Christmas. Drier than average for the month across northern areas, on the average to the south. Temperatures for December will reflect on or around the average.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">January 2014</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">January generally looks a wetter and potentially colder month, possibly significantly colder, so combining the two looks likely to produce some snow events of note throughout the first month of 2014, but whilst the mix may favour chillier weather, milder and wetter weather will be in evidence at times. The emphasis on the snow will not just be across northern regions but fairly widespread at times, giving much of the UK a taste of winter's past, bringing the season more into line with how the weather should be for the time of year. Perhaps a few surprises during January. With regards to rainfall, a wetter than average month, with temperatures on or below the average."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Essentially , they've headlined their report "A taste of winter past?" and The Express has interpreted that, rather than the content of the report, which, it has to be said follows Betteridge's Law of Headlines "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word "no""</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">What we have, is a paper with an agenda of denying climate change, claiming experts are saying one thing when they're not, and writing it in such an alarmist way that it seeps into the national consciousness "It's going to be the worst winter on record" then when it isn't, who's to blame? Is it the newspaper who made things up based, not on evidence, but the headline to a piece? No, blame the bloody weathermen, they always get it wrong don't they? Eh? Well, no actually, they get it right over 90% of the time. This particular piece of bullshit from the Express is a win/win for them. Wrong? Not their fault. Right? Climate change is a hoax!</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Further reading on this can be found here:</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vantageweatherservices.co.uk%2F3.html&h=yAQGRs6_PAQHPlO06uLfUyJ37t8CIuOzxfr8tTm0UdcFc3A&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">http://www.vantageweatherservices.co.uk/3.html</span></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fgeorgemonbiot%2F2012%2Fjun%2F15%2Fdaily-express-weather-forecast-jonathan-powell&h=RAQEVLd2kAQGpvOY7yAbr4EJali97aBCzGN5lRPm0GIkYhA&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/jun/15/daily-express-weather-forecast-jonathan-powell</span></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.northdevonjournal.co.uk%2FMet-Office-blasts-weather-reports-8220-worst%2Fstory-19934266-detail%2Fstory.html&h=YAQEIJq6_AQGWLbb3ACOnt6J5GYZqrGVbGiN0EiP7i5dbeQ&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">http://www.northdevonjournal.co.uk/Met-Office-blasts-weather-reports-8220-worst/story-19934266-detail/story.html</span></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/media/2012/08/dont-trust-daily-expresss-weather-reports" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/media/2012/08/dont-trust-daily-expresss-weather-reports</span></a></div>
Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-47041016290720419912013-10-07T11:38:00.000+01:002013-10-07T11:38:11.649+01:00Don't touch me I'm a real live wire.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
1,200 MURDERED IN THE LAST 10 YEARS BY MENTAL PATIENTS!<br />
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Shit the bed! That's fucking terrifying. Really? Wow. how the fuck are we not walking down the street being randomly attacked as we walk? "Well I just popped out for a paper and some nutter murdered me. Pow, just like that, shot through the heart (and you're to blame, you give mental health policy a bad name). 5th time this week you know? I just keep on going out there and getting murdered." Surely that should be a thing we're hearing from our friends on a daily basis?<br />
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But we're not, because when you wait a few minutes and have a look at that figure and go "Okay, there's 62 million people in the UK, even if that's the majority of the murder rate that's still a very very rare occurrence.<br />
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There were an estimated 6,800 Murders in the UK in the last 10 years. One in four people, including myself suffers with a mental health condition. So realistically, homicides by "mental patients" should be around 1,700, but they're not, whereas the 75% of you who aren't loonies are responsible for 82% of the murders.<br />
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This is before we even consider the fact that 95% of all murders are committed by men.<br /><br />I know, I know, you're freaking out now going "Sanctions need to be put in place to save us! Why aren't we locking up all the men?" and to that I say we don't need to. Just 95% of them at the very most.<br />
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However if you're looking properly you need to take in to account the murder rate. In the UK it's 1.2 per 100,000 which is low compared to the US with their 4.7 and their ongoing gungasm, where the only time you don't have the right to be killed is whilst you're still in the womb, to the point that the obvious solution to please both sides in the US is to ban abortion but have a choice of delivery suites that are situated in shooting ranges.<br />
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It's high though if you compare it with Iceland the country, which, it would appear likely has a lower homicide rate than Iceland the discount food shop, with a murder rate of just 0.3. Iceland has a population of 300,000 which would help explain it, one person murdered, and everyone went "Ah that was Björn Murdererson!" and that was that.<br />
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Still, 1,200 people murdered in the UK is 1,200 too many, 6,800 is 6,800 too many. I suspect that no one's disputing that, maybe Rose West is sat there in her cell going, "There should be more! Let me out there's so much more I could do!"<br />
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The hypocrisy of The Sun is well known, and this article is no different, they "Proudly support our boys!" when they're in the forces, they support Help For Heroes, and yet when they come back from being turned into soldiers, sailors, airmen and women, have fought or been put into some of the most hostile environments on this planet and have come home and have mental health problems running at almost double that of the non-military population The Sun feels okay in vilifying them for not falling into the right group?<br />
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1,200 murders in 10 years. That's a lot of lives ruined, and not just the ones ended, the ones that tie into those. That's how many people died on the roads between January and September last year. No one knows the figure for how many of those were caused by mental patients. I drive around 45,000 miles per year and killed no one in that time so my conscience is clear.<br />
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It's also known that you're more likely to be killed by a cow than by a shark, I am, I don't swim in the ocean, there's dangerous shit in there, both literal and metaphorical. 20 people in the US are killed by cows every year.<br />
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Why mention that? You're right it does sound daft to go and add that to the end of a piece about how The Sun has been perpetuating mental health stigma, but it is pertinent. 150.4 million cattle are slaughtered in the USA every year. So whilst the ratio is much greater, just like mental health patients, Cows are far more likely to be the victims of homicide than the perpetrators.</div>
Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-24137502875099625902013-08-22T17:30:00.000+01:002013-08-22T19:28:42.077+01:00She maybe the face I can't forget A trace of pleasure or regret <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As if being a trans woman wasn't dangerous enough, coming out is difficult as it is but doing it the day after you've been given a 35 year prison sentence is hard as fucking nails.<br>
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But that's exactly what Chelsea Manning has done and for that I respect her greatly. When someone whose name is so public comes out whether they're a musician such as Laura Jane Grace of Against Me, or in this case Chelsea Manning of Wikileaks fame, the idea that trans people's lives belong to the media is thrown into sharp relief.<br>
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If you're like me and hate injustice, but are a bit emotionally fragile news like this is met with relief and dread. Relief that as more and more people know about more and more high profile transitioning trans people the world will get slightly better for the rest of us, and dread because it means when I see that trending topic on twitter I don't want to click on to it because I know it's like the bit in Scrooged where Bill Murray looks under The Ghost of Christmas Future's robes and sees the lost souls screaming in eternal torment.<br><br>I don't read the bottom half of the internet, the bit where the general public get their say on things, I remember someone once saying that reading the comments section on the internet is like examining a 15 year old boy's bedsheets with a magnifying glass, you know what you're going to find and it's best not to look.<br><br>I also apply this rule looking at the top half of The Daily Mail, whose commenter's this week lurched beyond parody when one of them asked where one of the two British girls arrested for drug smuggling in Peru had got her jacket from.<br>
<a name="more"></a><br>I used to be full of piss and vinegar and would search out every injustice, eke every bit of outrage out of anything that I could (and if you'll remember what happened a few weeks ago between Caitlin Moran and I you'll realise I still can) but I eventually realised that it's best for my mental health if I don't go digging. I know it's a bit of a cowards way out, but I know that as a recovering addict and alcoholic that if I go picking at these things then the likelihood is that I'll get all angry, then I'll get upset, then this will spiral and if I'm not careful my mind is back to the same places it was when I was drinking and using drugs. So all in all it's best to be avoided.<br><br>I was reminded of this yesterday when I was doing a phone interview for a Radio One show due out in October about trans issues and was being interviewed by Paris Lees, someone who I have had run ins with and arguments with in the past but whom I respect immensely. 3/4 of the way through the interview she asked me which trans people I look up to. And I thought about it for a second and realised that she was one of them, so I told her. <br><br>The reason for that is that when I can't bear to look through the newspaper reports that either misgender trans people or paint us out as monsters, or as freaks or as deceivers, she has made her career from looking at these things and fighting that fight. I respect that a lot. It makes my job of going out there, or even staying here and shouting about equality that much easier if all I have to do when people are shits is tell them to fuck off, or block them.<br>
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So today when the news broke of Chelsea Manning beginning her transition, which had to come on a day when it looked like I might be getting made homeless (in the end it didn't, but it was touch and go.) I thought "Fair play internet, you win this round, I will avoid you."<br>
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As it happens This time the Mail used the right pronouns all the way through, the BBC in their coverage didn't. This doesn't really surprise me, often right wingers really like me and are more accepting of me being female (even if it is for the wrong reasons) than the supposedly open minded left are. Stuff like this hasn't surprised me since I was doing some work on a piece with a very successful writer, who'd written some fabulous lesbian characters who asked me "how can you be lesbian and trans? Don't all lesbians just want to be men anyway?" <br><br>But I understand that people get confused. It's confusing to deal with something outside of your comfort zone. People will fuck up, people will use the wrong pronouns, just like my family did, just like my dad still does sometimes by accident when he's nervous and he's around a new partner of mine. Every time. He gets really upset by it but I know that it comes from nerves rather than malice so I find it really endearing.<br>
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There will be people out there who do get it wrong, and that's okay because there is a difference between making a mistake because you're used to one thing and deliberately disregarding someone's autonomy and preference.<br><br><br>My partner who has English as a second language put it best when we were talking about how people perceive trans people "there is a worldwide misconception that transsexuals become the opposite sex. That little Johnny was happily playing with guns and soldiers and suddenly decided in later life to become a woman. That's how I had it explained to me 'he decided to become a woman' when that's just not the case."<br><br>And she's right. If the papers and the media just said "Manning is actually a woman." rather than "Manning is becoming a woman" Over night it would slightly shift the perception of people to a more understanding viewpoint.<br><br>Often, exclusionary radical feminism events such as the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival which has an entrance policy of "Womyn born womyn only!" fails in the realisation that trans women were born women. It's just that they weren't treated as women from day one, and had to tell the rest of the world that they were when they got older. Or as I try to explain it, when I was born my parents were convinced I was going to be a boy, for about 20 years.<br>
<br>I didn't transition to become a woman, I transitioned away from living as a man. And as scary as it was it was without a doubt the best thing I have ever done in my life, without it I wouldn't have a life.<br><br>I hope this also makes it easier for people who are struggling with being trans to see that whatever their personal circumstances and obstacles to their coming out and transitioning that at least they've not just been sentenced to 35 years in a federal prison after spending 3 and a half years in Guantanamo.<br>
<br>So to Chelsea Manning who is starting this process now in the most trying of circumstances I wish the best of luck and can say I can add another person to the list of trans people I admire and hope for the best for her,</div>
Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-56869030545758431462013-08-12T16:38:00.001+01:002013-08-12T16:49:57.901+01:00Yes I did yes I did, won't someone please tell them who the eff I is.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: white;">I'm sat here with writer's block, I turn to my partner, Sanna, who says to me "You talk about things all the time, just write about that." Which is helpful, and one of the reasons I love her so much, than and that over the weekend when we were bored in a hotel we drew beards and moustaches on Sanna said "I look like a fat paedophile!" I giggled and she said "Are you calling me fat?" Because obviously that's the more offensive thing to be called.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">It's difficult to think of things to write, simply because even when I try to talk about things that are serious I try to keep it light, try to keep it funny. In a week it'll be 9 years since I Started doing stand up comedy. A lot has changed in that time, some things have stayed the same, my heart still dies a little inside when someone comes up to me after a gig (as happens about 3 times a week now) and goes "I don't normally find women funny but you were great." 9 times out of 10 it's a woman who says that and I know it's supposed to be a compliment, but it really isn't, I've never asked any of my black or asian comedian friends if they get the same, I think that we've moved on enough with racism in this country that people know not to go up to people like Daliso Chaponda who I was gigging with at the weekend in Nottingham and go "You know, I don't normally find black people funny, but you were great!" Maybe it's not racism, maybe there isn't that cultural stereotype that black people aren't funny. Does Tiger Woods get it? "I don't normally think that black people are any good at golf but you've got quite a swing on you." Of course they don't it's patronising as fuck.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">It's essentially going "Before I saw you, I made a snap decision that you wouldn't be able to do the job that you're clearly getting paid to do and you know what? My prejudice was proved wrong, but rather than admit that's what it is, I'm going to tell you that that's an anomaly and that you're clearly <b>the</b> funny female comic." I call it the Jo Brand effect. Basically for about 10 years Jo Brand was the only female comic on TV, and she was there for a reason, she was fucking awesome. But comedy's subjective, we all like different things just as we like different bands. I'm currently sat writing this and listening to psychobilly music thinking "I don't know why Horrorpops don't regularly top the charts when Justin Bieber does." But that's because it's entirely subjective. After a few minutes of listening to Reverend Horton Heat the average teenager wants to shit in their own ears.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">Now imagine if the only female singer you heard on the radio or saw on the TV for the best part of 20 years was Nicki Minaj. I love Nicki Minaj, but if I only heard her, I'd get sick pretty fucking sharpish. After about 7 years of only listening to the Trinidadian teen idol I'd hate her. And then probably by the 20 year mark I'd be going "I hate all female singers." If after that I went to see a band and the support act had a female singer I'd probably tut and go "It'll all be singing for the boys with the booming systems, top down AC with the cooling systems, coming in the club like he's blazing up, with stacks of money out like he's saving up." And then be surprised when it was Amanda Palmer, or Florence off of Florence and the Machine, or Patsy Cline, Or Lynette Morgan.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">This is what it's like with comedy, whenever you ask someone who tells you they don't like female comics which ones they've seen they can maybe give you a list of 3, of which they usually agree that they do quite like one of them.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">As a comic when you go out on to a stage at pretty much any gig, unless you're doing your own show where people have specifically paid to watch you that they haven't the first clue who you are and they make a snap judgement. It happens to everyone If you look like they imagine a comic should look you've got a bit of leeway, if you look funny, you've got a bit of leeway. but generally in the UK at least there's this national identity where we're often sat there going "Think you're funny do you fucker? I'll be the judge of that!"</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">It's hilarious when comics come to the UK for the first time from the US and don't realise that in spite of the fact we share a language we really could not have a more opposite attitude, so in the US where they try to front sell it, "This act has been on Last Comic Standing on NBC, they've written for a number of comedy central shows and won an MTV award for most promising writer..." Your American audience is going "Fuck this dude must be AWESOME I love him already!" Your British audience is going "Cunt."</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">the UK is the only nation where the MC at a comedy gig tells the audience to applaud an act on to the stage. You know why that is? Because we're the only country that has to. I learned that the hard way, the only thing lonelier than walking off a stage to the sound of your own footsteps is walking on to the sound of your own footsteps.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">There's been another comedy boom it's on every channel all the time, even PM on Radio four has got in on it. The world's gone to shit so we all like a laugh.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">Female comics are awesome, there are as many different types of female comics as there are comics.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">I happen to talk about personal stuff that I find funny, being gay features highly on that because it's fucking hilarious, at least, the way I do it. (it's not you fuck like a god. - Sanna. That's why I call my left <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">hand Mjölnir - Beth) When I started out I wanted to be political. I wanted to be angry railing against injustice, highlighting stupidity and inequality. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;">Turns out I get so angry and upset that I can't make anything funny out of it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;">The time we live in it's never been more important to be political, we have vans going round the UK telling foreigner to go home. We used to just leave that job to Prince Philip or the BNP (Ironic that they should <i>actually have their jobs taken off them, </i>and by other racists as it happens.)<br /><br />We have the UK Boarder Agency stopping people at tube stations asking them if they've got the right to stay here. Though oddly they're less keen to ask the staff at the various Walkabout pubs if their visas are current.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;">Greece has slid into full on fascism, LGBT people there are being arrested, attacked and imprisoned. Same in Russia. Switzerland has now brought in apartheid, how surprised are we going to be if they kick off? No one has prepared for that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;">The whole system is fucked, In the UK our chancellor is trying to cut £11bn from public services, because our country is clearly such a crazy futuristic Utopia that we can afford to do that, kids are going hungry, old people are freezing to death, our neoliberal experiment that started with Thatcher has played out and it turns out it was bullshit. and yet we have a Labour party who don't know what they stand for because they're shitting it that if they in any way say "Look ruining the lives of the majority of people in order to sell off the last of our public services to vested interests, (such as the father in law of the chancellor who lobbies on behalf of the fracking industry) might be a bad thing" that the press and the electorate will crucify them.<br /><br />It's terrifying. It really is, and I can't make anything funny out of it because my rage is so impotent, it feels like I might as well get angry at the weather. The only reaction to it I can give as a comedian is as The Comedian from Watchmen.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;">In light of this it seems churlish to try to be funny, but in the end it's all I've got. It's a double edged sword, simultaneously You're the one who gets to say the unsayable, to point out the ridiculous truth at the core of the illusion that we all build our daily lives round, but you're just a comic, these are just jokes so no one's going to take it seriously.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;">In medieval times jesters were often mentally ill people who got to be the only people to insult the king, to tell them the truth and it was okay because they were mentally ill and they were being funny.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; line-height: 16px;">Some things never change.</span></div>
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Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-26279260584108880012013-08-05T19:56:00.001+01:002013-08-06T15:08:16.198+01:00You can't silence the voice of the voiceless.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Interesting times people, that 20th century American faux-Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" continues. Maybe it's because I'm a massive twat who doesn't know when to keep their trap shut, or maybe stuff just seems to happen when I'm around. I don't know.<br />
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I am writing this on my partner's weird Swedish keyboard, so if there's an occasional "ö", "ä" or "å" that is the reason.<br />
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In recent weeks there's been a lot of talk about trolls and internet abuse. People sending rape threats and threats of violence to women who dare to speak out. Before we go any further I will categorically state a very contentious opinion here, I think it's a bad thing to do. You should never threaten anyone. When you are threatened you should go to the police. Mostly when I've been threatened this is what I have done.<br />
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I've had a number of rape threats online. But this isn't just an online problem, I've had rape threats in the street and on stage, one lovely human being on a Chris Morris forum when I spoke about having been threatened with being raped on stage suggested [misgendering is the writer's own] "I wish s/he would get raped then maybe that would shut s/him up about it"<br />
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Clearly they don't know me very well as I'd not shut up about it, I'd probably end up doing an ill advised Edinburgh fringe show which I'd get 2 stars from The List and be told that I was being "Mawkish to the point of absurdity" But this is how these things go.<br />
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It's part of a culture where women are seen as objects, if like me you're a lesbian, mostly heterosexual society defines you in relationship to them, that you're "a waste" or, as I've heard over and over and over again from men who seem to labour under the delusion that if I were to meet the right man I would change my mind. Maybe I will meet the right man, preferably one with a vagina though, really not all that fond of penises in general. Being trans my body is seen as other people's property too, I'm asked regularly very personal questions that most people would never dream of asking a cisgendered (That is, not trans) person. <br />
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Sometimes these things threaten the worldview of people so much they feel the need to have a word with me, like the people who come up to me after a gig sometimes when 90% of the audience loved it to tell me that I'm really not funny and should quit stand-up comedy.<br />
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I'm a member of a minority, within a minority within the most oppressed majority in the world. I am aware that being white, and British really does help, but you know being a trans, lesbian recovering addict who's in a relationship with an unemployed immigrant relying on the NHS does put me high on the list of "Most evil things likely to destroy Britain" according to the Daily Mail. But being trans in 2013 is like being gay in 1970 (which is better than when I first came out when it was more like being gay in the 40's.)<br />
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As a result the standard media narrative is that I am a stereotype, I am a bloke in a dress and a wig and that I've made a decision to become a woman in order to trick normal good honest people into sleeping with me and making them secretly gay. Everything in my life is read in relation to this one aspect of who I am, and I am expected to have been shunned by my family and society and live a twilight existence where I should be massively grateful that someone, anyone could love me at all (and if they do it's most likely because they're a fetishist who's turned on by my state)<br />
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We don't get to be represented as we are in the media unless we fit into these narrow boundaries.<br />
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Over the last 13 years things have got better and better and in the last 5 years since I've been on twitter they have improved massively because it has finally given us a voice. It has allowed us to talk to each other and get involved and to overcome some of the societally induced shame that we have had to experience up until now.<br />
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We too get abuse, sometimes from right wingers and fundamentallists who think that we're sick individuals pretending to be something that we're not, and sometimes from left wingers and fundamentalist feminists who think that we're sick individuals pretending to be something that we're not. And most of the rest of it comes from people who think that it's funny when they think they look bad to say "I look like a tranny!"<br />
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Like all the groups of women who stand up and put our heads above the parapet we get shot at.<br />
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As a comic when I started off my set was littered with really offensive, and not very funny jokes about rape, aids, and homophobic stuff that I wince to think about now. I have an mp3 of my first gig in a comedy club that I am horrified to listen back to. For about 3 years I worked under the misapprehention that I should be as offensive as possible and if the audience didn't get it that was their fault. Then something changed and I totally did a 180. I decided that I should stop it, it wasn't clever, it wasn't edgy it was childish and boring and it didn't make me happy. I needed to make sure that there were no targets in my set unless they were deserving. No sexism, no ablist or classist language, that the only people who could take offence at my stuff should be bigots or prudes.<br />
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I try to stick by this rule to this day in all my affairs. One of my favourite moments in comedy was seeing a very good comic who is a really good friend using the word "spastic" on stage in the pejorative, after the gig a woman with cerebal palsy found him and spoke to him about what that word ment, how it made her feel and why he should maybe think hard about whether he should use it. It was wonderful to see that, and to see that comic's reaction to that and his heartfelt apology.<br />
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It's one of the great things about twitter that it gives a voice to the voiceless, through it I've made some great friends all over the world from Singapore to Mexico, people with severe disabilities, people with none, rich, poor, from all ethnic and religious backgrounds (Though mainly left wing) and so many of them, like me take great comfort in being able to communicate using it and not feeling alone.<br />
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People, committing crimes and threatening people ruin it. They do, there's no way round it they really do. And they need to be dealt with, the police need to take it seriously and twitter needs to hand over the ip addresses of offenders to the police (Obviously this will make people start using tor and other VPNs if they wish to give out threats of this kind) This, to my mind is much better than adding an abuse button, which will in itself be abused. What happens when a woman says something that the guys who orchestrated the recent threats disagree with? She'll get blocked. Or what happens the next time I say somthing that fundamentalist feminists disagree with? will I get blocked?<br />
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No, I believe it's better to petition the police in large enough numbers to get them to take this seriously.<br />
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They didn't about 5 years ago when I'd upset a London based promoter, who said on an online forum "The next time I see you I'm going to beat you up and knock you out safe in the knowledge that you're really a man." There was a definite chance I'd bump into this guy and I was afraid for my personal safety, but the police looked at it and said it sounded a bit like banter and they didn't want to get involved.<br />
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So yesterday Twitter Silence was held. Spearheaded by Caitlin Moran. The idea was to boycott twitter for 24 hours, something that she'd said in a times article was to show them what it would be like if it were left to the trolls. Having seen a number of friends have run ins with her before after she'd said something offensive and then called her on it she'd blocked them I initially found the whole thing to seem to be some sort of ego boost for her.<br />
