How we talk when we talk about sexual wrongdoing

You might have seen that there is a spreadsheet in circulation describing the sexual behaviour (to use a neutral word) of various Tory politicians. It is being published in redacted versions, but bits of information can be put together to name names, and presumably the whole thing will become (even more) public in due course. I have no idea whether any of the accusations are accurate: I would ask you to bear in mind that false rumours are not exactly unheard of in politics, and that putting statements into a spreadsheet does not thereby make them true

Anyway, what I thought was interesting was the words people are using to talk about this behaviour.
The spreadsheet itself has some interesting choices of words. "Inappropriate" features a lot. That is not surprising. "Inappropriate" is a popular word for this sort of thing nowadays: it is pretty vague in extent but quite clear in implying "bad". It's probably quite a good word if we are talking about things like unwelcome knee-patting or making personal comments with a view to causing embarrassment; I suspect it is far from being the right word in the case of someone who has apparently obtained an injunction against "inappropriate" behaviour.

The spreadsheet also uses "impregnated" and "fornicated". Have you ever asked someone whether their father "impregnated" their mother or "fornicated with" her? Me neither, and I don't recommend it: it would almost certainly be "inappropriate". These words are only used in connection with impropriety.

"Handsy" is a great word. But, as with "fornicate", doesn't its use suggest that we are talking about the sort of men that the Mitford sisters were warned about in the 1930s rather than people today? You'll see references to men "not being safe in taxis" in the links as well. Is it possible that when the redactions come out we will discover some shocking things about Neville Chamberlain's Cabinet?

I am also fascinated by the way the reporting of the spreadsheet has tried to distinguish between more and less serious matters. How about this:

"Not all the MPs on the spreadsheet are accused of acting improperly. It includes two MPs named in Sun stories who have had relationships with staff where no misbehaviour is alleged.

Justin Tomlinson had a relationship with his younger researcher and Steve Double had an affair.

No sexual wrongdoing is suggested on the part of either."

I see what they are getting at - Mr Double's sexual advances were welcomed - it was mutual handsiness! - but surely "Steve Double had an affair ... No sexual wrongdoing is suggested" is just wrong? Or am I being terribly old-fashioned?

If I were trying to be sententious about all this (and this is not the right context for such an effort) I would suggest that these interesting linguistic choices are the result of the inherent difficulties in having just one openly-accepted test for whether sexual behaviour is right or wrong, i.e. whether the immediately present participants are consenting, while people are quietly aware that there is more to it than that. "Impregnated former researcher and made her have an abortion" you say? I'm sure he didn't force her at gunpoint, so it's all just consenting adults, isn't it? Well, of course it isn't, and it may take a lot of (rightly) angry women making a feminist fuss about "inappropriate" behaviour to re-teach us some things that our grandparents knew. But that is for another day.

Croonin' Putin

Do you want to see Vladimir Putin playing the piano and singing 'Blueberry Hill' to a clapping audience of international celebrities including Goldie Hawn? Of course you do. Here he is. What a guy.

Euthanasia in Belgium

"Among adults whose lives are ended for psychiatric reasons, the most common conditions are depression, personality disorder and Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. ... In 2014, Belgium became the first country in the world to expand its original euthanasia law by explicitly allowing it for children, although this cannot be for psychological suffering. The Netherlands, the first country to legalize euthanasia, has proposed extending euthanasia to old, healthy people who feel they have “completed” their lives."

Read all about it here.

The other side of Tolkein

JRR Tolkien was Sub-Warden of Merton College, Oxford. Indeed, he has a good claim to be the most famous person associated with the College in all its 753-year history. And yet one feels that he is not fondly remembered there. This extract from the obituary of a more fondly-remembered academic, Dr Roger Highfield, might help explain why.

"Tolkien mania both amused and baffled him. He liked Tolkien personally but couldn’t fathom the fuss that surrounded him. Approached by a television producer for reminiscences, he deftly recommended Bruce Mitchell at Teddy Hall as a Tolkien pupil – a rare bird indeed, Roger remarked confidentially, because Tolkien was very lazy and supervised few. This deflection spared him having to admit that, aside from having played squash together, all he could say of Tolkien was that he was incomparably the worst Sub-Warden ever. 

