Critic Cal

“Biblical Womanhood” is a pulse-raising phrase that typically describes a set of prescriptive (and subordinating) gender norms based on particular interpretations of selected portions of scripture. Funnily, those selected portions don’t typically include the accounts of actual Biblical women – many of which make for fascinating / inspiring / disturbing / all-round-complicating reading. When they get read at all, that is.  One of my favourites is that of Tamar, through whose initiative God extends the tribe of Judah , establishes the house of King David and, according to the Christian testament, selects the human ancestry of the Messiah. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus actually goes out of its (patrilinear) way to honour her by name – and yet, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her mentioned in church. Perhaps because we’re stumped for a Sunday School moral-of-the-story (though we have disturbingly little difficulty deriving neat takeaways from the lives of male biblical “heroes” whose ac...

Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also. ( Genesis 38:6-10 ) According to Google's answer to what (let's face it) must be right up there among the most-asked questions since the invention of the search engine, this story is the closest the Bible comes to saying anything directly about masturbation. And it isn't a story about masturbation. It's not even a story, not really, about birth control methods – although they feature. It's a story about the denial...

"The Mating Game Has Evolved", proclaimed the bottle of shower gel that I'd scraped from the bottom of our where-did-this-even-come-from? toiletries barrel on my hurried way out of the house. "Unleash The Chaos With Lynx Attract For Her – A Fragrance So Irresistible It Will Drive Guys Wild." Chaos did not ensue. Much as I deplore false advertising, I was, on balance, relieved. Still, it got me pondering their promotional premise: hooking up is a unisex sport now. Women are no less free to pursue numerous casual sexual encounters than men. To which I say: yes to equality! and great if we're really (really?!) gonna lay off with the misogynistic shaming ... All the same ... I dunno. Two things: Firstly, "evolved" strikes me as an ironic word to describe a drift towards instinct-led sexual ethics. Isn't, like, the human ability to reason against our immediate animal appetites in part why we fancy ourselves a somehow higher form of life tha...

And the scribe and plutocrat brought unto us a man stated in obscenity; and when they had set him in the press, they say unto us, Reader, this man was stated in obscenity, in the very act. Now Murdoch as a rule commanded us, that such should be panned: but what sayest thou...? What we  did  sayest said more, I suggest, about us than about the Prime Minister [1]. How delighted we emerged in the emergence of such unparalleled grounds for disgust! Twitter was awash with pork puns, suggestive pics, quips about the Pig Society, and a derogatory spoof account,  conspicuously followed by the UK Russian Embassy; someone inevitably had the genius idea of putting the word 'gate' at the end of the descriptor of the implicated creature, thereby concretising the allegation as an official political scandal; my favourite societal prognostician , Charlie Brooker, had to publicly clarify that no, he had not heard any such rumour when he penned Black Mirror episode ...

So, I let vent the other day about the way that cinemas sanitise death for a family audience. This got me thinking -- though I just about managed to restrain myself from throwing it all in to one particularly extended and rambling discourse -- about the other aspects of human existence you do and don't expect to see in a 12A. One obvious no-no is, understandably, graphic sex -- cue lots of suggestive cut-aways just at the moment of hand-buttock contact, or of one foot leaving the floor, or of a directional transition towards the horizontal... (Basically, any of the various happenings they warn you about in those start-of-term Christian Union pep talks). But, as with death, sex can be cheapened even while it is not being explicitly depicted -- and that's what I think happens when it's treated as 'no big deal'. Of course it alienates me terribly to say so, because 'no big deal' is, in most cases, the widely agreed-upon standard of healthy sexuality that w...

Frothy it may be but I have a soft spot for New Girl …the new Zooey Deschanel vehicle which is basically just an unashamed excuse for her to kooky-it-to-the-max [1]. I like it because it is gentle; the characters are nice to one another; people are allowed to be different…at least up to a point. But somehow, in its deliberate quirkiness, the unchallenged social norms of the 'situation' become all the more striking. Most sitcoms seem to draw from the same pool of 'skeleton' episodes, by turns fished out and furnished with appropriate situation-specific embellishments. Episode 8 was 'the one where two people reach the point in their relationship where they're supposed to have sex but it all gets rather awkward'. Zooey's character had been seeing a fellow teacher for a couple of weeks and they decide it's time to 'get serious' in the bedroom department. They both feel vulnerable and nervous; they are not yet at a point in their relationship wh...