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Also the fact that doing the twitter silence was basically giving the abusers the outcome they wanted, at least for a day, made it seem to me, as I commented in the early hours of Sunday morning "Like having a pie eating contest for diabetes" or "Showing the IRA the UK's not to be trifled with by giving them Northern Ireland back to The Republic of Ireland."<br />
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It seemed silly, considering that from what I'd been told she'd said about it being "leaviing twitter to the trolls" it appeared she'd condemned everyone who wasn't joining in. It felt a lot like going "Well I think this and if you don't agree you're obviously a paedophile." Suddenly the onus is on you to prove you're not no matter how silly the charge levelled against you is.<br />
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So I found the whole idea of being silent for 24 hours to show "them" daft, and ill thought through, from people who have a constant platform to share their views. It was around then that I saw someone had done an audit of her offensive tweets. I remembered a couple of friends calling her on her use of the word "tranny" and her not apologising and blocking them, that was the point that I blocked her from my timeline. But these tweets were showing up, and being the sort of person who gets angry when people are being bigoted I quickly collected them into a storify and tweeted them. Suddenly it went viral. I genuinely never expected that to happen. Within a couple of hours I had a few hundred new twitter followers.<br />
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It all still felt stupid, I'd made a few jokes at her expense about her final tweet being the last noise she'd make before disappearing up her own arse for 24 hours, I was angry about what I'd read, and as far as I was aware she'd never apologised for her language, and use of terms like spazz, mong, tranny and using lesbian in the pejorative.<br />
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I found that for her to have spearheaded this particular campaign in light of what she'd said just confirmed my strongly held prejudice that this was all a backslapping exercise by a group of trendy London columnists.<br />
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Then there was the backlash, a Times writer went all "Leave Brittney alone!" about her telling me there are worse people to have a go at. I tried to explain how I have a go at them on other occasions and that I was highlighing the hypocrisy of what she'd done in promoting herself as "one of the nice people" I got told I was gibbering and then got blocked. My anxiety levels rose and I got a nose bleed, later some people came in with "is that the best you've got?" spoiling for a fight that I was going to have no part in.<br />
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By the time Doctor Who Live was on I had moved on from what had been a weird and fun distraction. It seemed that the majority of people who were online yesterday felt the same as I did and there was a mellower atmosphere. After midnight the few who I follow who'd done the silence started coming back on and it was business as usual.<br />
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The thing was, obviously it wasn't over. With the people who were most likely to be offended by yesterday's goings on only just back online today was going to be a different story.<br />
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It was lunch time when the comedian Ellis James tweeted me a link to what Caitlin Moran had written about my storify page. I read it hurriedly anxious and expecting to take offense, which I did, obviously. Massive twat remember. Then I gave it five minutes and read it again. And again. And a third time when I was calmed down.<br />
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She came across as contrite, she apologised for what she'd said and for any offence caused (I initially read that as transfering responsibility onto the offended parties rather than an acual apology). I appreciated her candour and above all I think I agreed with her. I was greatful to her for posting it and I tweeted my thanks to her for it.<br />
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I felt a bit of a 'nana. I also know that people who had retweeted me or who had latched on to the things I'd posted had probably gone too far. It's that deindividuation that comes with the realisation of power. Anyway I still thought the twitter silence was a bad idea. I don't think it achieved anything positive, I think all that energy could have been focussed better (and that includes all the energy that went into hating on Caitlin Moran).<br />
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One thing I diagreed with her about in the end, I wasn't suggesting that unless you were perfect that you shouldn't be allowed to protest, but that if you were protesting certain actions then you should be held accountable for anything you said which contradicted said protest.<br />
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Of course, later on, being told by Mr Bad Science Ben Goldacre a personal hero of mine that being involved in this made me one of "the worst people in the world" an acolade that he's previously given to others including Andrew Wakefield of the dodgy MMR Autism made up link was the pinnacle of this strange 48 hours. By this point I didn't feel angry, or upset or anything other than complete bemusement at this.<br />
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I mean I know I called an 8 year-old a "fucking cunt" last week in a supermarket, but I'm hardly Robert Mugabe am I?<br />
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I did ask if I could see his evidence or at least get this peer reviewed, so far though he has declined to comment.<br />
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The worst thing about this whole episode is that we're all on the same side. We think that people being dickish and threatening is a bad thing, we think that equality is a good thing. I think that we all come from different perspectives and backgrounds so some of us have had to deal with more erasure of our opinions than others, and that's the thing that's been lost in all this.<br />
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I was angry because twitter is the main outlet for my voice in a way that I didn't have before, I wasn't going to be silent for a single day in order to prove a point so in my anger I fixed on to the easiest thing, and then once I built up a head of steam I kept going.<br />
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What she said in those tweets was awful, but she apologised and was sincere in her apology. I may not see eye to eye with her on some things, but I totally respect that. Also as a comedian I have a responsibility to make fun of those with a position of power who I see doing things that I think are silly or dumb or stupid and in the main that's what this started out as, it just got a little out of hand, and so for anywhere that I overstepped the mark I would like to offer a complete and sincere apology.<br />
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And to Ben Goldacre, if we can find some way of scientifically finding out where in the world I rank as worst person (hopefully below David Cameron and Stuart Hall (the disgraced TV presenter, not the lovely sociologist)) I would be very grateful, as it may even help me write a show about all this for the next Edinburgh Fringe.<br />
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Maybe not though, I know most comedians go to Edinburgh to be discovered, I'm under no illusions now in my career that the only way I'm likely to be discovered is in a shallow grave in the woods by someone out walking their dog.</div>
Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-47843619259049565472013-03-21T22:00:00.000+00:002013-03-21T22:00:02.883+00:00They call it climbing and we call it visibility<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's been a while, and I've been trying to think about starting to blog again. I enjoy it and I find it really helpful, but every time I mean to something gets in the way. Life has a funny way of doing that. But today something happened that shocked me into writing again. The news of the death of Lucy Meadows.<br /><br />Lucy was a Teacher from Accrington, just 13 miles away from where I grew up. She was also a similar age to me, and like me Lucy was trans.<br />
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It's been 13 years since I came out as trans and started the journey to becoming who I now am, I was 20 at the time and the internet was nowhere near as common as it is now, access to other trans people was very limited, I grew up in a cultural vacuum. I also grew up in a small village just off the Pennine Moors, it was all a bit Jeanette Winterson. Thinking back to the world then it all seems so different. I hoped that things would get better, I knew that they would, because they always do, eventually. I had a very supportive friends and family network and as I grew in confidence about what I was doing and who I was my life got better and better.<br />
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As this was the early 2000s and being gay had only just become culturally acceptable, even fashionable and Canal St in Manchester's Gay Village was full on weekends of stag and hen nights looking for somewhere that bit cooler to hang out, but being trans then was like being gay was in the 1950s.<br />
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When I came out to my mother I'll never forget her response, she said "But we've just had a conservatory built!" at the time I didn't understand what she meant, and I talked about it in my comedy set years later, it was only then that she fully explained to me. "When you told me you were trans, the only think I knew about transsexuals was what I'd seen in the media, that you'd be sad and lonely, and that people would want to attack you for being weird and different. I'm you're mother, and I love you and I wanted to protect you and even though we'd just spent a massive amount of money on the house I was prepared to move away and start somewhere new with you as long as you were protected."<br />
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Even typing that now brings a lump to my throat. For the first few years of my transition I tried to be what they call "Stealth" Which at the time was considered the best option for you if you "passed" as female, which I did. Let's face it I'd always been female, people just didn't realise until I was 20 and I told them, and when I did they all went "ooh, yeah, that makes sense." But at the time there was such a stigma surrounding being trans that you didn't tell anyone. Being out meant being a target for ridicule, abuse and getting fired. The law had only recently changed so that if I had been arrested and tried for a crime I'd have been sent to a male prison, I couldn't get my birth certificate amended to female and if I'd died my death would have been listed under my legal gender and original name "Ben Horsley". You could get fired without problems for having "Lied at the interview" about your gender. It was best, I was told, if you didn't have to be visible, not to be visible.<br />
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I was never very good at that, and over time more and more people knew, and I discovered something quite shocking. VIRTUALLY NO ONE CARED! Simple, people take as they find. And aside from a few radical feminists who'd read a bit too much Janice Raymond, no one gave me any shit for it.<br />
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I remember talking to people about deciding to come out, not just to friends but on stage. A lot told me not to, that why should I unless I had to, I remember thinking that after coming out and living as the woman that I was and not trying to pretend any more to be male it was so freeing. For the first time since I was about 3 years old I was happy. <i>I enjoyed things.</i> I didn't come out of one closet to go into another.<br />
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I talked about being trans on stage, and still, no one cared. About 80% took me as they found me, 15% liked me even more because of it, and 5% hated me. As time went on I resolved myself to be more out there, to live my life as openly and publicly as I could, because if I didn't who would?<br /><br />I didn't see anyone like me anywhere when I was growing up, it was isolating, so since then I've seen it as a duty to be out there making the path easier for anyone who has to follow. Still people say "why do you do it, why are you so open about it, it's no one else's business?" Because people still don't know enough about this subject, there's still a level of prurience, a level of prejudice and a lot of ignorance.<br /><br />I'd hoped in the 13 years since I came out that things had got better, that I'd helped in some small way, and in a lot of ways it has, just not enough.<br /><br />Lucy was about to begin her transition, she was going to do what the doctors call "the real life test" which is to live in your new gender role for a period of time, usually no shorter than a year more often two years, before you'll be referred for surgery. She'd told the school she worked at, and with the support of the staff, the governors and the parents she'd kept her job, so far so good. Until the Daily Mail's Richard Littlejohn decided to write a hate piece about her.<br />
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A lot of trans women have had their lives pawed over by the media when they transition, their privacy invaded at a time which is massively stressful anyway. I remember the first time I went out dressed in female clothes. The fear that I had was almost unbearable, I was convinced that every person I saw would know, and would hurl abuse at me or attack me. It was terrifying, and it continued to be terrifying for years afterwards, even though there were very few occasions where I was read as male.<br />
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I can only imagine what it's like for that fear to become a reality, to be hounded in the press for just being yourself at a time when you're having to deal with incredible mental and emotional pressures. The 5% of people who seem to still have such a problem with trans people that they'd give them abuse being given this information, where you live, where you work and having their prejudices backed up by a national newspaper. It's just unbearable to think of.<br />
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I'm surprised something like this hasn't happened before now. Lucy's body was found at her home on Tuesday afternoon. Some are saying it's suicide, there's no suspicious circumstances.<br />
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I'd hoped that 13 years on and 13 miles away life would be better for someone who had the same realisation to come to that I did. Unfortunately it wasn't, and it won't be until people are educated enough to not think of being trans as something so unbelievably weird that it deserves national press coverage.<br />
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The tone of the Littlejohn piece was "won't someone think of the children?" My brother's children were primary school age when I came out, they saw every step of what I went through, and you know what? They're kids. EVERYTHING'S NEW AND WEIRD TO THEM. They dealt with it. They dealt with it better than they dealt with finding out there's no Santa Claus.<br /><br />Like with all bigotry, when people can't justify saying "I hate you because I don't understand why you're the way you are and aren't how I want you to be!" They say "I'm alright with it, but I worry about the kids".<br />
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Bigots always try to dress their bigotry up in concern, to deflect away from their fundamental fascism that everyone should be more like them and then the world would be alright. It's not and it never will be, and as long as there's people out their like Littlejohn and his fellows, as long as there's people who are scared to death to come out as trans, as long as newspapers think it's news to invade the privacy of trans people, to poke around and go "oooh! look at the freaks!" I will be out. I will be proud and I will fight to my very last breath.<br />
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This terrible waste of life, this terrible awful thing that has happened should never be allowed to happen again. Visibility is the key, people find it very difficult to be ignorant and scared of something they know about.</div>
Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-28808184732099087552012-01-20T15:29:00.000+00:002012-01-20T15:29:45.326+00:00Do you want to be in my gang...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">As a comedian you become used to certain things, that Liverpool will be a tough town to play, that a 5 hour drive to do a gig in front of a handful of people who couldn't care less if you live or die will become such a regular occurrence that it barely seems worth it to mention, and that someone more successful than you will come up with a joke that's almost identical to one of yours and a wider audience will see it and assume that it's theirs.<br />
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<br />
It happens, it's convergent thinking. Jokes live out there in the ether like fruit hanging from a vine waiting for the right moment, the right time and place and for the right person's brain to see something that everyone else has missed and <i>twist</i> a joke is born. Sometimes more than one person will see that thing in that way and then two people have the same joke.<br />
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I've been on both ends of this, and it's never fun.<br />
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Once I unwittingly did a joke that was word for word the same as another comedian's, and yesterday another comedian did a joke that was similar enough to one of mine for me not to be able to use it again.<br />
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On both occasions I've been the lesser known comedian, though only one of those occasions has it done any damage to my career...<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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That occasion was at The Comedy Store in London. If you're a comedian of my age growing up in the UK The Comedy Store is this Holy Grail, it's like Wembley Stadium is to a football fan, it's like Mecca is to a Muslim, It's like the Deputy Prime Ministership is to Nick Clegg.<br />
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I'd been in the car on a long journey to do my open spot, my 10 minutes on a Friday night. Don Ward, the owner of The Comedy Store had seen me at King Gong in at the Manchester Store, their gong show where I'd managed an awful 1 minute 22 seconds before being gonged off (a personal record at the time) in spite of this Don saw something that he liked and said to call them for an 5 minute open spot at the London Store on a Thursday night. WOW this was it, this could be the change of everything!<br />
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I booked my spot and went down to do the gig and it went well, it went better than well, it went amazingly, I got great feedback from Don and was invited to do a Friday night 10 minute try out. If this went well it could lead to doing paid weekend work for them and the career in comedy that I coveted.<br />
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Now between that gig getting booked in and doing that gig a lot of bad luck happened, the night before I was supposed to go off and do that gig my car got stolen. Well I say stolen, I parked it and when I came back it wasn't there, there was just a little pile of glass where my car used to be. I phoned the police and they said they'd look for it. It later transpired that someone had broken in to my car and stolen a bag out of the boot (a bag that contained a pair of shoes and my photo album of all my photos of me growing up). Upon seeing that my car had been broken into the police looked inside, saw how messy it was (another universal truth of being a comedian, your car will get full, to the point that people can't sit in the back seats comfortably, with empty crisp packets and drinks bottles.) decided that it had been stolen, trashed and abandoned, so they impounded it and it cost me £150 to get it back.<br />
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That day I rushed around trying to get my car back, trying to get another car so I could drive to London, trying to get a lift of someone anything to make it to this gig on time. In the end I had to phone and cancel. They booked me in again a few weeks later. I turned up and was told they'd made a mistake and had another comic doing the 10 spot who was also from Manchester, and could I come back the next week. I said yes.<br />
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The next week I got held up in traffic and was a little bit late, I rushed in and through into the dressing room and got my make-up and my outfit on ready to go on stage, I was flustered and terrified as this was a very very big gig for me at the time. I didn't listen to the act who was on stage doing his paid set. He was a comedian called James Dowdswell, who you may have seen as Count Fuckula in Extras, a fantastic comic who I'd not gigged with for about 18 months.<br />
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Anyway he finished his set, he came off stage and went out the front to watch, I got introduced and walked out and started my set, nervous but able to perform OK, then three jokes in I did a gag I'd done for about the last year.<br />
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That's where it happened, rather than the laugh it would normally get, it got a boo. I'd never been booed before, it was oddly relaxing. Like that moment when you've had an accident and you've accepted your fate. I didn't know why they were booing my joke about Kit-Kats I assumed they were a right on audience and didn't like the Nestle reference. I carried on through it and got nothing, I died on my hoop.<br />
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I came off stage dejected, knowing that for a short while at least my dreams of being a professional comedian were dashed. I still couldn't figure out why they'd booed me though.<br />
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It was at that point that James Dowdswell came back stage and said "Hard luck mate. You know why they were booing you?" I admitted that I didn't. He said "That joke you did is the same as one of mine and I'd just done it towards the end of my set." I didn't know that, when he told me it was word for word the same. Since then I realised that I should probably cut my losses with The Comedy Store and give it another go further down the line.<br />
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Coincidence. It happens. You have to accept it and move on.<br />
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<b>Yesterday</b> an account appeared on Twitter claiming to be Gary Glitter, saying that he'd moved back to the UK and that he was going to be attempting a comeback and to launch his autobiography. Talk of it quickly became the top trending topic, and many many jokes were made, one of them was by the comedian and writer Peter Serafinowicz, who asked if Gary Glitter would be releasing his book as a PDF file.<br />
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It's a good joke, some have called it "Genius" several hundred people retweeted it, several hundred more posted it on facebook, I've no doubt many hundreds and thousands more have texted it to each other, this is how it happens. This is how a joke goes viral, it's fun to watch sometimes.<br />
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It's less fun to watch when it's so close to a joke that you've been doing for 6 years, a joke that works every night, a joke that's kept a roof over your head and food on your table.<br />
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When that happens it's just annoying.<br />
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But it does happen, it's happened to me before, there's jokes that I wrote that have turned up in other stand-up's sets, in TV shows, in films in music videos. it's part of what happens, it's water off a duck's back. You get a bit annoyed, you move on.<br />
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This joke however was a special joke to me. It was my first professional quality joke.<br />
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When you start off as a comedian, you're awful, at least most are, some already have enough charm and transferable skills to get beyond they paucity of their material and do well whilst they wait for the quality of the material to catch up. Some people write brilliant material right off the bat and have to wait for their charm and stage craft to catch up with their writing. For most of us we're in the middle, we can't write well but that's perfectly balanced by being charmless and with no stage craft.<br />
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I was one of the latter group of comedians and my first couple of years were spent writing material that wasn't particularly funny, but which I thought was either really clever or just plain offensive, falsely assuming that any reaction was a good reaction. It's not, this is comedy, the reaction you want is to make the people who've paid money to see you laugh. If you can make them think or shock them at the same time that's great if that's what you want to do, but it's by no means necessary, the only obligation on you as a comedian is to make them laugh.<br />
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It took a lot of learning, but I got there in the end.<br />
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As you get better you look at the comedians who are playing the bigger clubs at the weekends, the ones who make a living from this and you think "I want to be doing what they're doing" at first you think it'll just take a fluke, a gig that goes particularly well and you'll be in. Then as you go along you realise that you'll just have to work really hard, and that the only way to be able to play those clubs alongside those guys is to be as good as them. <br />
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About 6 years ago I went over to France to visit my parents. When I was there my dad asked me to look at his computer for him, which I did, whilst we were there and I was sorting things out for him we were talking about what I was doing and he referred to a PDF file as a "Paedophile" I went "awww dad!" annoyed at his dad joke, that's what my dad does and that's what I do. That idea stuck in my head for the rest of the holiday, and my brain twisted and turned it into a joke that was usable on stage. When I got back I did it at a gig and it worked, I did it a few more times and it worked really well, I workshopped it with Gary Delaney, in my mind the best gag writer in the business, and we edited it down and added a tag on to the joke and thus this joke was born:<br />
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"As my dad's getting older he's getting shit with technology, I went to visit him recently he said "can you have a look at my computer for me?" I said "sure what's wrong with it?" he said "I think it's infested with Paedophiles" I said "What the fuck are you talking about dad?" He said "I've read it in the paper, they're all over the internet, now I've got one in my computer." I said "I'll have a look for you" so I'm sat there at his computer and there's nothing wrong with it at all. I said "There's nothing there!" he said "No there's one!" I said "No dad, that's a PDF file." You're laughing, he was shitting himself. Especially when it asked if he accepted cookies."<br />
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That was May 2006, since then a few people have made jokes like that on the internet, it's fine, it'll happen, it's an obvious joke once you see it.<br />
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Yesterday Peter Serafinowicz saw it and made the joke himself and was the right person in the right place at the right time telling it so that it caught the warm wind of public approval and floated out into the world where a thousand people saw it and laughed. Coincidence, not theft. I know that it's just coincidence, he's not Keith Chegwin.<br />
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If it was any other joke in my set I'd be a bit pissed off, and it's okay for me to feel that, I do stand-up for a living, these jokes aren't just jokes to me, they're what keeps a roof over my head and what puts food on my plate, as long as it's not intentional theft I'm cool with it, it was just this joke though.<br />
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See as I mentioned when I started out I was terrible and I'd look up to the acts playing gigs at the weekends in the big clubs, people like Mick Ferry, Steve Hughes, Mitch Benn, Paul Sinha, Zoe Lyons, Jim Jefferies, Glenn Wool, Craig Campbell and the like. I wanted to be able to be on the bill with those acts and not just doing the open spot, actually being paid to be on the bill with those guys, and to be on the bill with those guys you need to be able to hold your own. You need to be able to get laughs like they get. You need to be able to go on after they've been on and not die, because the audience doesn't care that you're new, that you're inexperienced, that this is your first gig at this club and you really want to impress the owner, they just want to know that you're as funny as the comedians that you're performing alongside.<br />
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That is all. You need to be able to follow any of them.<br />
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So when I was starting out and I had dreams of doing this for a living and I was writing material and trying to get better, the first joke I ever wrote which I felt was good enough. The first joke I thought was as good as anything in the set of any of the comics I wanted to be as good as, was the PDF Joke.<br />
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There's a reason it's been in my set for nearly 6 years, partly it's because for 3 years after that I never wrote a joke that was as good as that joke, but since then it's stayed in because I'm still immensely proud of that joke, I like the way it's developed over the years, I like that I've been able to mess around with it and have it as the start of 4 different much longer bits of material that I can go into, but mostly because it was the first joke I ever wrote where <i>I</i> felt good enough.<br />
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And so it's sad to have to say good bye to it, but what a way to say goodbye.<br />
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I am a comedian, I'll do what I always do when this happens, drop it, write something new and move on.</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-68023186813304768292011-10-25T16:01:00.001+01:002011-10-25T16:02:23.416+01:00Every Junkie's like a Setting Sun.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has suggested that the UK Government should tighten up the existing drugs laws so that designer drugs are automatically banned, rather than the current system where individual drugs have to be banned one at a time, the process takes so long that usually by the time that it's illegal to buy a designer drug, a new and slightly different chemical that produces very similar effects is out on the market.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>So far so sensible right?</div><div><br />
</div><div>Well it would be if prohibition worked. Which it doesn't, and never has done, and in fact often makes the problems associated much much worse.</div><div><br />
</div><div>At no point when I was using drugs did the fact that they were illegal deter me, if anything they added to the thrill, the sense of community I got with other users and addicts, that we were in this together, that we were outlaws, ploughing our own furrow living our own life outside of society.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Laughing and pointing at the people who got up on a Monday morning and went to work all week who at the weekend did the shopping, took the kids to the park and on a Sunday washed the car. They were mugs! They didn't know the pleasure of getting off your tits on a Friday and partying through until Sunday tea time. Working as a means to an end, as my friends and I explored exactly how far we could take the party.</div><div><br />