"The ultimate high or (depending on the vantage) low point of Roger’s and Merton’s experience of Tolkien came when Tolkien offered to bequeath to the College the priceless manuscript of The Hobbit (1937). Roger as Librarian was naturally beset by visions of queues, stretching along Merton Street and endlessly beyond, of miscellaneous devotees and doctoral students, taking it in turns to prostrate themselves before the sacred relic; but he and the Warden and Fellows manned up and duly assembled for a ceremony in the New Common Room at which Tolkien handed over the treasure to the sound of popping corks. Later, when Roger cut the string and opened the brown paper parcel, he discovered that the great man had wrapped up a different and still unfinished manuscript. Not only was he working on it, he wanted it back. It turned out to be The Silmarillion (1977) which, along with The Hobbit, Merton never did get. ‘Waste of good champagne’, was Roger’s withering verdict."

I don't think that's quite how a man of Gondor would have played it.

IKEA humans

This piece about 'IKEA humans' is well worth a read. I do not agree with all of it. I disagree with some of it. And much of it is about American issues on which I have no ability to judge. But it is interesting and thought-provoking. I have given some excerpts below.

Rats

"A third of the world’s food supply is consumed or destroyed by rats. ... There are more rodents currently infected with plague in North America ... than there were in Europe at the time of the Black Death."

"‘Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,’ an exterminator told Mitchell sixty years ago. ‘A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skilfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read.’ "

If you love reading about rats, then this is the link for you.

Interesting things you might have missed

1. Pretty much all the music ever. You should go to the link and try it out.

2. Sadiq Khan wants to ban wood-burning stoves because people have been braking their cars in France. Or something like that.

3. Belfast in 1955. How tempting the Alhambra Theatre looks!

4. The mysterious smuggler and an entirely logical/bonkers explanation for that Las Vegas shooting.

5. Different worlds.

Really good university funding policy

What would you think of a university funding policy that resulted in "increased funding per head, rising enrolments, and a narrowing of the participation gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students" and "increasing quality, quantity, and equity in higher education". Sounds good, doesn't it?

There is in fact such a policy. It's the introduction of tuition fees in England. Worth bearing that in mind the next time you read a Stefan Collini tear-jerker in the LRB. Roll back that policy at your peril?

Seven links, all worth a read

1. Woody Allen is very lazy.

2. This is the story of the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of Kim Jong-un. Fascinating and sad - perhaps too implausible to be a film.

3. This is an article by someone with Asperger's talking about neurodiversity. "Aspies don’t mince their words. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinks this is a sign of low empathy and he is not alone. Baron-Cohen thinks “empathizing is about effortlessly putting yourself into another’s shoes, sensitively negotiating an interaction with another person so as not to hurt or offend them in any way, caring about another’s feelings.” Baron-Cohen is one of the pioneers in the field of autism research. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that what Aspies have is a failure of introspection, not empathy. // Aspies have a blunt style of speech, because they mean well. [...] Neurotypicals always think it’s about them. Tell them social media is not good for children, and they will say, “Don’t tell me how to raise my child.” Tell them intelligence is heritable, and they assume you just called them stupid. Tell them you disagree, and they think you just don’t like them. Tell them the gender salary gap is not because of patriarchy, and they will remove you from their Facebook friend list. Why do neurotypicals make a torture rack for themselves, and us, with their poor self-esteem? And they still think we don’t have empathy."

4. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Dr Johnson asked. This article is a well-judged attempt to answer that question.

5. Ross Douthat gives Hugh Hefner both barrels.

6. "Soon an intelligent terrorist with a cruise missile and some off-the-shelf kit will be able to sink [an aircraft] carrier using their iPhone ... [Our leaders] should also study summer 1914 and ponder how those responsible for war and peace still make these decisions in much the same way as then, while the crises are 1,000 times faster and a million times more potentially destructive." The ever-readable Dominic Cummings, of course. The headline is "Review of Allison’s book on US/China & nuclear destruction, and some connected thoughts on technology, the EU, and space": that covers most of it, although there is more Bismarck in it than you would guess from that. Oh, and also: "When the UK leaves the EU, the EU will have zero universities in the global top 20."

7. Are you scared about software? If not, you should be. "The stakes keep rising, but programmers aren’t stepping up—they haven’t developed the chops required to handle increasingly complex problems. “In the 15th century,” he said, “people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d allow anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.”"