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</div><div>Could we be like them? Yes, but we'd rather snort another line of coke or ketamine, take an E and knock it all back a cap full of GBH and get hit by the ecstasy train calling at Euphoria via Body Rushes. My friends were always surprised when the come down came, when our brains had used every last reserve they had to process the poison we'd inflicted on ourselves and the pain, the hollow soul crushing loneliness and abject despair of the come down hit us with full force why I was the one who could get up and make cups of tea for everyone, who could function and take care of them, who would be the one to do the take away run and feed them when they couldn't get out from under a duvet for 2 days.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The reason, I only just figured out, is because for me that come down feeling was my normal. That was my default setting. Whereas my brain's setting was always "I WANT MORE!!!"</div><div><br />
</div><div>See I'm an addict. I'm an Alcoholic. It's at the very core of who I am and it affects every part of my life and every decision I have to make. It's a mental illness, it's a chronic disease that never leaves you and causes obsessive and compulsive thoughts and actions to manifest and I manage it by talking to other addicts and by not having the first drink or drug.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I've been clean and sober since 1st April 2009, that is that was the day I finally realised I had a problem and stopped using. I'd stopped drinking a few years before that and thought I was doing great when I'd just switched one addiction for another and I was getting towards the end of a downward spiral that would either send me mad, or to prison or to the graveyard. </div><div><br />
</div><div>It would be one of those for sure had I not stopped, and I did after I had an incident with the Police where they seized my car for having no tax or insurance. I freaked out, realised that my life had become unmanageable, especially as my car which was now in the custody of the police had some of my stash in it. I went home and thought through what had happened looked at the stash I had and looked at my behaviour and realised something had to give and so I quit and got in to recovery, which is where I am now, taking it one day at a time for the last 900 or so days.</div><div><br />
</div><div>See it wasn't the prohibition of drugs that stopped me, it was that my consumption of drugs had made my life unmanageable that stopped me. That day that I hit that particular rock bottom I'd been paid a lot of money for a job I'd done, basically I got in a lump sum the same amount of money I'd got for my previous year's annual wage. I'd also on that day moved in to a new flat, my career was starting to take off, I had a girlfriend I was going to marry and all the things that I'd spent my whole life saying "If I just have that my life will be complete!" That constant endless consumerist impulse to fix who we are based on what we have in status, relationships, trinkets and things.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It should have been the best day of my life. Well apart from the fact I was driving back from a friend's funeral. But it should have been. And it wasn't. I had everything I'd ever wanted, and it wasn't what I'd hoped it would be, it was horrible, there was still this big hollow hole in the centre of me, and worst of all<i> I was still me.</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div>You can run away, you can change everything about who you are and about your surroundings but you can't get away from you, where ever you are you're stuck with yourself and if you don't like yourself very much then that's hell.</div><div><br />
</div><div>These days I like me, and I'm happy not to have to try to escape being me any more. I'm still insane, I know that my brain doesn't have my best interests at heart. I have to ask others what is the correct course of action every time I want to do something, as I've realised that I hear the truth in a 1,000 voices and none of them are mine.</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div><div>But these are just the things that were part of my drug taking and my stopping drug taking. And although I no longer imbibe in mind altering substances. I still don't believe that prohibition is the answer.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I personally think that the drug laws don't work, I think that they're inherently racist and sexist and have helped to keep poor countries from self determination for the best part of a century. From Billie Carlton to Leah Betts, from Cocaine to M-cat, From Brilliant Chang and Edgar Manning to Howard Marks, the business of keeping drugs illegal has never changed in 95 years and has never got better, only worse.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The seeds for the prohibition of drugs in the UK had their birth in the US, as up until the 1916 Defence of the Realm act there were no drugs laws in the UK, if you wanted drugs you could buy them no problem. People were dying of addiction to alcohol and drugs in similar numbers to today, but in the US times they were a changing and people were getting scared.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Since the emancipation of the slaves in the US and the slow but steady move towards the civil rights movement the US was changing, Jazz music was starting to emerge and bring what would eventually become rock 'n' roll and the Birth of the Teenager and young people were mixing and having fun with people of different races and the old order of puritanical rule seemed to be coming to an end. Terrified at the prospect of miscegenation, and of these precious white women being defiled by hanging out with black men in Jazz clubs, smoking marijuana, taking cocaine, or smoking opium with the Chinese those in power decided that something must be done so as to ensure that their grandchildren were the same colour as them!<br />
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Obviously this was only a problem for their daughters, as they believed that women were more susceptible to this, and really couldn't take care of themselves, and besides their slip ups would have further reaching consequences. It's fine for their son to have a child out of wedlock with someone of a different race, easier to hide the shame and embarrassment and easier to explain away as just "boys will be boys."<br />
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So the US government decided to make opium, marijuana and cocaine illegal, and for good measure booze as well, the era of prohibition was starting.<br />
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Over in Europe the UK was struggling in a world war against the Germans. as was popular in the first half of the 20th Century. They were having great difficulty in continuing the fight and needed the help of the US. The US agreed to help, but on the condition that the UK made Cocaine, Marijuana, Opium and Booze illegal.<br />
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The British Government of the time wasn't sure about this. See the British Empire stretched across the world, it was "an empire where the sun never set." and whilst these days we're the world's arms dealer, back then we were the world's drug dealer. We'd just spent 100 years fighting with China to allow us to sell the Opium we'd been producing in Afghanistan to their people and it was one of our biggest money spinners. <br />
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We also realised that we couldn't ban booze, not without risking a revolution, but Marijuana was no problem as that wasn't popular at all and Cocaine mainly was produced in areas that had allegiances with the Germans.<br />
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So the 1916 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) made these drugs illegal and the licencing laws for alcohol were changed and it was all done under the guise of making safer working conditions in factories for the war effort.<br />
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But if you're banning something you need to have reasons, you need to have the people behind you, and if the people don't know much about drugs and don't really care then you need to whip up some moral outrage. Which is what the press did. Just a few short years earlier you could go to a chemist to get heroin for a tooth ache, or cocaine for all manner of ailments, suddenly these things are bad!<br />
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Stories circulated about prostitutes dropping cocaine into soldier's drinks to knock them out and they would then be robbed. Anyone with a working knowledge of cocaine knows that this is impossible as cocaine is a stimulant, it's like saying that they gave them coffee and double red bulls until they got drowsy and fell asleep.<br />
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This is the time that the also ramped up the anti Chinese feelings, it's the era of "The Yellow Peril" where stories of dastardly genius Chinese men drugging white women and selling them into sexual slavery start to become common place.<br />
<br />
The first big victory for the moral outragers came with the death at the end of the war of the actress Billie Carleton who had performed on stage at a massive event to celebrate the end of the war, she was seen at the ball partying and dancing with everyone she was a real party girl, and her drug problem was one of the things holding her back from making her big breakthrough, she was also found dead in her hotel room the morning after the victory ball. A silver box of cocaine was found at her bed side and the inquest returned the verdict that she'd died of cocaine poisoning. They said she'd died peacefully in her sleep of cocaine poisoning.<br />
<br />
That's just not possible. When you overdose on cocaine your blood pressure goes up massively and you start to fit and bleed from orifices. What's most likely and what is the general considered opinion is that she'd tried to balance out her high by taking sleeping pills to get off to sleep and that she'd overdosed on them. But it was too late and the media had it's first dead blonde girl corrupted by drugs and the dangerous underbelly of life. Especially when they traced the purchase of the cocaine back to Limehouse and China Town.<br />
<br />
In 1915 we didn't have much of a drug problem. In 1918 we did.<br />
<br />
Drugs have always been relatively cheap for the high that they give and have provided a way for people to forget the horrible situation that they're in, and over the next 95 years more and more prohibition came in and more and more people developed problems.<br />
<br />
The war on drugs started which was essentially a war on the poor. If the countries that produce most of the world's drugs were allowed to produce and sell them on the world market legally it'd bring about the end of cartels and corruption in so many poor countries around the world and allow them some self determination.<br />
<br />
In the 60's if you were a heroin addict you could be prescribed heroin by your doctor and we didn't really have a heroin problem. The US did. In the early 70's we stopped prescribing heroin and started prescribing methadone, and around about that time we developed a heroin problem that ballooned and got worse and worse.<br />
<br />
<br />
Prohibition doesn't work. It really doesn't it just makes things worse.<br />
<br />
So what's my solution?<br />
<br />
<br />
Legalise all drugs. To some people that's a massively shocking statement that doesn't make much sense, but let me explain further.<br />
<br />
<br />
Legalisation isn't the same thing as making something socially acceptable or condoning it. It's legal to fart in a crowded lift, doesn't mean that the government are condoning it or promoting it.<br />
<br />
If we were to legalise drugs we'd really hit organised crime badly, we'd take away 90% of their revenue stream. our government could buy drugs from the countries that produce them for a decent price and a lot cheaper that way than our battle for prohibition. It was worked out that for the government to buy and prescribe the heroin needed to keep one addict in their drugs would cost 50p per day. Compare this with the fact that the average heroin addict has a "habit" of between £30-£200 per day. They need to get that money every single day of the year no matter what, such is the nature of addiction that it takes and it takes and the obsession will turn otherwise normal lovely healthy productive members of the community into someone who will lie, cheat, steal, rob, and even kill to get their fix. In order to get £80 per day you need to nick about £500 worth of stuff. Every day.<br />
<br />
£500 worth of nicked stuff, or 50p? I'd rather pay less on my insurance for my house and car have a smaller chance of getting mugged in the street and have the government pay that money, I don't know about you?<br />
<br />
Plus the sheer cost of prison is massive, and when you consider that 80% of crime is drug related. If we treated people who were in there for drug related robberies and crimes for their addictions, and had legalised drugs meaning you'd almost completely wipe out organised crime you'd have a very very small prison population when at the moment we've got the highest prison population in Europe.<br />
<br />
The money saved could go to funding the NHS and funding education and detox and rehab for addicts and alcoholics.<br />
<br />
Also a lot of drug dealers (and addicts) are self starters, who aren't scared to work hard, they are also good entrepreneurs, it's just that they're working outside the system. Get them working inside the system and think of all the extra tax we could get.<br />
<br />
Plus from a health and safety perspective, if you're getting clean drugs that are regulated for quality, purity and strength from the government and providing clean needles for intravenous drug users you'll knock a lot of the associated medical complaints associated with drug use on the head. Every time someone dies of a drugs overdose there's an inquest, these cost over £30,000 a time. That money can be better put to use.<br />
<br />
How do you provide the drugs without making it cool and trendy and exciting to teenagers though?<br />
<br />
That bit's fairly simple. You make it so that you can get what you want for a reasonable price with tax included, but you can only get it from the town hall after you've filled out a bunch of forms. Nothing removes glamour like local government. It'd stop kids from doing it but would make it possible for other people to get what they would like.<br />
<br />
The thing is drugs can be dangerous, and they can be dangerous for all sorts of reasons, but you're not going to stop people from taking them by banning them, you're just going to make things harder for the people who do take them. Provide education, provide a support structure and take away the more dangerous aspects.<br />
<br />
By banning them the Government has essentially said "We don't know what to do so we don't want control of this" and organised crime has said "we'll take care of this for you."<br />
<br />
The government needs to take the power back on this.<br />
<br />
There's an Einstein quote which is used a lot to describe the behaviour patterns that we addicts follow, it is also the same behaviour pattern that successive governments have towards drugs, and it is this "the definition of insanity is to repeat the same action over and over again and expect a different outcome."</div></div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-61458294793678856822011-10-24T18:12:00.000+01:002011-10-24T18:12:44.496+01:00What do you think I'd see, if I could walk away from me.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Yesterday I placed 96th in the Independent on Sunday's Pink list of the top 100 most influential LGBT people in the UK. As I understand it this means I now get to tell anyone who identifies as LGB or T who is further down the list, or not on the list at all what to do. I think this makes me some sort of Colonel for the Gays, and definitely a General in the Trans Army, this along with my title of Political Correctness Brigadier makes me one of the most highly decorated sexual minorities in the pigeon hole (not a euphemism).<br />
<br />
The truth is of course I'm probably not even the most influential LGBT person in my own head. That honour goes to Ian McKellen who voices my internal monologue. But of course that's just one of the perks of being on the list, he'll do that for you. I hear Mary Portas has Frances Faye doing hers, and George Michael has Stephen Fry.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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It's a bizarre feeling to be on that list, this time last year I was looking at that list and saying "next year I'll be on that list!" and now I am. though I would have happily exchanged that one coming true for the other statement I made on that day which was "next year I'll be selling out the O2!" As it happens I now have an O2 mobile phone contract, but the universe works in strange ways.<br />
<br />
The bizarre thing about being on that list is that on the one hand my head goes "damned right" and on the other hand it feels like it's happened to someone else, and I also feel a bit guilty for feeling a level of pride at having made it on to that list. It's nice to have some recognition of what I do and I work really hard to go out there and be in the public eye and talk about LGBT issues, not just on stage but also anywhere else.<br />
<br />
I'm always happy to talk about them, being trans and open about it and being a lesbian and open about that (even though the two things in combination confuse the hell out of people, and well they might, it took me until I was in my mid 20s to figure out I was both trans and a lesbian, it'd be a bit daft of me to expect other people to understand that in a few seconds. I'm also comfortable with who I am and what that means, and I know that however people feel about me in relation to these things is their response.<br />
<br />
It's their feelings. And as real as they are to them they're theirs not mine. I'm not responsible for making people feel uncomfortable about me being me. Though sometimes it does feel like that, but as I get older I'm recognising the boundaries, and when I should apologise.<br />
<br />
I know plenty of gay and trans people who hate being gay or being trans, who feel that they can't be accepted by society as themselves, who've grown up hiding their sexuality or their gender identity and associating it with a big group of negative connotations, often the negative stereotypes that our culture deals in. The short-haired, mannish, misandarist, humourless, ugly, lesbian, the big, butch, deep-voiced, hairy-armed, manly, bloke in a dress, transsexual. They then put everything negative that they think of into these ideas and feel more and more uncomfortable with who they are, and try to say "yes, but I'm not like that." and side with their persecutors, as if to say they are all like that but I'm not like them.<br />
<br />
It's such a horrible level of internalised homophobia and transphobia and I've been guilty of it myself in the past, for me it was my way of protecting myself, I didn't realise at the time it was just making things so much worse for me. But I do now, and that's why I go out there and try to do something about it.<br />
<br />
As a recovering addict we have a saying "you're only as sick as your secrets" which I genuinely believe to be true your secrets and self hatred tend to be bigger and darker and scarier for you than anyone else. The things I used to be scared of, the things that seemed so big and terrifying have ceased to be so. And my attitude towards them has changed.<br />
<br />
As an example of this, one of my close friends works with someone I went to school with. This person said to my friend that they'd seen they were friends with me on Facebook or something, and asked how we knew each other, my friend said we were friends and had met through his house mate. The person I went to school with then said "Oh because I went to school with her, when she was called Ben!" To which my friend's response was "Oh, right, I'll say you said hi."<br />
<br />
When people think that they have some valuable information about you that has some leverage or the potential to give them the upper hand in a situation they can use it as a weapon against you. If you remove that weapon, or neutralise it by being OK about it then you take the power back. Knowledge is power of course.<br />
<br />
24 hours after I found out I'd been put on this list I saw the news that Stuart Walker a 28 year old gay man from Ayrshire had been set on fire and killed. Early reports had said that he'd been tied up first, though I'm now hearing other reports that say that he wasn't, and there are reports that are saying this looks like it might have been motivated by homophobia.<br />
<br />
Either way homophobic and transphobic crimes are occurring every day and need to stop. Sometimes with these crimes the homophobic aspect and transphobic aspect is ignored which is terrible, so I'm inclined to treat this as a homophobic attack until persuaded otherwise by the evidence, and I reserve the right to hold this position whenever there's any doubt, until such time as white middle class men are the victims of this type of crime by proportion of the population.<br />
<br />
It's horrible, and the way to combat this is to be open and honest about who we are, to live publicly and to confront transphobia and homophobia wherever we see it. It's difficult to hate a whole group of people when someone you love, or care about, or are friends with, or who you're related to is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Pansexual, Genderblind, or Trans. The more visibility we have the more difficult it is to maintain this position of hate. Hate comes from fear, fear comes from "othering" and if you can educate then it stops this all from being so alien. Knowledge is the key.<br />
<br />
Number one on the list was Elly Barnes, a Teacher who claims to have all but eradicated homophobia from the school she works in.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">"One former pupil said this woman changed her life. Since 2005, she has been running LGBT History Month at Stoke Newington School, north London, every February. She says: "I've had pupils say, 'Miss, are you trying to turn us gay?' and I ask them, 'Do you turn black during Black History Month or Turkish during Turkish month?'." Barnes "came out" on Teachers' TV, and says: "It's ignorance that causes homophobia – once educated, attitudes change. Sometimes it's a deep-rooted hatred which takes a long time to change. The best way is to show positive role models." We think she is one."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
That is the only way to do this, to educate to stop the fear and hatred at a young age, to let kids know that homophobia is not acceptable, to help kids who are being bullied for being gay or trans so that they don't grow up internalising that homophobia and transphobia and can have full exciting and happy lives and not feel like they've had to miss out on so much by hiding who they are in order to just survive.<br />
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It's not about ramming it down people's throats (obviously unless they want that, and some people are just filthy enough to want it.) and people who see it that way need to recognise that that's their problem, not ours.<br />
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As Gandhi said "love is the only weapon powerful enough to beat hate."</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-42692547268592790282011-10-12T01:49:00.000+01:002011-10-12T01:49:18.184+01:00It gets better, but not quite in the right aspect ratio<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Here's an it gets better video. I'm a idiot and got the camera on my phone wrong so this is a very squished up video, but I didn't want to go back and redo it. Also the freeze frame it's got kind of makes me look weird.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/M8eiHb-ow3E?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br />
</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-68207882883031822832011-10-01T11:32:00.001+01:002011-10-01T11:32:57.596+01:00Don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs Worthington...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 19px;">"Comedy is thus the very opposite of shame: shame endeavors to maintain the veil, while comedy relies on the gesture of unveiling." Zizek</span></div><div><br />
</div>Forgive me Blogspot for I have sinned, It's been 5 months since my last blog post. A lot's happened I moved out of my lovely little flat and moved in to a room in a shared house with a garden and a trampoline. I've started cycling and getting treatment for my anxiety and depression and I'm actively taking part in my recovery from my various addictions, accepting life on life's terms etc.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>Basically, I'm happy. BOOO HISSS! And this has had a negative impact on my comedy writing. It's hard to be funny when you love everything. Well unless you're Pat Monahan and I suspect he's hiding a dark secret, no one can be that happy all the time.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But the reason I've decided to start back with this blog in particular is because I keep getting dragged in to an argument on twitter, an argument with people who ostensibly are attempting to fight my corner, but in reality do not understand the industry I work in at all and are making up "facts" to fit their views, not looking at what actually happens and trying to alter it at that level.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I now know how corporate finance executives trying to explain credit default swaps to non industry people must feel like.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Basically Mock the Week has come under fire for being sexist, not in it's content, but in the number of panel members who are female, where their guests are roughly 18% female.</div><div><a name='more'></a></div><div>That sounds like it's terrible, but when you consider that about 10% of the professional circuit of stand-ups are women, you can see that that's quite an improvement on that. And Mock the Week is better than a lot of other comedy programmes on that score, On Live at the Apollo for instance, 10.04% of the comedians are women, and of those 1/3 is Jo Brand, the others are Joan Rivers (1/4) and the rest are Shappi Khorsandi, Sarah Millican, Gina Yashere and Andi Osho.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But even that is a fairly fair representation of the industry in terms of numbers if not diversity.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The 20% figure that's been bandied about in relation to the number of women working in stand-up came from looking through the Chortle website's list of stand-up comedians, this will give you a false reading, partly as it includes comedians from the open mic circuit who are in no way professional comics, it includes people who've visited the UK for gigs including doing runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and who are therefore not part of the circuit and overall gives a fairly unrepresentative sample.</div><div><br />
</div><div>From experience I can tell you that it's roughly 10% of the professional circuit that are female.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But why is this?</div><div><br />
</div><div>It's an interesting question, because in every other aspect of the industry it's a lot closer to 50%, and in some areas of the industry there are far more women than men, such as comedy agents.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So why are there so few women performing stand-up?</div><div><br />
</div><div>The main reason, as far as I can tell is simply "because fewer women want to be stand-ups" but <i>why</i> do fewer women want to be stand-ups?</div><div><br />
</div><div>Well anyone who's spend enough time around stand-up comedians will tell you that it takes a specific personality type to be a stand-up, in that way it's a lot like being an alcoholic. Or as Sarah Silverman said "being a stand-up is like being gay, you're born like that and there's nothing you can do about it."</div><div><br />
</div><div>If you were to build a character profile of a comedian you'd be looking for someone with: A big ego coupled with low self esteem, a pathological need to be liked, often not the eldest or only child, but usually from a family with an anxious or depressed mother and a distant father either emotionally or physically, didn't necessarily excel academically even though they had the ability, people pleaser, obsessional and defiant, and mostly grew up with a family or peer group where the ability to be funny quickly, or to be witty had higher than average cachet.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Some may have all those traits, some may have only a few this is by no means a forensic study but it does match a lot of comedians, all of them apply to me.</div><div><br />
</div><div>the personality traits that I've listed above are more often male character traits. This is one reason that I believe more men go into stand-up than women.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But at the entry level it's not 10% of open spots who are just starting out who are women, it's closer to 30%. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I was thinking back to when I started out 7 years ago, and I thought at the time that it was fairly equally split between men and women. That was my assumption. Then I thought it through and thought of all the people who started out when I did who dropped out and I can remember a lot more women dropping out than men.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But then thinking it through even further I realised that it was more noticeable when the women dropped out, because there were fewer of them in the first place, and I got to know them better as there was a camaraderie that came from being a minority on the circuit. basically guys at that level are 10 a penny, almost literally. as no one on that circuit's getting paid any money at all.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But more women than men did drop out over all as otherwise the circuit would be more fairly balanced.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So why is that? Is it because the industry's sexist? I'd argue that the answer is no.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I'd argue that society's sexist, and that the social pressures on women are different than they are on men. and the myth that women aren't funny keeps getting dragged up time and time again even though it's patently not true. Whether you like the female comedians you see on TV they do represent a fraction of the female comics out there, and stand-up is best experienced live, and the comedians that you see on television have got there because they can consistently make rooms full of people laugh. As a professional comic I reckon I perform to over 12,000 people per year, and of those I make about 80% of them laugh in any given audience. In the last year I had one death on stage, and even there in a room of 300 people I made about 50 people laugh consistently throughout the gig. Though if I was to be on TV there would be people who'd say "I hate Bethany Black, she's shit, she's just not funny" and subjectively to them that's absolutely true, objectively though the evidence points to me actually being very funny most of the time.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But the myth's prevalent that it's there when I walk on stage. And as a female comic it's a prejudice that you've got to get over before you can make an audience laugh.</div><div><br />
</div><div>In Stand-up the first 2 minutes are key, because unless they're there specifically to see you the audience doesn't know who you are, they don't know what your name is, they've not seen you on TV so they assume you're not very good ("because look at the shit comics that get on TV! and this one can't even get on TV.") If you throw that you're not what they expect a stand-up comic to look like: male, white, straight talking about wanking, drinking and why they're single, well unless you fit that description you're already at a disadvantage and you've got to address who you are, what you look like and why you're funny.</div><div><br />
</div><div>As a female comic you already approach the stage with an audience thinking that you're not going to be very good. A number of occasions I've had audience members audibly go "oh shit, a female comic, they're always rubbish." or get up and go to the bar when I'm coming on stage or any number of things like that.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The industry knows that the myth that women aren't funny is just that, a myth. And in order for female comics to be able to get to the point where they're professional they have to prove that it's a myth. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Because there's fewer of us it's a double edged sword. If you storm it as a female comic you're likely to be remembered more than a guy who storms it. But the opposite is also true, if you die you're more likely to stick in the mind than a guy who died on the same bill. So the trick is not to let promoter's see you until you're more likely to storm it than you are to die.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The other thing about audiences is that in spite of the argument around Mock The Week that's gone on this week where lots of people have said that with there being so few women on the show that it's not representing what women want to see, it is in fact bollocks.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Meera Syal once said "the thing in comedy that is the same for men and women is that they both hate women." and in audience terms that's true. Women in audiences are less likely to like female comedians. It's just how it is.</div><div><br />
</div><div>About 4 times per week I'll have an audience member come up to me after a gig and more often than not that audience member is a woman and they will say "I don't normally like women comedians but you were really funny." I take that in the spirit it's intended, as a compliment, when in actual fact what they've essentially said is:</div><div><br />
</div><div>"When I heard your name I expected you to be rubbish, and then in spite of all my expectations you were perfectly adequate at the job you were being paid to do. Well done!"</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div><div>It's on a par with the woman at a gig after I'd mentioned being gay who came up to me and said "Well I think you're great, don't take notice of anyone else! You be proud of who you are!" Which essentially I read to mean that she'd had a problem with me being gay, but had changed her mind.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I can see it when I'm on stage too. I mention right off the bat that I'm a lesbian these days, it's such a key part of my experience interacting with the world and I find endlessly funny stuff to say about it and the way that people react to it, and also as I'm totally comfortable with it it's a no brainer for me. But when I don't mention it until later I get a very different reaction.</div><div><br />
</div><div>See comedy is about status, just by being on the stage you're assuming a high status especially as you have the temerity to think that you can make a room full of strangers laugh. And this can be threatening to some men (often beta males who are the ones who heckle as they see it as a chance to raise their status in their own group) and to some of the women in the audience (ones who are their with their partners, or who are looking for partners.) where you become a sexual competitor. When I say I'm a lesbian right off the top it completely stops this and makes them feel comfortable about laughing at the things I'm going to be talking about.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This simple change in status then allows me to deal with other things. A lot of comedy on a club circuit is like plate spinning, you have to employ certain tricks to get an audience on side to like you in quite a combative arena so that you can then, when you've earned their trust that you'll be funny, talk to them about the stuff that's important to you.</div><div><br />
</div><div>For example if it's a Saturday night and I've got a rowdy crowd of 350 stags and hens and works dos and birthday parties that I'm performing to and I've mentioned that I'm gay and they're listening and there's still a chance that a stag or hen party might decide that they want to be centre of attention, what I do is find the hen of the nearest hen party to the stage and I flirt with her a bit.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This has an odd effect in that she's flattered, has had attention and is a little bit embarrassed, her friends like that I've made a fuss of her, a big portion of the audience think it's funny, and all the stags like that I've flirted with a woman and feel like it's given them something they can relate to me with. Other female acts do this in different ways but the reason behind it is the same, it's to lower their status with the audience so that they're not seen as a threat or sexual competitor.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It's all a con trick.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I've been called fat by audiences, I've been called ugly, I've been threatened by audience members, I've had enough threats of rape off men in the audience that I've got a standard put down to deal with it.</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div><div>If any part of comedy is sexist, it's the audiences.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Don't get me wrong, there are a few promoters out there who I won't name who are massively sexist, but they're very much in the minority and comedy especially professionally is very much a meritocracy. Either you can make the audience laugh or you can't. If you can't you won't get paid work, if you can you will. Obviously there's more to it than that, if the promoter likes you personally you'll get booked back more than if you're funny and they don't like you personally.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But why do more women drop out of stand-up without making it professional?</div><div><br />
</div><div>I think partly it's down to the amount of time and effort that has to go in to becoming professional at stand-up, if you don't love it, if it's not a burning desire, then you're not going to make it.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I personally don't believe in "natural talent" I believe in hard work and transferable skills. When I started out 7 years ago I was terrible. Really bad. I said offensive things for the sake of being offensive and didn't know the difference between that and funny things. But I stuck at it and worked very hard and kept learning.</div><div><br />
</div><div>There were about 50 comics in the North who started out at around the same time as me, after a year there were about 25 of us, after 2 years about 10 Now there's about 3 and we're all working professionally as comedians.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It is a tough apprenticeship. In the first year of doing stand-up I did 200 gigs, all open mic nights above pubs, I travelled 1,000 miles per week on top of trying to hold down a full time job. Every penny I had was spent on stand-up, I would get an average of 4 hours sleep per night and I had to sever all ties to my previous support networks. There just wasn't time to keep in touch with them.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The first year it cost me about £7,000 to perform stand-up. I earned £63. I had to cut back on buying clothes, something that has continued until very recently. I couldn't afford to get my hair cut. I couldn't afford to spend money on looking nice. But this didn't matter to me as much as performing stand-up.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Most of the industry are men. A lot of them are reasonably young, and most of them put off having children until much later, when their career has stabilised. More of the women that I've seen leave stand-up have done so to raise or look after or start a family.</div><div><br />
</div><div>If you're a mum and you're working 9-5 you're less likely to want to be away from your children in the evening too whilst you're learning to be a stand-up comedian, especially as it takes such a long time to learn and there's no guarantee that you'll ever be able to make a career out of it. Plus if you start doing stand-up in your mid 20s and you see that it'll take up to 10 years to get to a point where you're comfortable in your career enough to start thinking about having children then it's going to be off putting.</div><div><br />
</div><div>These are the things that make it more difficult for women, I know that if I had family commitments, or wanted (if I'd been biologically able to) to have kids, then I'd probably not be doing this. Or if being able to afford clothes, or socialising or make-up or hair cuts were as important to me as comedy then I'd definitely not be doing this for a living.</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div><div>There is also the fact that male comics who are terrible will continue to perform and the open mic level longer than women who are terrible. Women who are terrible recognise this and tend to go into different areas, whether that's writing, moving into radio, music, poetry, burlesque whatever their interest. Guys who are terrible continue on, not getting any better for years, occasionally getting big enough laughs at some gigs to justify their continued involvement in stand-up, and some of them over time do get better after years of being shit and manage to start getting paid work.</div><div><br />
</div><div>That's the double edged sword of the open mic circuit, it allows people who 15 years ago would have had to give up because they were terrible and wouldn't be able to get booked, the opportunity to get booked indefinitely.</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div><div>See the thing is it's a pyramid, the ones at the top of the open mic circuit find their way on to the main circuit, and the ones who get tot eh top of that find themselves picked up by TV.</div><div><br />
</div><div>TV reflects the circuit it doesn't shape it. </div><div><br />
</div><div>This week I've tried to explain this to various different people. Some of them who were fighting for more women in stand-up found that my story, and my experience of the industry didn't tally with what they thought; that TV generally and Mock The Week specifically being responsible for the small numbers of women taking up stand-up comedy. When in reality, there are fewer women on Mock the Week because fewer women do stand-up.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Some of the people who thought that decided to block me from twitter, some just unfollowed me Some people told me I didn't know what I was talking about and some told me my understanding was based on "unquestioned assumption." I see that as an example of what The Doctor in Genesis of The Daleks says "the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."</div><div><br />
</div><div>I'm not arguing that some of the content of Mock the Week isn't sexist, or that there shouldn't be more women in stand-up, I do think both of these things, I also think that society at large has a big part to play in this, and the way to change it is for more women to get in to stand-up.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I'd personally hate if shows like Mock The Week had to have 50/50 male and female comedians on it, because if I did ever get on any of them I'd never know if I'd got there from my own merit or just to fill out a quota. I already fill so many equal ops boxes I'd hate for that to be the reason for my success.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I've got to where I am today, which currently is a jobbing comedian on the comedy circuit through 7 years of very hard work to the exclusion of everything else, and I'm good at my job, I'm funny on demand no matter how I feel, whether it's the day I've had a pet die, whether it's the day I've been dumped, I get up on stage and make people laugh. I overcome prejudice and I hopefully change people's opinions of female comedians one gig at a time.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But this is all I have to say about this, and I'll be avoiding any further discussion on it, as I've managed to get my life back on track and I'm enjoying it, and it takes so much more energy to argue than it does to walk away, and every second spent arguing with people I don't care about is a second I don't get to be happy and spending time with people I do care about.</div></div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-7488474295100335912011-06-06T13:07:00.000+01:002011-06-06T13:07:29.094+01:00Sex and drugs and sausage rolls.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Getting my life back on track seems to be going well, I'm back working hard gigging hard and playing hard.<br />
<br />
On Saturday night I was in Leeds in a place where they really know how to market well, Tiger Tiger, which is right next door to an all night Greggs the bakers. When I was there a few months ago I was informed by one of the bouncers there that he'd seen that evening a couple turn up, take it in turns to go inside and get pissed whilst the other stood outside smoking and minding the pushchair replete with baby and sausage roll sticking out the front of it's chubby face.<br />
<br />
I do believe that one of the bouncers also works as a bouncer for that Greggs, at least he's not supposed to but he does it for free pies.<br />
<br />
A friend of mine today told me that he and his partner are having a baby and I've been grinning from ear to ear about it ever since. It's only the second time that a good friend has started a family, the other one I knew that they were trying for a while before she got pregnant so that robbed the moment of being told of some of it's majesty.<br />
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But in spite of the fact that I'm happy being child free and don't understand the urge to reproduce, I've been glad when both my friends said they were having kids for the simple reason I know that they'll be good parents. They'll do their best, they'll put the welfare of their kids first and they will dote on their kids, protecting them from harm and doing the right thing.<br />
<br />
It's wonderful really.<br />
<br />
It's also why I think that the recent press release about Conservative plans fuelled by Mumsnet and the Mother's Union so protect children from increased sexualisation is a terrible thing.<br />
<br />
The notion of childhood is a recently contemporary invention, until the end of the Victorian era children were seen as little money making components of every family, that each family was like a business and the more kids you could shit out the bigger your workforce working for Family inc. would be.<br />
<br />
Then towards the end of the 1800's at one of the big expos that took place back then where countries would show off the best of their science and engineering, a massive, international, geeky willy measuring contest, for the first time ever Great Britain wasn't at the forefront. We were losing out to the US, to Germany and so some of the European countries. Great Britain that had forced forward with the Empire, The largest and greatest Empire this world had ever seen, an Empire where the sun never set, and we were losing to the Krauts and the Yanks?<br />
<br />
THIS. WILL. NOT. STAND!<br />
<br />
So we looked at what they were doing differently to us to make their advances more advanced than our advances. And what came back was a simple answer: School.<br />
<br />
The US since it's formation in 1776 had been a home of immigrants leaving Europe for the new world and their Manifest Destiny. they all arrived of different creeds nationalities, languages and cultures.<br />
<br />
The Founding Fathers had set up in the constitution "freedom of religion" even though they were mainly either atheist or moderate Christians, for the reason that the pilgrims had fled to the US to escape religious oppression in Europe.<br />
<br />
Well they were puritans, they believed that life was to be endured rather than enjoyed and if it's fun then it's sin, and it was part of their religion to evangelise and try to recruit. So the Catholic and heavily drinking protestant nations of Europe got pretty pissed off with these killjoys, because it's so difficult to enjoy a party with someone who doesn't drink sat in the corner telling you that what you're doing is bad for you and that you should stop it now. So they got booted, and left for America. (and this probably goes some way to explain why Americans look the way the British and the Irish drink as being crazy)<br />
<br />
<br />
The problem being, that when you're trying to form a new country it helps if you're all united towards a common goal and have some level of cultural cohesion. It's all very well killing injuns and taking their land, but you also need common ground with your compatriots, you all need to speak the same language for starters.<br />
<br />
So the US set up schooling for all the nation's children, and just to make sure that they were all singing from the same hymn sheet (so to speak, they wanted a separation of church and state and religion was banned from public schools) Every morning would start with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States.<br />
<br />
This corporate worship of a symbol goes to explain why the flag means a lot more to the people of the US than it seems to do to people of almost any nation.<br />
<br />
So the UK set up schools and the 1870 Education act meant that it was compulsory for children to go to school.<br />
<br />
As successive generations went through the school system this idea of childhood being the best days of your lives took root, and over time the age at which you were expected to leave school raised and raised, and now with more people expecting to go to university, and then trying to hold on to that lifestyle until their 30s there's a generation of people who are having kids now who've held on to their own childhood for years, and they want their kids to be kept in this state of arrested development too.<br />
<br />
It starts int eh 1950's when you've got the first generation of people between 13-20 who have disposable income, live with their parents and want to have fun, the birth of the teenager. as time's gone by this stage has extended, in both directions.<br />
<br />
Adults want to be teenagers again and hold on to it for as long as they can, and children want to be 18 so they can do what they want.<br />
<br />
This is all perfectly normal.<br />
<br />
Society is patriarchal, so a lot of what is deemed aesthetically pleasing comes from the aesthetics of those in power. So the dominant ideology is that looking 17 is the ideal.<br />
<br />
<br />
Kids are sexual beings. There's no escaping that. When you're tiny you touch your own genitals a lot for comfort, to explore and because it feels good. You're attracted to certain things with an almost sexual intensity and certain thing as give you stirrings in your underpants or knickers for reasons you can't understand.<br />
<br />
Most kids are told not to tell anyone about these things because they're dirty, whereas their impulse to pick up a stick and use it as a pretend weapon is perfectly acceptable.<br />
<br />
The British are really fucked up about sex. I'm not breaking any rules by saying that, I'm not revealing any big secret, we are. When it comes to sex we're shy and embarrassed and don't like to talk or think about it especially not publicly.<br />
<br />
And so as a result we get terrified by sexuality, the expression of it, what it means to us, how it affects other people.<br />
<br />
That's why we end up with discussions about slut walks in the way we do, because we're so fucked up about sex that we have to have a march to raise awareness that when someone gets sexually assaulted that we have historically blamed the person being assaulted for inviting the attack by being sexy rather than blame the person who's actually committed the attack.<br />
<br />
Rape is assault were sex is the weapon.<br />
<br />
This is the crux of the problem here.<br />
<br />
This idea that we're sexualising children is bogus, kids always want to dress like adults. When I was little I wanted a Leather Biker Jacket just like the one Freddie Mercury had in the video to A crazy Little thing called Love, but I wasn't allowed on for 3 reasons: <br />
<br />
1. It was too expensive. <br />
2. I was 8 years old it would have looked fucking ridiculous.<br />
and<br />
3. Because I had parents who instilled boundaries in me, that certain things I could do when I grew up but until then I had to follow their rules.<br />
<br />
<br />
And that's basically how it works. It's tough being a parent. Your kids constantly tell you that other kids get everything and they don't, and you remember what it was like when you were growing up and you don't want to be your parents you want to be understanding and nurturing and so you say "yes go on then you can." when you really should be saying, "No, I don't think that's appropriate." and dealing with the tantrums.<br />
<br />
<br />
The other side of this is that we suddenly seem to think that there's paedophiles everywhere and that if we sexualise children they'll pounce because we're just serving them up.<br />
<br />
This is again, victim blaming. It's like that Frankie Boyle gag "What's the number one cause of paedophilia? Sexy kids."<br />
<br />
Paedophiles sexually assault and rape children for a varieties of reasons, control, anger, part of what it is that attracts them to children is their innocence. That they are children.<br />
<br />
Sexualising children doesn't make them more attractive to paedophiles, often quite the opposite.<br />
<br />
<br />
Hiding sexual images from children isn't about what's best for children, it's about what's most comfortable for their parents.<br />
<br />
Parents hate having to answer questions about sex, and they get all uptight with nudity on the TV and about sexual imagary and freak out about anything to do with sex, so kids don't want to ask and get their info from other kids, and then when the parent finally plucks up the courage to talk about sex with their kid it's massively embarrassing and awkward for everyone involved.<br />
<br />
<br />
I was talking to someone the other day who was saying about how their sister had friends who were a gay couple and she asked how she had explained that to her son who saw them frequently and she said "I told him they were friends because he's far too young for explaining gay sex to him." My friend answered, you don't need to explain gay sex to him, you just need to let him know that some couples are same sex, there's no need to bring what they do in the bedroom in to it. but not telling him is just storing up problems for the future.<br />
<br />
This is how I see it anyway.<br />
<br />
There's no problem with kids seeing sexualised images, often when they see dancers on music videos they don't interpret the dancing as sexual, they just see it as dancing, and it's the parents who interpret it that way. If kids get used to seeing sexual stuff around and their parents answer the questions as they arise, and put boundaries about what they think is appropriate behaviour for their children at each age and why it's either appropriate or inappropriate rather than expecting the government to legislate for their inability to parent properly, then we'll start making some sort of progress with stuff like this.<br />
<br />
There's been lots of talk about teenage boys watching lots of porn on the internet and expecting anal or blow jobs as a matter of course.<br />
<br />
Well, and again, I'm not wishing to burst any bubbles here, boys have always expected that as a matter of course, but the problem here isn't the exposure to pornography, it's poor sex education from parents and schools. Parents like to think that their kids aren't watching porn, and by the time they know that they are it's too late to have the discussion about it and what is and isn't realistic in terms of experience or expectations.<br />
<br />
Plus this idea that by watching porn they expect these things to happen realistically is bullshit, there's not a single teenage girl who's watched porn who's terrified to call out a plumber because she expects that she'll then have to have sex with him. Nor a girl who's phoned round every plumber in the hope that he'll come and fix her pipes (gynaecologically).<br />
<br />
<br />
So the idea of selling lad's mags in brown paper just brings the idea that there is some level of shame in being a sexual being, and there isn't.<br />
<br />
It's parents wanting to legislate to make their job easier in the short term but harder for society in the long term.<br />
<br />
Here's a long term solution for you: compulsory parenting classes for everyone who wants to be a parent to teach them skills for dealing with, teaching and nurturing their children from birth through to the end of their teenage years.<br />
<br />
Maybe then we'd start to see some bigger changes in how we deal with our feelings and our sexuality.<br />
<br />
<br />
As for my friends, I wish them the best of luck, they're doing a job I don't want to do and I trust them to to it well, because they take responsibility and they care, they're good people and they'll make very, very good parents.</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-19823955392791735062011-05-31T18:08:00.000+01:002011-05-31T18:08:00.921+01:00What do I do now?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">It's been a strange old week, last week I was in London for most of it and enjoying myself stopping over with my friend Tat. She's got a lovely place in Hackney and I got to stop there for a few days, wander round London Fields and discover that it's true what they say, in London you're never more than 6 feet away from a twat.<br />
<br />
Saturday evening I headed back up north, my last minute search for gigs had been unfruitful and I was going to be spending a Saturday night off So I headed to my sister's house where I'm currently in residence on her couch.<br />
<br />
The next day She went off to Chester for the day and was stopping over so I was on my own in the house. I don't deal with prolonged periods of being on my own very well. I have got a lot better, it's part of the addict in me that I don't trust myself on my own, when I'm on my own it has always appeared, I'm in bad company.<br />
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I've never trusted my brain to have my best interests at heart, it hates me and plays tricks on me and convinces me that the course of action that will cause the biggest reaction will undoubtedly be the best thing to do, and 99 times out of 100 it's wrong. My emotional brain is in a constant battle with my rational brain. I don't believe in ghosts, I don't believe in spirituality, I don't believe in gods or afterlives or any of that stuff. But I still manage to scare myself to death every time I'm in the car on a dark road that if I look up into my rear view mirror Jason Vorhees will be sat in the back of the car and poised to strike, or I'll see the eyes of the beast that was in the cage in that story in the film Creepshow. Or I'll turn a corner of a winding country road and there'll be some sort of phantom there.<br />
<br />
I know that there can't possibly be, but it still scares me because my emotional brain in those situations wins because it's had 2 billion years of evolution that has only been passed on by being scared of being eaten and led to me existing in the first place.<br />
<br />
Which is why it seems so odd that my brain's default setting when something goes wrong in my life is to go, "Oh, well, there's no way you can handle this, you should probably just kill yourself."<br />
<br />
I don't know why it does that, but it does, and mostly it's fleeting, but during times of great pressure and sadness it hangs around like an ominous vulture circling, looking down on me waiting for my resolve to weaken so that it can swoop down and tell me that I and everyone else I know would be better off if I were dead.<br />
<br />
I have intrusive thoughts all the time, this is why I don't trust my brain, they find their way in there and then they won't leave. The reason I don't eat deep fried food is not for health reasons, it's because every time I try to make something that way my brain goes "go on, stick your hand in the oil, go on do it! DO IT! DO IT!!" Or it tells me that in a second it's going to override my control and pick up the pan of boiling oil and pour it down myself.<br />
<br />
It's the same voice that tells me when I'm talking to someone nice who I like who has a position of authority who I'm listening intently to "spit in their face, or knee them in the groin, show them they're not in charge, they think they're better than you, attack them!"<br />
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I never act on these thoughts but they're always fighting there underneath the surface, and that's the real reason I'm scared of heights, that my brain may throw me off without letting me have any input.<br />
<br />
Anyway, after a few hours in the house on my own I decided to have a bath and go off to my flat to pick up some things, having left in a hurry a few short weeks ago taking just enough stuff to last me 5 days, I was also dying to see my cat Lucy.<br />
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I had a bath and in the bath is usually sanctuary, a calm place where I can reflect on things, feel the water's warm embrace and plot and plan and look to the future, but recently that's not what's happened.<br />
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Writing this now it's nearly a month since Rosanne broke up with me. I'd been away in Camden doing the Camden Crawl and had the best gig of my career there thoroughly enjoyed myself and was heading home after a good weekend and looking forward to a couple of days off with the love of my life.<br />
<br />
When I got home she was already at the front door of the flat downstairs waiting for me, this was unusual but I thought nothing of it. She told me she'd cut her hair, "that makes sense" I thought, because I go a bit mental sometimes and if people I know cut their hair or get new glasses or a new tattoo it takes me a while to adjust to that and sometimes I can over react. This time I didn't though I was fine with it.<br />
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We walked up stairs and she seemed down, I assumed she was just feeling a bit miserable but nothing that a few days off and some pampering wouldn't solve. As we got into the flat we sat in the lounge and I asked her what was wrong and she said "I don't think our relationship's going to work out."<br />
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And that was it.<br />
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There were tears, I took off my engagement ring, we talked about it, I tried to tell her that we could sort it out somehow but she was adamant. After a few hours we went to go to bed, she didn't think it was a good idea to share the bed for one last night, I told her that it was what I needed, it was what I'd been looking forward to all weekend the end point of my journey, we had all the rest of our lives to be broken up, but for tonight, for one last time before the unknowable stretch of nights alone it would be nice to sleep able to hug her, to feel her warmth against me, to know that place where I could feel safe and loved and for the whole world to go away.<br />
<br />
We lay next to each other that night, but it wasn't the same any more and never would be again.<br />
<br />
It felt exactly like when you're trying to sleep at the end of a weekend taking ecstasy, you've started the comedown, there's no more fun to be had, the seratonin's stopped firing and you're running on empty. Your brain has now shut down all the functions that it can, all the feelings all the ability to move, it's trying to repair itself and your mind's racing and it won't let you sleep even though you're tired.<br />
<br />
Over the next week or so I didn't see her much and I was left at the flat with the cat and felt totally isolated.<br />
<br />
I came to my sister's then and let her stay in the flat. It made sense, Manchester had beaten me again and it felt like there was nothing for me there any more.<br />
<br />
In the here and now I was in Preston in the bath thinking about going back there, and having not thought about it all week, it all came flooding in. As I got out of the bath to dry myself I started to cry. Why? Why had this happened? Why did she leave me?<br />
<br />
Fed up I called my mum, My dad answered and on hearing I was upset passed me over to my mum. I spoke to her for an hour and felt a bit better, not much, but I got myself together and went over to the flat.<br />
<br />
I'd phoned Rosanne to see if she was going to turn up, as I'd wanted to see her. See, as much as it had hurt me, I knew it had hurt her too. The break up was strange.<br />
<br />
Part of the difficulty in looking forward and looking to some point in the future where I may find someone else is that the relationship that Rosanne and I had was as close to perfect as I could imagine.<br />
<br />
Genuinely. It was the first relationship I've ever been in where I felt like I wasn't being used, where I felt like it was a genuine partnership, where there was mutual respect trust and a mutual level of feelings.<br />
<br />
I loved her as much as she loved me. We never argued, we respected each other, we had the same opinions, she liked that I'd occasionally spend a whole day playing on the PS3, I liked that she'd go off and do her own thing, I liked that she was into art things that I had no comprehension of. We were never jealous of each other or jealous of the friends of each other. There was nothing in there that I would have changed one little bit of.<br />
<br />
The reason for breaking up was simple and true, she needed to be free to mess up, to disappear at a moment's notice, to not be tied down to one place, she's a conceptual artist, she needs to be in a place where she can experiment and do anything, she thrives on anarchy. I need to have stability, I'm away on the road a lot I want something that's constant, I want my own place, I want to own it and I want to nest in it. The two things are mutually exclusive and offer no negotiation. After talking we decided it was wise to break up now whilst we were still happy, whilst we still were in love, before the compromises that we'd both have made to keep the relationship working had driven us to hate each other. To quit whilst we were ahead.<br />
<br />
So how do you move on from that? How can you form a relationship again after that? I genuinely don't know. I've had a perfect relationship with someone who I'd consider to be a perfect partner for me. No matter how good a relationship I may find myself in in the future I'll know, deep in my very bones I'll know that it can't last. Even the most perfect human I'd ever met couldn't maintain a relationship with me.<br />
<br />
I drove. I got to the flat. I got out of the car. As I opened the door to the front of the building I could feel the feelings welling up inside me.<br />
<br />
I got into the flat and could hear the cat crying for me, she'd missed me, she needed me. And there it was again, uncontrollably sobbing now I stroked her and wandered round the flat. Everything brought with it a different memory, something sad something horrible, even the happy memories, the things we'd bought together in the knowledge that we'd be making a life together now suddenly simply served as a reminder to all those future happy moments, those days those weeks those years, the holidays, the Christmases all these future happy moments lost to me now, a parallel universe that I'm unfortunately trapped away from. Like Rose and the Doctor at the end of the second series of Dr Who.<br />
<br />
all the emotions that I'd not felt, all the thinking that I was getting through this break up relatively pain free, that I was getting through it quickly because I was sober and clean was being dragged into the harsh light of day and held up in front of me showing me what a fool I'd been.<br />
<br />
It was the worst I'd felt since she'd said she was breaking up with me. As I stumbled through the bedroom collecting my clothes I saw by the bedside table, lying on the floor, my engagement ring. I picked it up and held it tight, putting it in my pocket. It was all too much for me.<br />
<br />
My rational and my emotional brain fighting each other so hard I felt like I was sitting in a back seat watching them. My brain going to the "you should kill yourself, you've had the best day of your life and every day's worse than the last, you wake up every morning knowing that today will be the worst day of your life, and you know what? As bad as that day is, you'll also know that tomorrow will always be worse."<br />
<br />
My rational brain, knowing it can't beat my emotional brain on the sheer visceral self loathing scale says "That's as well, but make sure you've paid off everyone you owe money to before you do that, you can't leave them in the lurch, and think of how that debt would be passed on to your family, you can't do that to them."<br />
<br />
And I know that the rational brain is right, and also cleverer than the emotional brain because it's sneaky, it knows that it's going to take me a few years to pay off everyone I owe money to and by then I'm bound to feel better.<br />
<br />
But in that moment it's so difficult to deal with. The cat sits on my knee contented, happy to be with me and for a few minutes I'm happy. I can feel the joy again, I can cast from my mind all the horrible stuff that's filling it.<br />
<br />
Rosanne doesn't turn up. I was hoping she would, I felt like I needed to talk to her. I know that she's probably having as difficult a time as I am, we've both lost a load of weight through the pain of this. But from where I am she's unreachable, untouchable, and the one person who I could always share everything with and she's not there.<br />
<br />
She's not there.<br />
<br />
I want to take her by the hand and say "this is how I'm feeling, can you tell me how you're feeling so that I know, so that it doesn't feel like I'm all alone, so that I can at least know that you don't hate me, so I can at least know that I still exist to you."<br />
<br />
But I can't. These are the things I can never say.<br />
<br />
I'm an addict, it's in every part of my life, I basically made myself needed thinking that that was a good and kind thing to do, but basically it was creating a prison for her, and I couldn't help myself. The sadness and the feelings of loss are withdrawals. I watched Get Him To The Greek the other night and there's a line in that where Aldous has said he was clean and sober for 7 years, and Jackie says to him "Yes but you did yoga for 5 hours a day, that's mental, there's nothing in the world that you can't turn into heroin" And that's what I've been doing here, and I know it.<br />
<br />
That's why in the second that it drops and I'm alone, and I know that it's over that I'm 15 again, and it's 3.22pm on the 25th May and I'm sat in the living room of my first girlfriend's parents and I'm being told that it's over, and I leave and I walk home with my eyes closed the sun on my face illuminating my eyelids and me seeing the redish orangey glow and feeling cold, hoping that if I keep my eyes closed all the way to the bus station I'll cross a road and get hit by a car. And then oblivion.<br />
<br />
It's the same from then on every time I get dumped, every time it hurts more than the last.<br />
<br />
It's as insidious as any of the other addictions, when I was using there's nothing I wouldn't do for a fix of whatever it was I was taking at the time, and this is no different.<br />
<br />
I get my stuff together in the bag and I walk out of the flat locking the door behind me. I get to my car and I take a few deep breaths and I drive away to my gig, to a room full of people who want to be made to laugh, to a room full of people who only want me for 20 minutes, and we both know the score, when it's over it's over, I love them and they love me, they need me, without me they won't be laughing and I can make them laugh and that feeling, the hollow and meaningless love of strangers is enough.<br />
<br />
I need this. Until time takes it's toll and I'm through the worst of this, which it will, everything gets better eventually, I'll love again, I'll live again, I'll find myself a few years down the line in love with someone and completely unable to remember what this felt like, sure as day follows night.<br />
<br />
But until then, what am I supposed to do?</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-81968302015331616802011-05-29T12:56:00.000+01:002011-05-29T12:56:17.453+01:00no offence<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Offence is easy to cause, often we do it without even thinking about it. Sometimes we can brush it off without thinking too much about it. "What someone I don't know thinks that something I did without realising was offensive? Fuck 'em!" Other times it's more difficult.<br />
<br />
Today I managed to cause offence to someone I really liked via the medium of the internet and she blocked me before I had a chance to explain. The internet makes us all autistic, it removes context and nuance from our words, often I've found myself getting really angry at something that someone's said to me on an internet forum and told a third party what they've said and the third party has responded "That's only horrible with the intonation you've given that. Read it in a silly or daft voice or as if they're being sycophantic and then think about it?"<br />
<br />
To which I always fly into a rage and tell them they don't know what it's like and then flounce out, before realising that I'm being unreasonable and then flouncing back in to apologise.<br />
<br />
T'was ever thus.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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In my line of work you face a lot of people who get offended about all sorts of things, for example one night at the Frog and Bucket Comedy Club I saw George Cottier doing a bit of material where he suggested that all blind people were evil. Now within the context of the piece of material you could see that this was the result of a logical phallacy, no one in the room was under any illusion that what George had said was anything that any reasonable person could take seriously, like Richard Herring's piece about how racists are less racist than non-racists. But someone in the audience did take it seriously he stood up and said "I think that's offensive, and I've got a blind friend" he then pointed to his blind friend who was sat on the same table who said "Shut up you idiot, you're embarrassing me, that wasn't offensive." somewhere else in the audience another blind man stood up and said "I'm blind and I didn't find it offensive, I found it funny so shut up you dick."<br />
<br />
It's easy to make mistakes, and it's easy to offend people. I try my best in my comedy to have no victims. It's not something that I feel I can do. It makes me feel uncomfortable and it goes against my whole philosophy of life.<br />
<br />
There is in comedy the issue of messing around with status, and it's acceptable for someone who is low status to make fun of someone who is high status. The Jester making fun of the king, this is ok because it challenges the status quo without ever changing the power balance. That's why it's seen as ok to make fun of politicians, Their high status makes them easy targets for humour.<br />
<br />
But if you are of perceived high status it's not socially acceptable to make fun of someone who is low status.<br />
<br />
Chris Rock talks about this in one of his shows, saying it's ok for a fat woman to make fun of a thin woman, but not the other way round. It's ok for black people to make fun of white people but not the other way round, and it's ok for poor people to make fun of rich people but not the other way round.<br />
<br />
<br />
To a degree I agree with that, but I like to not perpetuate it, for example women making fun of men, I think that feminism's come a very long way, and any woman who thinks that she should be allowed to walk out of the house wearing what she wants and has the right to complain if she gets attacked is a feminist.<br />
<br />
I hate the way that some women take the piss out of men for being men, I think it harms the cause of feminism as a whole, it makes some men, the ones who seem to think that women have complete equality and should stop yapping, think that it's ok to revert to old fashioned sexist comments.<br />
<br />
This in it's own way harks back to my earlier blog on liberal guilt. I sometimes wish I was right wing, because then I'd not have to worry about offending people, I'd assume that everyone was of equal status, or that status was there for a reason and that you should respect those above and be able to have a go at those below, and therefore never worry about offending people because the people being offended don't matter, and should respect you for being one of their betters.<br />
<br />
When I started out I was a shock comic. Partly because I didn't know how to be funny, I didn't know what it was about me and the way that I interact with the world that was funny, and in response to the horror that I was going through in my life, and all the associated madness that surrounded it I would say and do the most loud and shocking things thinking that that was a short cut to being funny.<br />
<br />
Turns out joking about gang raping a horse, not as funny as I thought it would be. <br />
<br />
Turns out, joking about children that have disappeared and the newspapers and societies reaction to them in a way that shows no empathy, Not as funny as I thought it would be.<br />
<br />
Turns out, joking about a friend's parent dying of cancer, NOT AS FUNNY AS I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE!<br />
<br />
<br />
To lend this some context, at the time the only thing I was using my brain for was, as Russell Brand put it, "as a filter for various chemicals" mostly at this point alcohol and occasionally speed and ecstasy, this combined with the fact that I was recovering from a nervous breakdown, going through a transitional period in my life, and the fact that as it turns out I've got quite a few autistic traits, and never noticed when other people got offended, or at least thought "That's their own problem, I'm a fucking genius, they're fucking idiots." meant that I was in no real place to judge what was sound or reasonable.<br />
<br />
I am, 10 years since my nervous break down and 2 and a half years clean and sober, still in a difficult place to judge what's reasonable, but at least now I'm not having to filter it through layers of booze, drugs and a heightened sense of madness.<br />
<br />
So I surround myself with people who feel the same as I do, people who tell stories that they think are perfectly reasonable and get to the end of the story and suddenly notice everyone's sat, slack-jawed, staring.<br />
<br />
Anyway as I've gone on, I still tell stuff that's shocking, but it's also about me, it's the stupid stuff that I do because I think it'll be fun or funny.<br />
<br />
Which is why if I ever end up in a hospital with something stuck up my arse, that'll be what I tell the doctor. "I thought it'd be fun"<br />
<br />
If there was an afterlife, after the accident that will undoubtedly finally claim my life that's what I'd tell whoever I saw first when they ask "Why did you do that?" I thought it would be fun or funny.<br />
<br />
But the difference is that now, there's no victim in the comedy that I do, or if there is, it's me. The oldest joke in comedy is "Man fall down" in this instance the man is in fact a woman and that woman is me.<br />
<br />
Remarkably, I don't actually like causing offence to people. I like to make people laugh, I like to make people feel better about themselves. That's the thing that's right at the core of my being. And when I upset people it makes me feel really really sad.<br />
<br />
I still cringe years after the fact when I remember stuff that I'd said that would have upset people, or made them feel slightly uncomfortable, I feel complete shame when I realise what I've said or done it's horrible.<br />
<br />
And I know that there'll be another one of those moments added to the already bulging roster of moments to make me feel like that after what happened this morning.<br />
<br />
I've had enough arguments on the internet with people to know that they make me feel really shitty very quickly, and they leave me feeling awful for days.<br />
<br />
A month or so ago I'd said something in an interview that when taken out of context had really upset someone, I felt awful, but tried to place my remarks in context and explain why if they'd seen the whole thing it wouldn't have come across quite so badly. We argued back and forth for a good 24 hours, all this time I was away on the road and feeling more and more anxious and upset, but I never put that across, nor any emotion across in my arguments because I know that once you do you're lost. I've learned this through years of discussion and debating with people in real life and online, and from years of having to stick up for my right to exist when people tell me that I shouldn't.<br />
<br />
In the end I got fed up with feeling so bad and blocked them. They then emailed me to tell me what they'd meant in a longer than 140 character message, and I told them that I'd blocked them because I was away from home and feeling really vulnerable and it was clear we'd never reach consensus and I was feeling horrible and just needed a hug and was going to be away from home for at least another 10 days before I could get a hug.<br />
<br />
Sometimes when the feelings come out they come out all in one go.<br />
<br />
The person who I'd been arguing with said "I didn't realise you felt like that because what you were saying came across so dispassionately"<br />
<br />
Words are my business, but they fail me as often as they fail anyone.<br />
<br />
This morning they did that.<br />
<br />
Someone on twitter who I really like was upset by last night's episode of Dr Who because of the pregnancy storyline, she felt it was inappropriate and was really upset by it, she'd checked with some other mothers who were also feeling the same way. <br />
<br />
Over the course of the morning she'd said a few times that the programme makers mustn't have wanted mums to watch it, and that they should have been in the kitchen tidying up the dinner plates and the like.<br />
<br />
I felt that saying this sort of thing was unfair, and it was projecting a meaning on to the programme that wasn't there, and projecting her own problems on to it and taking the stance of a victim.<br />
<br />
I told her this and she blocked me.<br />
<br />
She was probably right to. Reading back what I'd written I'd phrased it wrongly, and should have opened a discussion about it rather than just saying that.<br />
<br />
But it's kind of how I felt. I was totally wrong to voice it like that, but at the time it was how I felt.<br />
<br />
<br />
Let me get one thing straight though, You're entitled to be offended by anything that you see or hear or touch or taste or smell. And I will never say any different.<br />
<br />
You are entitled to your offence, take ownership of it.<br />
<br />
When Russell Howard's Good News did a sketch about a British version of a Thai Ladyboy airline, lots and lots of trans people were upset by it, they found it to be massively offensive.<br />
<br />
I didn't, I didn't make the connection between the sketch and trans people, nor did I think that the sketch was about all trans people, mainly because I didn't make the connection between that sketch and trans people to begin with. I personally think that the whole of Thai Culture in regards to that particular area of the sex industry is massively exploitative and forces young men who look feminine but who are not trans into doing things that they shouldn't be doing, because it's a way out of poverty. It's why I hate the fact that local authorities and gay pride events seem to invite The Ladyboys Of Bangkok to perform as often as they do, it makes them, and anyone who goes to see them complicit in this form of exploitation as far as I'm concerned, and makes it more difficult for trans people in their daily lives.<br />
<br />
I've lost count of the number of times when I've spoken about being trans on stage that someone's come up to me afterwards and said "I liked what you said about being trans, I've been to see the Ladyboys of Bangkok." and expect me to see that as some sort of compliment. Do these same people go up to black comics after their set and say "I liked what you did about race, I've been to see a minstrel show."?<br />
<br />
You are entitled to your anger, your upset, your offence and I will never tell you any different, I will argue with you over it if I don't think it's offensive, and if I think that what was said or done was justified but I will never tell you you aren't entitled to feel the way that you feel.<br />
<br />
But use your offence. Take ownership of it and use it as fuel to fight and to make the world a better place for yourself or for others.<br />
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To take offence and then to turn it round and personalise it, to complain in a way that makes it look like the person or thing that has caused offence has done so deliberately to upset you, to subjugate you, to pick on you is to just play the victim. From experence I've learned that that doesn't help anyone.<br />
<br />
That just says "poor me!" and is asking for sympathy, that's saying "They always do this and I'm powerless to stop them so rather than fight I'll hope that someone notices that they're being horrible to me and stops them." it's passing the buck.<br />
<br />
That this makes me angry is a personal bugbear from years of being an active alcoholic and drug addict. Nothing was ever my fault, I was sad and lonely and everyone hated me and I couldn't afford my rent and I never got a break, and everything was wrong in the world and that was why I drank, that was why I got high.<br />
<br />
Poor me, born in the wrong body, poor me, didn't have any money, poor me, my career was going nowhere, poor me, I was single, poor me, poor me, pour me another. It was the world that was at fault and I was the victim.<br />
<br />
Bit by bit and day by day I started to retake control of my life. I stopped drinking. Yay! but managed to turn all that addictive power into drugs and a relationship! Boo!<br />
<br />
Got over the relationship break-up and turned some of that addictive power into my career, Yay! And the rest of it into drugs, Boo!<br />
<br />
Got clean and turned the rest of it to my career. Yay!<br />
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Every day though it's a new challenge, and it's keeping on top of it, it's looking at these things and saying "I'm the one who's responsible for this."<br />
<br />
I'm not responsible for being an addict, that was there before I had my first drink, and the first drink activated it, it's still there now I've been clean and sober for 2 years, and it'll always be there.<br />
<br />
I'm not responsible for that mental illness. I am responsible for how I behave in relation to it. I can manage it by not drinking, by not taking drugs. And it is a daily thing. for as long as I've been clean and sober it doesn't matter, I could finish writing this sentence and go and open a bottle of vodka and down it and tomorrow I'd have been clean and sober for as long as it was before I had a drink.<br />
<br />
I take responsibility for my actions. I take responsibility for my career. I take responsibility for my own health. I take responsibility for my car, my cat and my flat.<br />
<br />
And I take responsibility for the things that offend me, and when I am offended I call people on it, and explain why, and we talk it through and we come to some agreement.<br />
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I don't allow myself to be a victim, I try not to project my own issues on to the work of others, I have done this in the past, I used to do it all the time.<br />
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If I go to a piece of art or a book or a film or a comedy show and something in it makes me feel uncomfortable or upset or makes me think about something that I have difficulty dealing with, what I do is take that as an opportunity to explore why I feel that way, to find some way round it, to decide what is it that causes those feelings and if there's some way I can work through them.<br />
<br />
I think it's because once I'd got one thing sorted in my life, the thing that underpinned everything else, the thing that once it was sorted finally got me in a place to start slowly dealing with the bits and pieces of every day life, getting help with my gender identity and living in the life and body that I should have been living in it seemed like anything else was achievable.<br />
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There was nothing I couldn't do, I felt, and so from that day on I've treated life like a constant exercise of self improvement. Bit by bit, day by day I'm getting better at the things that I think need improving, I'm trying to be a better person every single day.<br />
<br />
<br />
Sometimes I fail, and sometimes I hold people up to my standards when they shouldn't, and sometimes I get annoyed at people for various things. Using text speak in tweets, the things that they think are massively important that I don't think are, people who I think think they are better than me when clearly that's not what they think at all, People who get very invested in things that I think are nonsense.<br />
<br />
I get so short tempered about all of these things, and it's all linked back to my addiction, I just want to be in control of something! Anything! Everything! That's the problem, I can't, and I need to accept that, I need to accept that there are things I can't change or control, and chiefly amongst those are the actions and thoughts of other people.<br />
<br />
In this instance I said something that was out of line because I thought the person I was talking to would function in the same way that I do, and they clearly didn't, and my reasoning behind what I said was based on the 32 years of collected experience that I'd brought to the table, and those were <i>my</i> experiences, not hers. She dealt with it in her way and I misunderstood that and filtered it though my experiences and said something that was massively out of order.<br />
<br />
I can come across as massively belligerent, as uncaring and thoughtless, and that's because I am, but afterwards I always realise that I've been the one out of order because people are people and they're wonderful and horrible and marvellous and stupid and geniuses every single one of them.<br />
<br />
<br />
I love people, but often don't feel like I am one, I feel like your world is not for the likes of me and that I'm better staying out of it and watching from the periphery. But I keep on trying to join in.<br />
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So if I've caused any offence through my apparent bullishness then do let me know, because the odds are I don't realise that I've done it, and I do care about hurting other's feelings.</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-41181237933415851902011-05-26T16:13:00.000+01:002011-05-26T16:13:59.822+01:00Privacy on parade<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">It's an interesting time for me at the moment, I'm newly single and not too happy about it, but time moves on and I'm sure I'll feel better soon enough and be ready to move on with my life.<br />
<br />
To be honest I'm quite excited about all the opportunities that this brings, the end of a relationship is a time to reinvent, to reassess who you are and what you're about. See if any of those opinions you held so strongly have changed or if you were holding on to them because you thought you should cling to some unchangeable truths.<br />
<br />
I'm fairly sure that I've done some of that, I'm stil trying to overcome the fact that I can be massively co-dependent, and trying to balance that with being a good partner who's helpful and kind without being too helpful and kind and making myself indesposable would be a good thing.<br />
<br />
One thing has changed this time though and I think it's a testament to my mental health getting so much better, my opinion has changed on being dumped.<br />
<br />
I use to say to partners, "if you ever leave me, please leave me for someone else." People always thought this was weird, that it's far worse to be dumped for someone else than just dumped because there's the extra level of betrayal.<br />
<br />
I never understood that, but that's partly because I always though that there's nothing worse than being on your own, so at least if you get dumped <i>for</i> someone else there's a reason; they want to be with someone else.<br />
<br />
Whereas, if you get dumped and they're not leaving you for someone else it means that they'd <u>rather be alone</u> than go out with you. And that's much much worse.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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So single I am for now and single I will stay for the foreseeable future, right now I'm not ready to look for anyone else to share my bed or my life with. I'll get on with the day to day business of taking care of myself. I'll get a hair cut, I'll lose a stone, I'll get a new wardrobe, and I'll concentrate on my work.<br />
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I love my work. I love being on stage, I love talking to people about all sorts of stuff and as I've become more self assured I've had less of a problem sharing stuff about myself.<br />
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I know partly where this comes from. I spend the first 22 years of my life hiding a terrible secret that I didn't want to tell anyone about, and it was terrifying, as a result I'd give away every other bit of anything I could think of to anyone passing.<br />
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Combine this with the fact that I tend to be fairly open minded about people's various proclivities and don't find things that everyone else seems to find disgusting disgusting and you've got a recipe for success!<br />
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Anyone who's seen my act will tell you that I don't shy away from telling things to strangers that if they'd done it they wouldn't tell their best friend, and those are just the things I can get away with telling an audience without them freaking out.<br />
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So it surprises me when people get so uptight about their privacy. I really don't get it.<br />
<br />
On the one hand I don't like the idea of being forced to carry round ID cards with all my info on it, but mostly that's because I'd lose it. I know Jeremy Hardy once said "to all those people who say 'I've got nothing to hide' really? then why don't you take a poo with the door open?" I do. I've never had a problem pooing in front of other people, they often say that's the sign that a relationship's lost it's romance, and I don't think it is, that's a sign that you're comfortable with each other. It's not like they're watching your anus distend and the poo come out because you've not got a clear toilet bowl (I know, I've searched the internet, they don't exist.) So all they're doing is seeing you sit down with your pants down and occasionally hearing something hard hitting water.<br />
<br />
The real problem of pooing in front of a loved one is when you've got to wipe your arse. Everyone looks at the paper, we need to know whether to stop wiping yet. But that's the bit that feels shameful in front of anyone else.<br />
<br />
But I digress. This wasn't about poo, this was about privacy.<br />
<br />
It confuses me in the same way that people who are conspiracy theorists confuse me. I'm no stranger to narcissism, almost every story I've got to tell others is about me, I find it difficult in conversations to remember to say "How about you? What've you been up to?" and even more difficult to remain interested once they start answering those questions. I don't think that the whole world is a big conspiracy organised to keep us docile where shady organisations want to control every aspect of our lives through the military industrial complex run by secret services in the employ of the world bank attempting to bring about one world government under the New World Order, and even if it was and even with the level of narcissism that I have I know that I'm not important enough to be of any risk to their plans in any way whatsoever and so it's very very unlikely that they'd want anything to do with me.<br />
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They can't even spell my name correctly. On my car documents it says "Bathany" rather than "Bethany" Bathany's not even a word Damnit! If there is a conspiracy they're shit at it, they really are.<br />
<br />
And so I've got no problem with anyone knowing most of my details.<br />
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I'd rather the public didn't have my bank details and computer passwords, or my pin number or cash card. But other than that I don't care.<br />
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It surprises me how many people do care, as if this knowing of information about you about the things you like to look at, the things you like to have a go on, the websites you look at etc. and think that we're sliding towards a police state.<br />
<br />
I separate people into two types. Those who are forward looking, the creative type of people the optimists, people who think that the future will be better because it always is, that we slowly and incrementally make the world a better, more tolerant and understanding place day after day. And on the other side there are the fundamentalists, who think that the world was better before, that stability and unchangeability is better, and that every change that is made is taking us further and further away from this once perfect ideal.<br />
<br />
It's the reason that as you get older and more conservative (note the small c) you tend to think that the world's a scarier place and it was better and less dangerous when you were young. It wasn't, it was just better because you were young, and if your parents tried to hide the worst excesses of the world from you, you think it was better for that reason.<br />
<br />
The thing that I find odd is that from where I'm looking it seems like the loss of privacy is something that worries both types of people, but I think I've figured out why.<br />
<br />
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook said that the age of privacy is over. And with the furore on Twitter over the whole super injunctions and Ryan Giggs etc it looks like he's right.<br />
<br />
People seem to want it both ways, they want to be able to talk about celebrities, to circumvent the super injuncitons that are being put in effect due to our privacy laws, but by the same token don't want their privacy to change.<br />
<br />
You can't have both, and the thing is that we live our lives in public now. If you're on the internet, if you tweet, you blog you use facebook, you communicate with your friends you're searchable. It's great, it's connected us, it's plugged us in to each other in a way that wouldn't have seemed possible even 10 years ago. We're picking up momentum and we're learning more and more and advancing quicker and quicker, we can share information quicker and over greater distances than ever before, and the price that we pay for this is to a certain extent a loss of privacy.<br />
<br />
But is that such a bad thing? Is it not a return to the way things used to be?<br />
<br />
For as long as humans became humans and lived in tribes right through to the beginning of the industrial revolution we didn't have much privacy.<br />
<br />
If you lived in a village like the one where I grew up everyone knew everyone. They knew what they got up to, what they did for a living, who their friends were, who they fell in love with, who their kids were and so on.<br />
<br />
Then with the industrial revolution people started to move from villages and small towns into cities and with it came a level of anonymity. Research has shown that most of us interact regularly with around 30 or so people and have about 5 people who we're close friends with. And that's the same if you're in a little village in the middle of nowhere, or if you're in the middle of London. Chances are, that most of your friends know who you are, where you live, where you work etc etc. They know everything about you, and if there's something they want to know and you're not around or they don't want to ask you directly they can ask your friends.<br />
<br />
There was panic about how this alienation would affect people who live in close proximity, would we become barbarians if we don't have that sense of community that we had in villages? The answer was, "No" because in a city you do have the same sense of community, it's just not with the people who are in closest proximity, it's with the people who you have most in common with. The thing is that people then like to live close to people who they feel are in their tribe and community, so you see areas spring up in cities, such as Manchester's gay village, or in areas like Moss Side with it's West Indian community, or Rusholme's Asian community.<br />
<br />
The flip side to this is when you see things like the story of the Murder of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death whilst 38 neighbours saw various parts of the attack and no one called the police, this was seen as a shocking inditement of the alienation of living in cities, but on further examination psychologists saw that it wasn't that<i> in spite</i> of 38 people seeing the attack no one called the police, but <i>because</i> 38 people saw what happened no one called the police. They all assumed that someone else would and that the responsibility wasn't necessarily theirs.<br />
<br />
The way I see it with the whole privacy thing, we are moving towards a time where this idea of privacy is going to become a thing of the past. The internet has turned the whole world into a village, and once more we're finding ourselves in a position where everyone knows what we're up to, everyone knows what we're doing, who we are, who we want to sleep with, who our kids are etc.<br />
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It's like a digital levelling, some people will get caught out doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing, but the smart ones will figure out a way round it, and maybe we'll all get a bit more honest about who we are as a people.<br />
<br />
The thing I've learned over my life is that secrets have caused more problems than they've solved, that being honest with myself and other people, whilst difficult has been the best thing to do in the long run, and most of all, fewer people care about the things that I think are massive and terrifying than actually do.</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-36891192787963711962011-05-18T11:58:00.000+01:002011-05-18T11:58:55.617+01:00Glass houses<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Nadine Dorries. It's hard to know where to begin. She's got a safe Tory seat, and more and more she seems to be trying to position herself as the UK's Sarah Palin.<br />
<br />
She does a bullshit blog in which she makes up 75% she says (though this may be an elaborate ruse to get people to think that her massively delusional bollocks is just her messing around and not the sulphurous brain farts of a clueless idiot.)<br />
<br />
And she's passed a 10 minute bill on teaching sexual abstinence to girls by a majority of 67 to 61. Though I suspect it's because the 67 mistook the 10 minute bit of the title to infer that's how long you should abstain from sex before saying "Oh, go on then."<br />
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Abstinence in sex education obviously works, I mean look at the teenage pregnancy rate in the US states where they teach it... Oh, hang on a minute, don't, they show categorically that not only doesn't it work, that in fact the opposite is true it leads to higher levels of teenage pregnancy.<br />
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But up until the other day and Dorries appearance on the Vanessa show where she basically said that if girls were taught to say no there'd be less sexual abuse.<br />
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<br />
Think about that for a second. Yes. If girls said "no" then there'd be less sexual abuse.<br />
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That's like the Jimmy Carr joke about the number one cause of Paedophilia being "sexy kids" It's a gag that works because it takes you down one way and then changes the direction at the end. The idea is that no reasonable person could believe that that is the reason. It's a perfect example of irony, where the literal meaning is the opposite to the actual meaning. (I know this definition of irony from watching St Elmo's Fire, ironic I know that I only know the definition of irony from an American film, when the British regard the Americans as not knowing the meaning of irony.)<br />
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As a joke, the idea that sexual abuse is the fault of the victim works when it is taken to ludicrous extremes because no one would believe it, but when an elected MP says it, and means it, and people back her up on it, then it's just terrifying.<br />
<br />
<br />
Because make no mistake, that is what she has done there. She's said it's the victims of sexual abuse who were at fault. And for someone who has political power, and who has had a motion passed to be read as a full bill with the express intent of being enshrined in law to say these things is dangerous.<br />
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Let's have a look at this and take it apart shall we.<br />
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<br />
Firstly, Abstinence education doesn't work. It just doesn't, and for it to be girls only is startling. This basically says girls have all the responsibility for teenage sexual activity. Therefore boys are just left off the hook, it's not their fault, they're horny little buggers and can't help themselves, whereas "ladies" need to be the ones in charge.<br />
<br />
It also perpetuates the misogynistic idea that sex is something for women to endure rather than enjoy. Guys like sex, women don't, sex is all about making the man happy and women should just go through it because that's how you get babies and marriage and a house and trinkets and all the other things to fill your life with to distract you from the fact that nothing really makes you happy and you've not fulfilled the potential that 6 billion years of evolution has prepared you for.<br />
<br />
I used to do a joke in my first Edinburgh show about how I thought I was bisexual because the idea of sleeping with men didn't make me feel sick, didn't make me disgusted, didn't really make me feel anything negative at all. I didn't feel anything positive from it, but I assumed that all women felt like this. That all women found men to not be physically attractive, because they aren't, they're hairy and masculine and rough and that's not attractive in what I believed to be an objective sense. Then I realised that most women don't think like that. In fact the only other women I knew who felt like that were lesbians who hadn't realised that they were lesbians yet. This myth that women endure sex fed in to this and meant it took me longer to figure out who I really was. For the record I wish I was bisexual, I hate to discriminate against people and I feel it's unfair of me to remove 49% of the population from the potential dating pool, but you know, you don't fancy who you don't fancy and for me that includes blokes.<br />
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Sex is ace, it's loads of fun, wherever you fit on the sexuality or gender spectrum it's loads of fun if you're having sex on your terms. For me that's in a relationship with one person to whom I'm monogamous, but that's just me, I don't like one night stands, group sex, nor am I polyamourous. But there are people who are, there are women who are and who have amazing sex lives that they really enjoy.<br />
<br />
And they're not "giving it away" They're having sex on their terms. When they want and with who they want. This however does not mean that if any of them were to be sexually assaulted that they deserved it. This is why the Slut Walks are currently taking place, because you should be able to walk the streets without fear, and know that if you get attacked that it is not your fault but the fault of the person doing the attacking.<br />
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It's like the Islamic cleric who got in the news arguing for the Burqa by saying that if you left a piece of meat out you shouldn't blame a dog for eating it. No one comes out of that analogy looking good. What he's basically said is that all women are pieces of meat, and that all men are pretty much rapists given the chance.<br />
<br />
Is that really where we are as a society?<br />
<br />
One of the things that really affected me in my life was when I was growing up, and being trans I was being brought up male as far as the rest of the world could tell. But I wasn't male, my head was as has always been female, and because of that my natural behavioural tendencies attracted the attention of bullies and I was picked on frequently, I was attacked at school and in the street, and on one occasion had a group of about 20 boys beat me up, stub cigarettes out on me and cut my hair. I complained to the school, and they told me two things, number one was that they were very proud of their record when it came to not having any bullying at their school and they didn't want that to change so they were going to leave it and hope that it all worked out for the best, and secondly the deputy head said to me, "have you tried being more normal, maybe if you conformed a bit more this wouldn't happen."<br />
<br />
I held on to that for a very long time, it was one of the things that delayed me coming out, it was horrible, I was being blamed for bringing the bullying on myself, I later realised that this was because of Section 28 and that the teachers all assumed I was gay (which I was but now how they thought) and that if they did anything to stop it that they'd be seen as condoning homosexuality as an acceptable "life choice"<br />
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These laws and decisions that are made at the top have consequences far beyond what they originally intend, and the same is true of this particular statement by Dorries.<br />
<br />
Back to the fucking teenagers (which if it isn't a porno film title it should be), basically when you hit your teenage years you do want to fuck. It's natural, it's your body telling you that you're ready to reproduce, however for the most part when you're that age you're not economically independent so it's probably best you don't have any kids.<br />
<br />
So for that reason it's best that you try to have sex as safely as possible, know enough about sex to know what is and isn't your thing, what you do and don't want to do and know above all things that you have the right to say "I don't want to take this any further, and I don't want to do that." at any time.<br />
<br />
What I think though is that when it comes to teenagers they should be having as much sex as they like whilst they're still young and attractive.<br />
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The other side to this is that whilst most kids do want to have sex when they're that age, with it comes crippling self doubt and low self esteem in dealing with people who they fancy, so that knocks the numbers of those who'll be doing it down a fair few.<br />
<br />
Guys have always had this idea that woman can have sex with any guy they want just by offering and yet I know loads and loads of women who spent their teenage years desperately horny and not able to find anyone to have sex with them.<br />
<br />
I think good old fashioned teenage uselessness at social interaction is a far more useful contraceptive than abstinence.<br />
<br />
Part of allowing teenagers to say "I don't want to do that" needs to be that they know that they're not going to get in to trouble for having sex, and the current age of consent laws work directly against that. Teenagers know that what they're doing is already against the law, so they're less likely to go and talk to people about it and less likely to get advice. Add to this that the British are <i>so</i> fucked up about sex, it's really not surprising that we have the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancy in Europe.<br />
<br />
Let the kids know that what they're doing is legal, that they can go and talk to responsible adults without the adults going "you shouldn't be having sex" and you'll find that that does a much better job of lowering STIs and teenage pregnancies.<br />
<br />
That's a part of it, another part of it is that we have poor sex education because parents like to think that their kids should be as fucked up about sex as they are and don't like the idea of their kids knowing and being ok with sexual stuff that they feel squeamish about.<br />
<br />
The biggest part of this however, by a long way is the socioeconomic conditions that lead to us having the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe.<br />
<br />
Basically for a lot of working class people they're brought up and told that they'll never achieve anything beyond working in some manual labour job that they probably don't like but which will pay the bills so that they can go out for a pint a couple of nights a week and have a house that they rent and possibly an ok second hand car, and that aspiration is for other people. That going in to the professions or the arts are for other people, "not for the likes of them". Everyone around you is told the same thing, all your friends grow up thinking the same as you, and every time you show ideas above your station you're ridiculed. Better to not try and stay with the group you grew up with than try, mark yourself out as different and then possibly fail anyway.<br />
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If you add to this that the manufacturing base in this country has been totally destroyed over the last 30 years, you find that there's vast swathes of people who have grown up with no hope for a better future, the jobs that they would have gone into after leaving school no longer exist and so there's nothing for them.<br />
<br />
Nothing to aspire to.<br />
<br />
But, if you have a baby...<br />
<br />
Schools not going to lead anywhere, you don't enjoy it and there's not point in trying, but with a baby there's purpose for you, there's something that's easily achievable, and the result is something that loves you that you love that allows you to know that you're doing the most important job in the world and that you love your kid and your kid relies on you.<br />
<br />
And the cycle begins again.<br />
<br />
No amount of abstinence education and no amount of victim blaming will overcome that social pressure.<br />
<br />
To lower the STI and teenage pregnancy level you need to do something about that. You need to educate in schools, not just about sex, but that if you're from a working class background you can achieve anything that you set your mind to, that you can have aspirations, that the professions can be for you, that the arts can be for you, that you don't have to settle for this unfulfilling life with the hope of a lottery win at the end of it.<br />
<br />
That there's more boys can achieve than being a footballer and more girls can achieve than being a glamour model or footballers wife.<br />
<br />
Do that and watch the teen pregnancy rate drop like a stone.<br />
<br />
<br />
The mystification of sex has been far more damaging to us as a people than almost anything else in the world, it's part of the cause of misogyny, it's part of the reason for some of the weirder rules in every world religion, and it needs to stop.<br />
<br />
We need to let each other and teenagers know that it's ok to talk about these things, and it's ok to say no I don't want to do that, but that it's also ok to say "yes I do want to do that" and that it's ok to talk to people before you make some regrettable sexual decisions.<br />
<br />
Which let's face it is all part of life. I've made some really bad mistakes with regards to sex, fortunately no one caught anything and no one was born as a result, so in the grand scheme of things I just felt stupid and upset for a bit, and we both had sex with someone we didn't really like.<br />
<br />
<br />
Anyway I think the point I was trying to get to is that everything about Nadine Dorries blaming the victims is wrong, her teaching of Abstinence only sex education is wrong, and for a woman to be proselytising about sexual abstinence and the morality of sex education when she started seeing her current partner when he was still married and cheating on his wife is a bit rich.<br />
<br />
Big fuck off glass house, and a big fucking stone.</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-80929962816907523112011-04-29T11:49:00.000+01:002011-04-29T11:49:11.753+01:00To events management companies offering an exciting opportunity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">At this time of year there's lots of Events Management companies starting up, and lots of Students on Events Management courses who have been given an end of year project of organising an event and it seems like 50% of them think "ooh what would be great is if we get some comedians like that Michael McIntyre's comedy roadshow!" and they don't know the comedy circuit, they don't know that there are a lot of professional comedians who are earning a lot of money from comedy without ever going anywhere near a television screen.<br />
<br />
As a result they think that a stand-up comic is like a band or a DJ or someone else who works during the week and does their entertainment as a hobby. They don't realise that to get basically proficient at the job that they want you to do takes so much effort that by the time you're ready to do the gig you're getting paid a substantial whack for your work.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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Often they'll tell you it's a "fantastic opportunity to get your material seen." This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how comedy works, and in a larger sense how business works. What follows is advice to anyone who runs an events management company who's thinking of getting some comedians for free.<br />
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<br />
It's about incentivisation. If you want to get people to do things you've got to offer them the right incentive.<br />
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For Photographers they can boost their portfolio by doing your event.<br />
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For bands it can be good practice, and they're not being asked to bring a load of their own punters, and they can possibly gain a few more fans.<br />
<br />
However, for Stand-up comedy what is the comedian gaining? What is it that you're offering that's better than a paid Friday night of gigs, that they will turn down the opportunity to earn £200-£800 just doing circuit gigs to do what is essentially a corporate which under normal circumstances would pay a lot more?<br />
<br />
Comedy's different than music, when people go to see comedy, they don't go to see specific comedians except on tour shows. Comedy is also different to music in that once you've heard a comedian's signature piece you're not going to laugh as much when you hear it again. it's a diminishing return. And doing a gig that's like this, the onus isn't going to be on Comedy so it'll be a difficult gig where the comics will have a tough time and more than likely not come across in the best light. So they're not only being asked to turn down money on one of their work nights, but to do so for a gig which will more than likely be very tricky to play.<br />
<br />
It takes a professional comic to be able to deal with a room like that, but if you're not able to pay professional rates you're only going to be able to get professional comedians, you'll get newer comics who may well do 5 minutes each of rape and paedo gags which aren't going to go down particularly well and will reflect badly on your company.<br />
<br />
<br />
So for the comic, there's no chance of progression to get better gigs, at a gig that's going to be tough on one of the busiest nights of the week where they'll burn 20 minutes of material in front of a crowd that they'd not be able to play in front of again for a few years, and not get paid. The Photographer probably makes their money during the day, the band probably work day jobs, the disco DJ probably works as an IT tech in a faceless multinational during the day, this isn't their main source of income, and if it goes well it'll be a new revenue stream, and if it goes badly, well nothing lost.<br />
<br />
For most comics this is their livelihood. What you're asking is them to gamble a months mortgage payments on the chance that you may be able to offer them some gigs in the future, and that you won't get to the end of this and go "oh well, comedy doesn't work in this sort of line up. Never mind." It's a hell of a gamble.<br />
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Plus I'm guessing that even if everyone else is working for free the bar staff are getting paid?<br />
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You're not offering an exciting opportunity, what you're doing is asking a favour, and in doing so the balance of power shifts very much to the comedian.<br />
</div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-20739155803199360032011-03-15T13:01:00.000+00:002011-03-15T13:02:44.224+00:00Unnatural disasters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">One of the signs that I may have a circle of friends that possibly wasn't the best for me came when I flat shared with a couple of pals of mine who weren't the cleanest and tidiest of people. On a scale of "Ikea show home" to "Sitting on the back of the sofa using an air rifle to shoot the rats that scurry around eating days old take aways from plastic bags", they were definitely towards the filth end of the scale. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But one Saturday night we were having a party, so we cleaned and tidied, got rid of the beer cans and over flowing ashtrays that covered the table so that they could be replaced by fresh beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. We even got the Mr Sheen out to clean it down, such was the mental state of our flatmates that when we finished no one thought to tidy away the cleaning products. So sat in the middle of the coffee table stood that bottle of furniture polish.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This, however, was not the thing that let me know that my circle of friends was possibly not the best for me, no, the thing that clinched it, was that as each of the guests arrived they walked in to the lounge saw the Mr Sheen out and said "Are we having crack tonight?" That being crack the cocaine derivative, not that I had a bunch of Irish friends going "are we having craic tonight or what" No, a group of friends who walked in to a party saw some furniture polish out and knew that one of the easiest ways to freebase cocaine and make crack was to heat cocaine in a solvent like Mr Sheen until it makes a popping noise, that that was their first thought when they saw furniture polish at a party should have set alarm bells ringing.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">From that night on we referred to Crack as "Charlie Sheen" I don't know if <i>The</i> Charlie Sheen has ever partied with any of my friends but it would make his statement: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #63565f; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body,” make <i>a lot</i> more sense.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">When I see all the internet stuff about Charlie Sheen, some people have laughed, some have made fun of him, some have got really angry. Not me, I just feel sorry for him.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I'm a recovering addict and alcoholic, and I say "recovering" because that's what it is, I'm recovering from an illness that was there before I had my first drink and will be there until the day I die but an illness I manage by not having drugs and alcohol and by talking to other people about it and sharing our experiences with each other.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">It was nearly 2 years ago that I got clean. I'd realised I had a drinking problem about 15 years ago, but didn't stop drinking until 5 years ago. I switched to drugs thinking that was somehow less of a problem, it wasn't it just meant I was still an insufferable prick, but now I was up all night either dancing or getting paranoid.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">But here I am now clean and sober and taking care of my own shit. Paying my bills roughly on time, able to post letters within a day or two of when I write them, and I'm no longer mental, I take responsibility for when things go wrong that are my fault and don't mope about them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">Some days are better than others but there's always that thing there that it's all just one drink or one line of coke away from crashing down around me, because unlike most people who can have one drink, or one line of coke and have fun and go "I'll leave it there." I can't do that it's not through a lack of moral fibre or will power anyone who's met me will know I'm one of the most strong willed people they know, but when it comes to drugs and booze it's like trying to have one Pringle, and the advertisers of that product truly knew the nature of addicition, as they were all coke-heads.*</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">And so when I see someone who's got the self same illness as I do, and I see that they're still active in it, and doing themselves harm I don't think their acting out is funny, I feel sorry for them. When I see someone walking down the street with a can of lager in their hand drunk and yellowing and knowing that there's a good chance they're not going to survive their next drinking binge, I feel sorry for them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">Addiction is a mental illness like depression, or OCD, and someone who's got a black depression and for whom all the future is is an endless black carpet of despair and loneliness which will eventually lead to their total non-existence and they don't know which is preferable to endure it or to end it, their live isn't made any better by the application of money, for all the money in the world doesn't make any difference when you can't get joy from anything at all.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">The same is true of addiction, I can't think of anything worse if I was still high and drunk than earning $14m per year and being surrounded by people telling me I was the greatest person in the world.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I'm impressed that Charlie Sheen's managed to make it this far, but I can see that he's having a full on mental breakdown, and there's only a limited number of places that this can lead.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">Addiction will kill you if left unmanaged, and if you're lucky it'll kill you quickly; a boozy night where you fall asleep on your back and choke on your own vomit, a heart attack from over doing it, falling asleep in a euphoric state and never waking up from a heroin overdose. Those are the lucky ones. for the vast majority it takes and it takes and it takes, money, relationships, jobs, freedom, and then your health starts to deteriorate, physical and mental and it becomes irreversible.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">He's basically got three things that can happen, he could die, he could get sectioned and spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric institute or he could get into recovery and try a day at a time to manage his illness, like an insulin dependent diabetic.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">So when I look at him on TV and the internet acting mad, my overriding emotion is pity, sadness, and hope he'll get help and get better soon.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">The other feeling I get is frustration with people, the same people who I got angry at over Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, the people who were watching that and tweeting on twitter as if to say "OH MY GOD IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE THEY'RE SCUM!!!" the same people who I'd had conversations with about racism, and rise of the far right who'd said that discrimination and bigotry was wrong still found time to be racist and think it's acceptable. If the people on that were in another country, you know maybe a poor one with lots of brown people in it would it be OK for us to laugh and point and talk about them as if they weren't even human?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I doubt it. I doubt channel four would commission a series of "My Big Fat Forced Wedding" and invite it's audiences to laugh as English women of Asian origin are told that they're going on holiday only to have their passport taken off them at arrival and then get married off to a cousin. I can see the Twitter comments now "OH MY GOD IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE THEY TALK FUNNY AND ARE A DIFFERENT COLOUR TO US!"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">It's not just stuff like that though. Japan this week has had the most horrific natural disaster in recent memory, and the news is full of scare stories about nuclear reactors. I was surprised yesterday to find out that there hasn't been a single nuclear explosion in Japan. Not one. And there was me terrified thinking that we're all going to die, and looking out over an endless black blanket of depression about the whole thing.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">Nope, turns out the explosions have been simple chemical explosions at nuclear reactors. The sort of press I don't trust not to cook a story to make it scarier is saying that the fallout will drift across the entire planet, the sort of press I do trust is saying that although they're at high levels of alert everything is under control, and fortunately one of the reactors that's been worst affected was due to be decommissioned in the next fortnight.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">It's pretty much as I expected when I first heard the news, I thought "Japan, well at least it happened there where they've planned for dealing with this sort of thing and their stuff works, their society works, they know how to quickly mend broken stuff with minimum inconvenience." and then the people on twitter and in the news started building the story like it was an official sign of the apocalypse.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I was thinking about a story a friend told me about how he'd met up with a friend who was originally from Newcastle, but who'd lived in Japan for 15 years. When he came to visit they went into central London and one of the tube stations was closed for engineering works on broken escalators. My friend's friend saw that and said "Oh, should we go and sit in a café and get a coffee and wait for them to mend it and re-open?" my friend laughed and said "It'll be closed for the rest of the day." and his friend couldn't believe it "Won't they be ashamed if it takes them that long?" I don't think shame comes into the mind of the average British worker, or if it does it's a long way behind "How can we drag this out long enough to get paid a full day"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">But on twitter by the time the news was filtering through to the UK about the quake "Hurricane Katrina" was trending, and within 48 hours "Pearl Harbor" was trending.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">Some people were saying "They didn't give a shit when Katrina happened, why should we give a shit now?" These were people who hadn't done their research, Japan donated loads for Katrina. But I can forgive some of them some ignorance, I mean if someone's dying and needs a blood transfusion and you're the only person available your immediate thought would be "Well I've got no evidence that they've given blood at any time in the past, so I think maybe I won't help them out." wouldn't you? I mean it's the obvious human reaction. And still it's not like if you have a baseless assumption of that nature like you don't have the most wonderful source of information ever devised by humans where billions of people are connected to everyone else and able to share information, is it? I mean it's not like a simple Google search would yield something like <a href="http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2005/September/20050915165123ajesrom9.768313e-02.html">this.</a></span><br />
<br />
But then it started to happen, "it's payback for Pearl Harbor" or Pearl Harbour if you can actually spell. thousands of people saying that the Earthquake, Tsunami and explosions at Nuclear Power Plants were all kharmic payback for Pearl Harbor, forgetting of course that the execrable film of the same name was surely payback enough? But even so, is it really payback for that? Really? Really? No, Really?<br />
<br />
To think that takes out the last 60 years of geopolitics and everything that went on, forgetting that the US did drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on a pure death toll count, the 2,350 who died at Pearl Harbor is definitely less than the 200,000 who died as a direct result of bombs dropped on those cities, (mostly civilians)<br />
<br />
But if they believe it's payback by some supernatural deity that's just fucking mental, and shows a stupid level of escalation, They bomb Pearl Harbor, the US Bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what do they think happened then? The Japanese Meditated for 50 years until Buddha got of his fat arse and decided that not hurting another living thing wasn't the true path to enlighenment but sending a hurricane to a place where the Federal Government had decided too many poor people who don't vote for them anyway lived, which was followed by the US praying to Yahweh until he decided as he was helping out the US that he'd continue with a massively over the top reaction to Katrina by sending a massive earthquake, a tsunami, and then for good measure a couple of explosions at a nuclear plant?<br />
<br />
I know some people have some strange views about Gods, but really to think that they're behaving like they've been written for a Tex Avery Cartoon is properly mental.<br />
<br />
Besides which, it turned out that the Military brass in the US knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance, so unless they were taking a guided tour round the nuclear plant at Fukushima last week it's pretty far off the mark.<br />
<br />
<br />
Though it does make me think, there are plenty of people who seem to think that an all powerful being can send fire from it's fists and destroy planets, judge people for their choices and decide who lives and dies. Who's to say what Charlie Sheen believes is any more strange, he's just built himself in God's image.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">*they may not have all been coke-heads.</span></div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-9680709645877980802011-03-14T15:19:00.000+00:002011-03-14T15:19:49.521+00:00What I think about when I think about Heckling<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">What's the worst heckle you've ever had? That is amongst the most popular questions asked by journalists, people at parties, civil servants, the Police, whoever; When you tell them you're a stand-up comedian that's the question they want to know. Partly it's down to the fear that people have of doing stand-up themselves, their biggest fear is that they'll get up on stage and no one will find what they say funny. As Oscar Wilde might have quipped, the only thing worse than being laughed at, is not being laughed at.<br />
<br />
The embarrassment that the average person thinks they'd feel is enough to deter most of them from trying out the business that I work in, as they convince themselves that when you go on stage it's a battle between you and the audience who are only ever a few short seconds away from shouting something horrific at you that you'll never be able to deal with. That you deal with hecklers at every gig. For some people they think the whole point of going to a comedy night is to heckle. In fact I know for a fact that some people get nervous all day before going to a gig that evening because they think heckling's expected of them and they're already trying to think through what they're going to say.<br />
<br />
I know that for a fact because before I did stand-up that was me.<br />
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I was the worst type of audience member, I was a comedy geek who knew the names of everyone who'd won the Perrier from the Cambridge Footlights with Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Tony Slattery in 1980, through to at that point Daniel Kitson. I knew who'd been on what TV shows doing stand-up and watched as much of it as I could. What I didn't know at that point, and wouldn't learn until I started doing stand-up myself, was absolutely anything about live stand-up comedy.<br />
<br />
The fact I was still drinking at that point really didn't help me. In my days as a heckler I heckled the best the circuit had to offer at the time, I heckled Daniel Kitson and ended up looking a massive fanny after a bunch of put downs, I heckled Bill Bailey, Rob Newman and Jeff Green all on the same bill for a charity night which was my first ever proper live stand-up gig. (I had been to see the Comedy Store Players a few weeks before, but I've realised I'm not really into improv). Bill Bailey I liked so much I went to another gig to heckle him.<br />
<br />
I got thrown out of one club in the East End after drinking 3 pitchers of Grolsch on an empty stomach and heckling all three acts, only being quiet for the MC, I won't mention any names either of the acts or the club because frankly, whilst I remember who was on that night it was a lifetime ago and I was such a bad and horrific heckler I think I ruined the night for 200 people, I also know that every act on that bill that night is still on the circuit and I've gigged with all but one of them since, one of them regularly, and I'd hate for them to know.<br />
<br />
I think the high point came when the closing act was someone I'd seen on the TV a fortnight earlier, and with an almost Lisbeth Salanderesque memory that I've always had until the booze and drugs slowed it down, I could remember every single line of this guy's routine. I then did the worst thing a heckler can do, and started shouting out the punchlines just before he did. Rightfully I was thrown out of the club after an argument with the MC. And the following months I suffered from such an horrific sense of alcoholic paranoia and anxiety that I emailed the club about 30 times to apologise for my behaviour.<br />
<br />
It was strange that this didn't let me know that comedians use the same set of jokes more than once, but it didn't.<br />
<br />
Anyway, here we are over a decade later and I'm earning my living from stand-up, and I now see hecklers as my penance for the times I got pissed and heckled. And mostly I'm good at dealing with them, occasionally I have nights where the audience and my brain just seem to work on different levels and speeds, and on those nights the heckler ruins a good evening, but those are few and far between, an unfortunately usually when I've got a reviewer in.<br />
<br />
But as I said, heckling happens rarely, and most of the time it's unintelligible, and when it's not unintelligible it's an audience member who's not quite got the joke and shouted out what you meant by it, thinking that they've been funnier than you by thinking of a topper for the joke you've just told, when in actual fact they've just explained it the joke.<br />
<br />
Other times it's just remembering that it's a conversation, they talk to you, you talk to them the only difference being you've got 180 people eaves dropping and providing you and they forget that everything's going to be fine.<br />
<br />
Then once in a while you get a weird one.<br />
<br />
Well usually once in a while. In the last fortnight I've had a weird one every other gig. From the gig in Essex where 20 coppers raided the place just after the show started and sent their drug dogs round finding nothing before they left and took half the audience, who it turned out were all undercover police, followed by having two guys who I think may have been local drug dealers, (not wishing to stereotype anyone, but from my days when knowing how to spot these people felt like the difference between life and death, you learn to be able to tell.) walk in and have one stand next to the stage and try to threaten me. You can't win a heckle battle with a local drug dealer when the entire audience knows that's what he is. Right through to the Gig on Friday night which I'll tell you about in a second, they have been strange gigs with strange heckles.<br />
<br />
I was asked about heckles for an article for the Holla Back network, an organisation based out of New York who are urging women to stand up to street harassment, and which heckles I'd had did I think I'd had because I'm a woman. And two recent ones came to mind.<br />
<br />
One was at a gig in Leeds about 6 months ago where there'd been two guys down at the front who'd been heckling all night, and I was closing the show so I went on and immediately had to deal with one of them saying "Oh shit, a female comic, they're always shit." and then we went back and forth for about 20 minutes, after about five he called me fat, and then went down a route of saying that if I lost weight I wouldn't have to shop in the maternity section, I kept winning, because (here's the secret) I'm on a raised stage with a microphone and lights on me, and the other 200 people in the room have all paid, if not to see me specifically, then to see some professional comedians be professionally funny, not to listen to a teenager with far too much misplaced self confidence try to be the centre of attention.<br />
<br />
After about 15 minutes I was getting furious with him, to the point I was shaking with anger. He noticed and suggested I was scared, I told him it was quite the opposite and was wondering if I booted him in the face, whether the 199 other people in the room would back me up and say it was an accident.<br />
<br />
Then in an angry tone he shouted "Fuck off you FAT LESBIAN!"<br />
<br />
Bang.<br />
<br />
He'd gone too far a while back but I'd tolerated him, because often if you give a heckler enough rope they eventually have the self awareness to realise that the cheers, laughter and applause are for the act on stage, and the silence and the boos and the burning eyes of people who've paid anything up to £30 for their night out before they've even bought drinks boring into the back of their heads. In this case it didn't happen, because he was with 2 friends who were equally cunty.<br />
<br />
But now that was as far as I was prepared to allow too far to go.<br />
<br />
Quietly. Calmly. I put the microphone back in the mic stand. and stood there in silence looking at him for a few seconds. I could feel the atmosphere in the room, you could have heard a pin drop.<br />
<br />
Then in a low voice I said "I think you'd better go." he looked confused and upset. "what?" I said "You heard, I'm not continuing until you've gone, I don't have to put up with this at work, we were having fun and a joke and you went too far, and I'd warned you, now I'm not going to carry on until you've gone."<br />
<br />
Suddenly there was a rush as everyone in the room was behind me and cheered.<br />
<br />
I said "It's fairly simple, we'll do this as a democracy. Who here wants him to stay give me a cheer?" Him and his two friends, then they suddenly look a bit shocked, like they thought that the audience would be on their side.<br />
<br />
"who wants him to go?" Then the loudest cheer you've heard in a long time.<br />
<br />
"I think that says it all really, now fuck off." he hesitates and from the back of the room someone shouts "If you don't fucking leave now I'll kick your arse"<br />
<br />
I reference that with a look and he goes to leave. His friend who'd been as tricky sits there sheepishly and I tell him to go as well, he stands up and turns round as if to play to the gallery and suddenly sees that the club's security has turned up and he starts to look frightened and they drag him out.<br />
<br />
The gig finishes in a much nicer way than it had begun and everyone had a great time.<br />
<br />
But for the first and only time I'd been properly affected by a heckle, when I tell you what the second worst heckle was in a minute you'll think it strange that this one affected me more, but it did. It wasn't the fact that he'd ended his tirade with calling me a lesbian, I am one, all he's done there is correctly label me. The thing that really upset me was that he'd called me fat.<br />
<br />
That's upsetting for two reasons, one is that I don't think I was particularly fat at that point, and the other is that since then I've lost a stone (I was already changing my diet and exercise so that I would start to lose weight) and I can't fully enjoy that feeling that I'm getting fitter and healthier and slimmer without feeling like I let that little bastard win.<br />
<br />
So that was the third worst heckle experience I've ever had.<br />
<br />
The second, was, well, it's strange, because whilst the heckle I got is so much worse, I let it slide off me, because I've had it before a number of times and I assumed it was one of those heckles that female comics got frequently, I then found out that it wasn't a few weeks back when my friend Tiffany Stevenson came to stay and I told her about the gig I'd been at.<br />
<br />
See, in this industry often promoters won't put two women on the bill together, some are up front about this, some aren't so, and some deny that they do this whilst actively doing it. So it's not very often that you end up on a bill with other women, and when you do it's often a Womens' comedy night or a charity night, and there they don't heckle ever.<br />
<br />
Well apart from that one in Newcastle where I upset a heckler who was pissed by suggesting when he was slurring his speech so badly that he'd had a stroke. He took offence at this as did his friend who told me that it wasn't funny as his dad had died of a stroke two weeks earlier. They got up went to leave and one of them threw a pint of lager over me. Which as a recovering alcoholic felt like some sort of closed Kharmic loop.<br />
<br />
So like I say you rarely get to work with other female comics, and rarely do you get to see how they deal with hecklers, or what heckles they get that often.<br />
<br />
See the great thing about this job, is that you know when you have an argument and a<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">s you're walking away you have that perfect idea about what you should have said, the killer blow? The French call it <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">L'esprit de l'escalier the spirit of the staircase, this is the only job where that's useful because when you think of that perfect witty come back you will, at some point in the future be able to use it as if you've just thought of it there and then and to the audience it will look like that too.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">This is partly how comics deal with hecklers, we do it often enough to know what we're doing, and hecklers will often use the same heckles in the same place.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">Now I've been told that often female comics get heckled with "get your tits out" I've never had that, however the one heckle I've had often enough to have thought of the perfect come back for happened.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I told Tiff about it matter of factly and she was horrified.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><br />
<div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It happened at a gig I did a few weeks ago which was a bit of a bear pit, but in a fun way, they heckled but they were responsive so it was a dialogue which made the night fun rather than it being people making noise who you can't interact with, that's like someone turning up at a gig and playing their stereo at full blase. anyway at this gig there was a table of 10 people in their late teens and early 20s who were hammered and had been drinking all day who just wanted to heckle, that was all they were there for they wanted to be as much a part of the show as they could. and the ring leader was a guy at the front who was drinking bottle after bottle of wine. Again I was closing so I went on and started chatting with them and he quickly got heckly, so I did as I always do and played along a bit, made him feel a bit stupid, but let him know he was involved, he made a couple of pops at how I look, but they were only in retaliation to things that I'd said, at one point calling him stupid and pretending to throw a ball for him to chase, he said "that's funny, you've switched it round, usually it's the dog that would chase the ball not throw it." And to be fair I had to give him that one, obviously being called a dog isn't nice, but it was no worse than any of the stuff I'd said to him. </span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Then about a minute later I said something else and I can't remember what it was, but it got a big cheer and a round of applause, and that was when he said "Someone's getting a raping once the show's over."</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It was a few days later when I was thinking about that and thinking, it's strange that in any other job if a member of the public, or a customer said something like that you'd call the police or do something, but in the job I do you become blasé about it. I once had someone threaten me in the street with those words and it terrified me for weeks, but in this situation it seemed perfectly acceptable.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;">Not only </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">acceptable</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"> but I've heard that line enough times on stage to know that the correct response to that is "Yes, you once the royhipniol kicks in and I get the dildo out my bag. And don't worry I'll drop you near to the hospital so you won't have to walk far to get your stitches."</span></span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So I was talking to Tiff about it and it turns out that that isn't a usual heckle for women. </span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As far as I can tell it turns out that this is the third step down the thought process by young men who feel sexually threatened by a strong woman who isn't interested in them sexually. And that's really horrific. Like they've gone "Ok she's trying to be funny I'll be funnier. Oh she's put me down and they like her, I'll have a go at her looks. Oh she's ok with that, she's taken the piss out of herself for that and it's not affecting her. I'll show her I can be the dominant one and win in the end, I'll threaten to rape her."</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And whenever I've had that heckle it's always been around that point, when they've realise that taking the piss out of how I look isn't going to work.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So that's the second worst heckle I've ever had.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The worst, isn't as horrific as that, or as confrontational as the first, but it's the weirdest, and on the night it threatened to ruin the whole gig.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I wish there was some way to scientifically measure the mood in a room, as a comedian it's your job to gauge it and to work with that and make the audience laugh, and before you go on you can feel how the mood of the room is.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When you're on stage you can also feel when it changes, you can feel when focus has been pulled away from you and on to someone else, and whether that's ok or if it's distracting. There as as many variables as there are audience members about what can change the atmosphere in a room, and most of the time as a comic you learn how to navigate that and how to change it. </span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sometimes it feels like you're operating a very complex piece of machinery and you've adjusted all the dials and valves and got it working a treat. Things can go wrong but you're on top of it you know what you're doing, but you know that all it takes is for someone to tap it in the wrong place with an exact amount of force and it'll fall apart.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Last Friday night, again in Leeds I was hosting a show when that happened.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The venue was packed, the audience were chatty, looked like they were going to be fun and up for a good night, I was the host. How good a host is can be life or death to a gig, it's like spinning plates. You go on to a cold audience, whip them up into some sort of frenzy, get them all facing the same way, talk them through the rules, let them know how many comedians there are going to be, raise or lower the energy level in the room so that each act goes on to a room suited to their material, and you've got to do this and be funny.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And the night started off great, they were everything you want from a Friday night audience, and the energy in the room's going great, I do all the things I need to and start getting them clapping and cheering ready to bring on the first act.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"So if you could start clapping your hands, stamping your feet..."</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And from off to one side suddenly someone shouts out "Hello! My name's Patrick!"</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I had to stop everything, and start to try to deal with this guy. I had a brief back and forth with him I asked who he was and where he was from, turned out he was Polish and had lived in Leeds for a few years.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
"That's lovely, but we can have a chat during the break if that's what you want, I'm a bit busy at the moment."</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Then he shouted something that came so out of left-field that it threw me for a second and completely changed the mood in the room.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"I have cancer." he said. "I will die soon."</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bang.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Nothing can clear the mood out of a room like something like that can. </span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Fortunately when he said "I have cancer." I said "you have cancer?" so when he said "I will die soon." I was able to say "you and me both." which got a bit of a laugh.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Then he said "You're the comedian, make something funny out of that."</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He then got really disruptive and got thrown out. It was the first time I've ever been at a gig where a heckler's been thrown out before the first act's been on.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cancer's not usually a comedy gold mine, I'd never tried to make jokes about it, except one terrible pun when I first started which was "I tried to write jokes about cancer but some people have no sense of tumour" There's a reason I stick to telling stories.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But that was it, he'd picked the worst possible time to say the one thing that would suck all the atmosphere out of the room.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Over the course of the evening I got it back, and "I've got cancer" became a running joke, although towards the end they sounded less like he did and more like Alexandr Meerkat from the compare the market adverts.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So that now tops my list of worst heckle, not because it was horrific, but because it was perfect. At the time it seemed like there was no get out, and it turned a gig that would have been lovely all night into a bit of a struggle, but a gig that the audience enjoyed anyway.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But next time I'll know what to do, and it'll look like I came up with it there and then.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Being heckled isn't the scariest part of the job by a long way and it happens infrequently enough for stories like these to be easy to remember.</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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</span></div></div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-53784860619391617772011-02-24T13:17:00.000+00:002011-03-14T15:23:09.840+00:00Horses For Courses<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
I've been thinking about these for a while, when I first started out I went on one with a friend, I'd already been doing stand-up for a couple of weeks when she got in touch and asked if I fancied going. It was run by Janice Connolly and Archie Kelly was guest tutor, both of them fresh from Phoenix nights (which I know dates this story.)<br />
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The course was useful to me, but the lessons I learned wouldn't really help until much much later.<br />
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Cut to 6 years down the line and the same friend got in touch with me to ask if I might help out as a guest tutor on the stand-up course that they run.<br />
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I jumped at the chance, as I think that if you can you've got a duty to the industry to try to help make it a better place with better comics, promoters and audiences for the good of us all, but that's possibly because I think I might be a goddamned communist, or at the very least un-American.<br />
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Now, of the people who went on the course that I was on I believe I'm the only person who's still performing, my friend is a teacher and works in the industry in another capacity as well as running the stand-up course (she doesn't teach on it another comedian does the teaching).<br />
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And I've heard a lot of discussion about whether stand-up courses are worth it, if they can actually help anyone and if those who would succeed would do so anyway without the aid of the course.<br />
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Personally, like Jimmy Carr, I don't believe in "Funny bones" I think that funny on and off stage are separate things with interchangeable skills, some people can be the funniest people you ever meet, lightning fast and very witty, but on stage they can't get that across, and some people are the opposite. I also think you can learn how to make people laugh I don't think that sort of thing is innate I think it's learned, and I think that provided you're willing to put the effort in, and you're capable from learning from your mistakes and critically examining what you do on stage there's no reason you can't keep getting better and better, up to a point obivously, there is yet to be a comedian out there who transformed on stage in front of people into the Platonic form of the joke in a burst of pure light.<br />
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So I believe that Stand-up courses can have a place, the problem with a lot of them is that the ones who would have gone on to be successful comics do and the others don't go anywhere other than down to the pub with their friends and tell them about how they used to be a stand-up, and they were good at it, but they just couldn't balance it with other commitments, and people had said that they could be the next Michael McIntyre.<br />
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I think that what stand-up courses need to do is be able to teach those who do start off unable to write a joke, who don't have "Natural talent" and to teach some of the skills which are not related to stage, because that's where the focus seems to be with most if not all of them.<br />
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The 5-10 minutes a day that the act who's on the stand-up course is on the stage performing is vital but it's a tiny proportion of what actually goes in to being a stand-up, it has a disproportionate impact too, do badly you don't get booked, do well get booked a lot more, however there are other things that they need to be able to teach that they don't.<br />
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As far as I'm aware there's not a stand-up course out there that teaches how to go about writing a CV, telling the newer acts that the industry is small enough that any bullshit you put on there is likely to get found out, so if you've been on at a gong show where Jim Jefferies was MC you've not "supported Jim Jefferies" If you were at a new act/new material night where Jason Manford turned up and did 10 minutes of new stuff and you were on last you haven't "Headlined above Jason Manford" or if you were on before him "supported Jason Manford"<br />
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That going on last regularly at gigs where between the 10 acts on the bill the combined gigging total is less than 500 gigs is not headlining and you don't "Regularly headline small rooms" you regularly go on last at open mic nights.<br />
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And these are things that will trip you up, and make promoters less likely to believe what you're saying and less likely to book you, and that if you do get booked off the back of it by a promoter who is either brand new and doesn't know yet how the industry works, or is taking a chance on you because you might be telling the truth, and you turn up and die badly in a way that shows up your lack of experience, then they're not going to book you again for a very long time, and the new promoter may learn a lesson from that and end up becoming quite a big time promoter and you've pissed on your chips with them. The established promoter may talk to other promoters about how badly you did and you find that you're having difficulty getting gigs.<br />
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The circuit's changed quite a lot since I started when you could get away with stuff like this because there were fewer comics. Alex Boardman on another forum told a story about how in the mid 90s when he started out he put some bullshit press quotes that he made up and said were written by the Guardian on his CV, these quotes were later reprinted by The Guardian and became actual quotes, but these days with the internet it's easier to see through things like this, and there's about 100x more comedians out there all looking for the same gigs.<br />
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Not a single comedy course, as far as I'm aware, teaches that as a new comic that it's not advisable to sit in the corner of the green room and pontificate about your experiences on the comedy circuit and your great knowledge of comedy when you've been going under 18 months and are sharing a green room with comics who've been going 18 years.<br />
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I don't think any course, as far as I'm aware, teaches you how to write emails to promoters, who to get in touch with, how often you should email them if they don't reply to you. Even little things like what level you need to be at before posting when you're free on forums like Chortle.co.uk , or sending out your fortnightly availability to promoters who regularly book you.<br />
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Stuff like checking when you book a gig where it is and what time they need you there, and making sure that you're there on time and that you've got the phone number of the promoter in case of any trouble on the night with traffic etc.<br />
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All of these are vital skills that you need as a stand-up, all as important as the skills you need when you get up on that stage, because without them you're going to find it more difficult to even get to that point.<br />
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And as a stand-up most of the learning about performance that you do you do on stage, it's there that you learn what does and doesn't work, how to judge where a laugh will come in a new bit of material, how to emphasise the words for the biggest impact.<br />
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How to banter, how to turn that round so that you can switch from that to material without it looking forced and without audiences being able to see the joins.<br />
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And the only way to get better at that is through stage time.<br />
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The other aspects of performance that you can teach off stage are what needs to be taught, keeping your head up, standing at the front of the stage, going through material and taking bits out of it that aren't adding to the jokes to get down to the diamond in the middle of the idea.<br />
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In terms of how to teach them to write better material it's a tricky order, because on the course it's a supportive environment with others who are all in the same boat performing to each other, and with you only able to judge how well you're doing and how you're progressing alongside other people who are at the same level as you. You then finish the course and go out into the world of gigging where the audiences don't care that you've had a 6 week course they only care if you're funny and mostly they're not prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.<br />
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So it can be a strange situation to be in, I think what you need on a course is for there to be a guest pro comic every week who does a short set and helps with questions etc, just so you've got something you can measure your progress against. I think that whilst the courses need to start off supportive, there also needs to be a more critical deconstruction of the students material to really get to what does and doesn't work and why that is, teaching brevity, going through with the group and thinking about what in various bits of their material could be got rid of and still have the joke work.<br />
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Workshopping bits of material, maybe each week giving them a topic and getting them to pair up and go away and come back in half a hour with 3 jokes each based on that topic.<br />
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Stuff like that would work in a teaching environment, and be useful for teaching stand-up, and letting the people on the course get their money's worth and helping to teach those who aren't as "naturally funny" how to work on the things that they can.<br />
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Personally I don't think that stand-up courses are good enough, I think that the way they try to teach new stand-ups could do with looking at, and I think that there is the potential for there to be some really useful stand-up courses out there that would help a new generation of comics to come through.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>So I helped out on the stand-up course, and it was plain to see that some of the people there really wanted to be stand-ups and were going to have an easier time of it than some of the others, and that some of them really didn't get it at all but were there because they like going on courses, and if it hadn't been comedy it'd have been flower arranging, or cake decorating or poetry or creative writing workshops.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This particular course was one of the better ones I've seen or heard of, and it was great fun to help out, and I definitely would again, but the things I've realised through thinking about it and taking part and talking to people made me realise that the way that we try to teach these things could do with a little sprucing up.</div></div>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-91281837705287119732010-12-01T14:25:00.002+00:002010-12-01T14:25:48.873+00:00Broken Computer theoryAs with the tipping point of The Broken Window Theory and how that leads on to further broken windows, so my computer has broken and all the good work of me putting the effort in working hard and writing a blog a day is now affected and I'm not going to be able to write a blog for a while.<br />
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It's just one of those things that happens, there's no guiding hand trying to stop me, it's just piss poor bad luck and nothing else.<br />
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As soon as I've got my computer back up and running I will be back to blog another day.Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-66006566683402509372010-12-01T14:25:00.000+00:002010-12-01T14:25:36.203+00:00Broken Computer theoryAs with the tipping point of The Broken Window Theory and how that leads on to further broken windows, so my computer has broken and all the good work of me putting the effort in working hard and writing a blog a day is now affected and I'm not going to be able to write a blog for a while.<br />
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It's just one of those things that happens, there's no guiding hand trying to stop me, it's just piss poor bad luck and nothing else.<br />
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As soon as I've got my computer back up and running I will be back to blog another day.Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-58196986862669757172010-11-25T15:07:00.000+00:002010-11-25T15:10:48.207+00:00Another CountryThere are times that I'm transported back to being a small child again and I get the feeling I used to get when my friends older brothers had their friends round and we'd get playing, because I could never resist a play with the older kids, and it would go too far and someone would use their superior strength to hold me still and no matter how I struggled I couldn't escape, and the frustration was palpable. These days like I get that feeling when I'm battling with putting a duvet cover on, and I never fully trust anyone who doesn't approach this task with caution and a little bit of their heart going "Right there's the outside chance of making a massive cunt of yourself here, be careful, the last thing you want is to end up with the duvet on the floor and you trapped in the cover."<br />
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It's my second worst feeling. Even thinking about it now has brought a little bit of it back to me.<br />
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The worst feeling from childhood is that one that still sometimes comes to visit in the middle of the night, where you said something ridiculous and even years later you want the ground to open up.<br />
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As a kid my worst of these was listening to my brother, who was my hero when I was little and he'd been studying physics and was telling me about it, and about some of the effects of it. And I misunderstood one of the things he'd said, switched a word, and because I was little, about 5 or 6 I believed anything was possible. And if I didn't have proof, I had the disclaimer of children, and tabloid story editors everywhere to lend a story of authenticity "In America..." See the American dream of "In America anything's possible, doesn't just run as far as their neoliberal politics that anyone from anywhere providing they work hard enough can become President." It runs as far, in the minds of children and Tabloid journos that is a literal "In America Anything Is Possible" It is a continent that defies the laws of physics, logic, chemistry and biology. If you've got a story that you've made up, just say "It happened in America" and suddenly, for some reason it doesn't sound instantly like bullshit. Especially if you add "I read somewhere, that in America" Suddenly you don't even need any proof.<br />
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Let's hope politicians never figure out this trick, or Nick Robinson will have a load of work cut out for him, and then David Cameron will have to pretend that he's got the news paper it was in somewhere in the back room and keep putting Nick off until he forgets about it and something else comes along.<br />
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But this story didn't happen in America, or as my nephews call it "Themerica" Which I think is a lot more apt, The Merica, definite article, Only one in existence, and befitting of its stature. This story happened far away from there in the playground in Withnell Fold Primary School one lunch time, when we were using sticks and watching Jamie Philips pull the legs off spiders, and I retold the story that my brother had told me, only I'd misheard one word, translated it to another and thought that this made sense.<br />
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That word was "accelerate" I'd switched it to "expand" and now my story about how "if you dropped an aniseed ball off the top of Blackpool Tower it would accelerate so fast that it would be like being hit by a bus" suddenly became "If you dropped an aniseed ball off Blackpool Tower it would expand to the size of a bus." Some took the piss straight away, some decided to tell the teachers this new fun fact, and the upshot of the whole incident was that for years afterwards people would bring this up, for the first few years it would just make me burst into tears, then later fly into rage, and now I just wince a little inside from time to time when I get struck by that memory.<br />
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For me that feeling of humiliation and embarrassment is indistinguishable from the feeling you get when you've been caught out on a lie, or when you've told a lie you can't possibly sustain.<br />
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The one where you're asked a question, and they've phrased it in a way where you can't say you don't know, "Of course I fucking know... I'm not stupid!" and in your head you're going "I don't know, oh fuck quick make something up." It happens to me far more than I ever thought it would, I think it's because I listen and then try to second guess what other people have meant by what they've said. I'm really bad at reading nuance in what people say, and telling tone of voice and I don't pick up on subtlety at all.<br />
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In the TV series and Books Dexter by Jeff Lindsey, the Eponymous hero says<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> "People </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">fake</span></em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> a lot of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">human</span></em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> interactions, but I feel like I </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">fake</span></em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> them all" and sometimes that how I feel, and then when it turns out that in spite of all the effort I've gone to to make sure that no one notices that I'm having to put human interactions though some sort of translation process before I understand them, and I make an error and am found out I feel massive humiliation, and completely out of control.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I'm suddenly 14 again and waiting outside the Warner Bros Cinema in Walton Le Dale in Preston with my then Girlfriend Caroline, waiting for my dad to pick us up, and I know he's not coming because I haven't asked him, and she's assumed that I have, because that was the deal, and I'd not realised and as we'd come out from watching Wayne's World 2 she'd said "So when's your dad coming to get us?" And I felt like I should have known and can't say "Oh, I didn't realise that that's what we'd decided" So instead I said "He should be here soon." and we stood and waited, all the while knowing that he's never turning up, and that this lie can't sustain itself.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">You'd think as I get older I'd learn from these lessons, but I don't, it's almost Nietzschean that in forgetting our history we're condemned to repeat it.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I think a lot of the source of my melancholy comes from my relationship with my dad. I love him to pieces, he's wonderful, and he's the best person at emotional blackmail I've ever met. There wasn't a Friday what went by as a teenager where I'd be interrupted from watching My Two Dads, or Blossom, or whatever else Channel 4 had on their 6:30 Friday US comedy import show half hour, with my dad calling up the stairs "I'm off to Tesco, do you want to come?" And I'd go "No thanks, I'm watching something." and then his voice would change, he'd sound really sad and go, "Oh, I thought you liked coming with me to do the shopping." then a long pause, just about enough to make me feel massively guilty before following it up with "Are you sure you won't come?"</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">And ten minutes later we'd be wandering round Tesco chatting and having a laugh and making jokes, it was great, I loved it.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I get consumed with nostalgia thinking back to these things and I wish I could travel back there briefly to re-do some of it, make it better, especially as I started to get into adolescence, it's almost tragic when we look back at how impermanent things are, no sooner have you got a handle on it than it drifts away. It's part of the Modern world, and modern in it's true sense, with the move from rural to city living. Marshal Berman takes a Marx quote as his title with the title of his work on the ever changing nature of life that sums this up "all that is solid melts into air"</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I think I was about nine or maybe ten years old when my dad and I went camping in Anglesey, we bought a tent from Outdoor Action in Blackburn, a shop which a few years later I helped out with a November Camping Sale, by telling one of their staff a great slogan would be "Now is the winter of our discount tents, made glorious summer... With our discount tents."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">To be honest the second half of that was theirs, for some reason they didn't like the brevity of just having the first sentence.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">The tent we got by the way ended its days at the 1997 Glastonbury Festival, when a combination of tiredness, rain, and heavy wind stopped me from being able to put the tent up and half of it got blown away, and in the tiredness and coldness and misery of that evening, I dumped what was left of it in a bin and went home, less than 12 hours after arriving and having not seen a single band or anything. I got a National Express bus back from Bristol and arrived home a good 6 hours before my parents who'd gone out of their way to drive me down there. Furious doesn't even begin to cover it.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">But that was the last journey of the tent, the first was to Anglesey with my dad. Just me and him.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">We had books to read, we had a little gas stove and we intended to go on walks and climb Snowdon. Which we did whilst I told hi all about the Romans, and Asterix, and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and probably repeated verbatim any comedy sketches I'd seen on TV in the last few years. We had a great time. I even had my first taste of Guinness.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">We Climbed a mouontain, and I got some bad blisters. and we went home.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">It was lovely. We decided that we'd go again in the next half term.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">When the next half term came though even though it was only a few months later, I'd reached that age where I wasn't going and doing stuff with my dad! I was far too grown up for that. there was countryside to be explored, bows and arrows to be built, rivers to be jumped, and a lackadaisical attitude towards health and safety never better exemplified than when Alex Kirby fired an arrow which we'd made and then decided would be cooler if we melted a plant pot over the sharp end and turned it into a arrow/napalm dispenser, Said arrow was fired into the sky and hit me in the stomach, not cutting me but doing extensive damage to my brand new Adidas tracksuit top. This was only beaten in the danger stakes by Jamie Philips attempt to shoot a butterfly with an air rifle and taking a beat on it and tracking it as it flew between him and us, pointing a loaded gun at each of us in turn.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">I can still recall the sound of my dad's disappointment when he realised that our week away camping wasn't going to happen, and that the youngest of his children had now grown up to that point where doing stuff with their dad was no longer cool. Sometimes when the mood catches me right I think back to this and cry. These days I'd love to go camping with my dad again, and climb some mountains, but I get the feeling he's no longer able to do that. But I'll always have that memory of when we did, and it's one of those precious moments of which you may only have half a dozen in your whole life, but it's more precious to me than anything.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">That night by the way, the night when my dad realised I was too old for camping, apparently he managed to get trapped in a duvet cover.</span>Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8033316444102391774.post-53365537006481218182010-11-24T13:32:00.000+00:002010-11-24T13:32:45.944+00:00I should have told ya that the things that you love start to own yaJudgement, and prejudgement. We all do it from time to time, it's natural and it's one of our basic defence strategies passed down to us from our ancestors on the plains, a stranger comes in to our group from the outside, we're suspicious and fearful, and if something bad then happens to upset the equilibrium it's clearly their fault.<br />
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It's not always the first answer that's the right one though is it?<br />
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For example, if you're brought up culturally within the Judeo-Christian religion as most of us are the first answer that we get given for why women go through pain in Childbirth is that because Eve took the fruit from the tree of knowledge after talking to the serpent, God punished her and her daughters and all their daughters and so on, for all eternity to pain in Childbirth, and the Serpent to slither on his belly. God in this instance being a massive prick, and also breaking the Geneva convention on human rights which disallows group punishments for the action of the individual. And yet further proof if proof were needed that you don't get Morality from what's written in the Bible, I'm fairly sure that most of us don't think it's fair to punish everyone of a group for the actions of one or a few?<br />
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So that's the first and most obvious answer to why women go through pain in childbirth if you take your facts from middle eastern folk tales. If you through a process of peer review and a thirst for knowledge and don't take the first thing you're told at face value, you eventually get to the point where you figure out that the likelihood is that we evolved over billions of years from a single celled organism eventually to a point where our species branched off from other primates and they ended up being Chimpanzees and Orangutans etc and we became who we are and felt pretty smug because a few short billion years before we made that leap a random genetic mutation meant that everyone down a different branch evolved differently and had become Bananas, and the primates thought they were stupid and piled the ultimate insult on them by eating them and making their skins the ultimate pure expression of comedy. Anyway the earth changed, the jungle receded and our ancestors went from all fours to bipedal, and so our hips had to change shape to become load baring, and as a result of that it meant that babies had to be born before they were fully developed and intelligent, and would cause a lot more pain in birth, but this meant that adults would have to form strong bonds in order to look after the child until maturity.<br />
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So, Ate an apple and punished by angry sky God, Vs over a period of time body shape changed and we're not quite properly evolved for it not to hurt. It is a judgement call but I know which one I think edges it.<br />
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But it's easy to make snap judgements, and our thinking isn't always straight forward, we say stuff without thinking, and sometimes in our effort to be nice. It's a bit like that Liberal Guilt blog I did a few months back, only slightly different.<br />
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I heard someone the other week describing someone that they thought was a total wanker, and they said "But I thought he'd be a lot nicer, you know, all things considered." and when pressed on what she meant by this she said "Well, you know, he's in a wheelchair." As if the inability to move his legs would somehow give him a sparkling personality. This romantic notion that if we're somehow different that this will make us a better person.<br />
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It doesn't work like that. And this positive connotations we have with people who are different can be just as bad as the negative ones that we have, in the end it's all judgemental.<br />
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Tonight I'm off to Nuneaton, which sounds like the sort of thing you can be thrown out of a convent for. It was the home of George Elliot, and annually enters the Britain in Bloom competition, which in 2000 it managed to get to the final of. It's the sort of place that rarely shows up on anyone's radar unless you or family live there, I've been to a number of these towns over the years, and they're usually pleasantly surprising. Swadlincoate, for example, has a dry ski slope and some lovely denizens, and about the most exciting thing it has to offer according to Wikipedia is that it's as far away from the sea as it's possible to be in the UK, a title that it somehow manages to share with Ashby De-La-Zouche. Quite how your towns greatest geological feature can be shared in such a way I'm not sure. But apparently it's so.<br />
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Ware, in Hertfordshire too A lovely little nowhere place, in so many ways reminded me of where my friends grew up the suburbs beyond Chorley in Euxton, the houses that were built in the 1960's and 70's and the large suburb expansions where you were never more than half a mile away from another identical square at the entrance to an estate with a Chip Shop a pub, a Spar and a Laundrette, the Laundrette I suspect has now gone and been replaced either with a place to get a mobile phone unblocked or a sun tan place. The gig was at the local sport centre and football club, away from these newer houses and more towards the centre of Ware, itself one of the oldest towns in Britain, It had been there for years by the time they decided to build a fort there to keep the Vikings out. And as far as anyone knows the Vikings never came.<br />
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The Vikings not arriving appears to have been the last exciting thing that happened there.<br />
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And the reason I love these places is because they remind me not to judge people.<br />
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I get quite nostalgic for these places, that's why I love coming to do gigs in them. My own growing up in my home town was fairly average all things considered, all the problems I had were mine, and little to do with the location I was growing up in and as soon as I could I left the small village I lived in and headed for London.<br />
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A fresh start a new me away from the horrible stifling depressing shitty home of my birth. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to live in a place like Chorley, when they could go somewhere good, like London, which to me was synonymous with success, with the future, with being able to be different and express yourself.<br />
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As the sort of kid who got attention for walking through the streets of this small Lancashire Market town with pillar box red hair in bunches, big baggy jumpers and candy floss pink PVC trousers and knee high patent leather boots, and wondered why I got unwanted attention from every angry beta male who was out looking for something to fuck and fight, and probably not in that order.<br />
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Being quite the androgynous teenager, it was confusing to most of the ones who ended up in the pub where I worked, Harry's Bar a place which was rammed out for Sunday afternoons watching the premiership on the big screen. I never realised until long after I left that most small towns across the country, there aren't a great number of fights on nights out. But Chorley was that sort of town where people all want, as the T-shirt Slogan says "A pint and a fight - The Great British Night!" And I got dragged over the bar to take part in a few. Other times I'd just confuse the fuck out of punters.<br />
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"Are you a bird or a bloke?" I'd get asked at least 5 times a shift. the simple answer "Yes" never seemed to satisfy them so they'd always ask again. And I'd always have 2 replies ready to go, either "I think your chat up technique needs a bit of work." or "As I've no intention of fucking you what business is it of yours?"<br />
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Ok, unlike a lot of teenagers who think that they don't fit in, and that no one they know possibly understands what they're going through, I really didn't fit in, and no one did.<br />
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But what I didn't realise was that it wasn't the town that was holding me back, that I wouldn't go somewhere else and people would stop judging me, I wouldn't find London to be the Shangri La, this playground where I could become what I wanted to be, to blossom out of this cocoon and find acceptance. And I didn't for the simplest of reasons.<br />
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I was still me, I was just in London. I think that's what helped precipitate the big crash I had. I didn't know it at the time but just like the comet that crashed into the earth and got rid of the Dinosaurs that let the mammals take over the planet, I was about to have a massive extinction level event of my own happen.<br />
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Throw the realisation that what you've been striving for is an illusion and a relationship breakdown plus equal parts drugs, alcohol and depression into a blender and you get quite a concoction.<br />
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The urge to run away is hard wired into us, some of us run and never stop, because it's easier to try the etch a sketch restart to our lives rather than stop still and go. Right, I'm going to look at what it is that's wrong and try and solve each piece bit by bit.<br />
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That's why I love going to these small towns. It's why I don't mind the fact that they remind me of where I grew up any more.<br />
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I always thought these places were judgemental, and that they mistrusted me, and hated me and saw me as an outsider and a bit odd, something that I played up to.<br />
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And for the longest time every time I went there I was surprised, and I shouldn't have been, if I'd just looked back to how I was treated in my home town.<br />
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I got all sorts of shit when I was growing up because people couldn't quite figure out what or who I was, and I wanted the attention and didn't quite know how to go about it, and once I'd got the attention I dealt with it badly. I made everything about me.<br />
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And then when I came out, suddenly the attention stopped, the anger that I felt coming in from other people wasn't there any more. And by and large everyone was supportive. A year after I transitioned and was "living full time as female" as it says in the Gender Identity Clinic booklet I was given I found myself back in that same pub where I used to get all the aggression and anger and be the focus of confusion from blokes who were having a difficult psychological time trying to figure out who I was and took that as a direct attack at their sexuality. I was in that pub. And it was England vs Argentina in the World Cup. I felt isolated, like I stuck out, amongst all these people who I thought of as knuckle scraping mouth breathing inbred racist sexist homophobic transphobic idiots, I was terrified, for roughly the amount of time it took for England to score. the pub went wild, drinks thrown into the air, people jumping up and down and dancing, and one of the towns hard men picked me up and gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.<br />
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A few weeks later when some people from out of town were talking and poking fun at me from the bar, and some other of the Blokey-bloke blokes had a right go at them, something along the lines of "she might be a bit of a freak but she's our freak." Which is as close to a recommendation I would ever expect to get.<br />
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And this is why I love going to these towns and talking to these people and doing shows there, because no matter where people are, no matter what their experiences are, people are still people, and if they've made the effort to come out to a comedy night thenthey're alright by me and we've already got some common ground, because I like a laugh too.Bethany Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14466122677394306338noreply@blogger.com1