Congratulations - it's a Beautiful Bundle of Cultural Assumptions!

March was so action-packed and industrious a time that I had no opportunities to come here and rant about things that really matter, like why daffodils make me angry. I know - it's everyone's loss.

And yes, I had thought about a Thatcher-related rant, but honestly, I have very little to say that hasn't already been dredged up on Facebook. The whole thing has been ridiculous overall: often disappointing and frustrating, sometimes heartening. I have never much liked Russell Brand, for example, but reading his piece on Thatcher has made me start to re-evaluate him, at least as a writer and thinker of some ingenuity.

Anyway, I didn't come here to type about that. What I want to discuss this evening is perhaps less topical, but it's an issue lurking, nonetheless, waiting to jump out and smack you some day soon.

I'm at one of those ages, you see, where my dearest friends have begun to procreate. Personally I am not that interested in very small babies apart from the fact that holding them is pleasant because they are very warm and I chill easily. On the other hand, however, I am VERY interested in my dearest friends and have high hopes for the potential brilliance of their various offspring.

Despite my lack of first-hand parenthood experience, I understand that having a baby is Quite A Big Deal, and Life-Changing, and Stuff Like That. I understand that babies are a long-term investment, so to speak, and that the new arrival will be around for a long time. Their existence will be incorporated into my relationships with my dearest friends and their partners. I want to be able to mark the advent of the baby in the lives of my friends (and to a lesser extent me) in a meaningful way. I want to show respect for my friends' new "creation", and offer them my heartfelt congratulations. I want to show respect for the baby, as a miraculous new life, and as a person in their own right, and as a being that is naturally and nurture-ally a lot like my dearest friends and brings them joy.

And how do I do this? Dunno - how do most people mark such an occasion? Glad you asked.

FACT TIME: Babies come in two flavours, and luckily for the likes of me, card manufacturers the land over have got both options covered. You see, gender entirely determines everything about all humans that have ever existed, and it is important to begin reinforcing annoying gender stereotypes as soon as the baby can scream its first breath.

Yes, yes, I know: I'm a fool to approach a shop full of greeting cards expecting any kind of proper insight or even the most basic employment of decency and common sense over a tidy little sick-pile of emotionally-redundant mawkishness. I am well aware of the use of Hallmark as a byword for the grossest kind of impersonal bollocks masquerading as the feelings of a real person you've met before. But bloody hell - I perused two well-known chain stores, hoping for some kind of let-up from the relentless pink and blue, pink and blue, pink and blue... there was none. Honestly: I couldn't find a single card that I could send to my friends. I'm not even saying 'I couldn't find a card that astutely and wholeheartedly expressed my sentiments as an individual'; I literally mean 'I couldn't find a card that didn't make me actually shrink away from the card racks with horror and embarrassment'.

I'm not even certain why exactly this bothered me so much. It's not like I don't know about how lots of stuff is sexist. It definitely isn't news to me that our society finds the weirdest ways to reinforce gender as a divisive, conformist thing so that by the time we're at an age to question it, we've internalised so many bullshit cultural assumptions that half of us end up believing the 'That's the way it is in nature' arguments put forward by those who are less inclined to challenge it. It isn't as if I haven't seen the resulting problems of these kinds of assumptions going on every day, with widely varying degrees of subtlety, in the young people with whom I work.

But I dunno... there's something so sad about this. Not exactly about the fact that cards give something of a miracle such trite and tawdry treatment - although that's a bit pathetic too. No - I think it's partly the sheer lack of imagination, and partly the depressing way that it shows just how early we're marked off as being this or the other, and all the arrogant assumptions that go along with that. The new baby is not someone we know, admittedly, so we can't exactly acknowledge them as a snappy dresser/good cook/obsessive golfer or whatever - but then the card isn't really for him or her. It's for the parents. If I had carried a whole fucking person, albeit a tiny one, around for months, and fed it, and come to terms with the fact that it would be urinating inside me repeatedly, and thought of names for it and started a savings account for it and gone through hours of labour to deliver it safely into the world, I'd want it to be acknowledged as something more than simply a "potential footballer" or a "potential ballerina". The idea that something so amazing - and the arrival of a new life IS amazing, however underwhelmed one might be by an actual small baby's social skills or conversation - can be reduced to something so pat... yes. That bothers me. IT'S A BOY. IT'S A GIRL. THAT'S ALL.

Some might say it's all relatively harmless, and maybe in the whole huge grand scheme of things they're right, but in my gut I didn't feel that way when I was standing in those shops, and I don't feel that way now.

In the end, I found one card - ONE card - which was pale yellow and had a bunny on it and no references to genitals of either persuasion to be found. It was nothing extraordinary, but finding it felt like a relief. For my other friend and her new baby, a card with a Cary Grant quote about madness in families on the front - much more appropriate and appreciated, and something I could buy without hiding my face at the till, leaving other people to purchase the remainder (willingly or not).

Outragings and Offenditures

I have to admit that as one who enjoys being a tad self-righteous, there are some aspects of modern life I find perplexing - that is to say, I don't yet have a hard and fast stance for myself on them. I oscillate back and forth between views - a well structured argument can change my mind on it; I find new information; I read something and find myself not sure whether or not I agree. There are a few of these, and I'm sure I'll discuss them in later rants. But there's one in particular I want to talk about now: comedy.

I have a pretty severely disabled sister. Generally speaking, she is like most other sisters on earth: a pain in the ass who is loved very very much and for whom I would do anything. My sister knows who I am, and can call me by name, and fully understands that I can change her DVDs when they end and make her bowls of Rice Krispies on request. She does not know what electrocution is, or how to call for help if needed, nor does she understand the intricacies of household objects that could set her alight or crush her to death. She would be guileless in the grip of a kidnapper, and helpless without her seizure medication. She has no sense of danger, and her grasp of right and wrong is about level with that of a very young toddler or a labrador puppy. She is vulnerable.

Between us, my family has protected her physically, mentally and legally all her life. We have guarded her against anyone who might abuse her or upset her or give her too much chocolate. We have also made legions of jokes at her expense, from the series of photos when she was a baby in which she is placed in numerous household applicances (washing machine, oven, microwave etc) to the tear-inducingly funny impressions we have done of her more 'ticcy' behaviours for each others' amusement. "You're terrible," my mother will gasp through a face that hurts from laughing, and she's right. It is terrible, and to us it's also hilarious, and much needed. You know that old cliché about 'having to laugh' in a trying situation? People who care for disabled children 24/7 can really do with a laugh sometimes.

These jolly japes sprang to mind a while back when my father, who does seem to be getting a bit more right-wing as he gets older, renounced the dry comedy stylings of Frankie Boyle because he made jokes about people with Down's Syndrome. I tried to point out that it was a bit rich that he felt it was fine for various people to joke ceaselessly (and often in ways which are boringly derivative, by the by) about mothers-in-law, immigrants, women and so on, yet disabled kids were off limits because he had one himself. He said it was because disabled kids can't stick up for themselves; I argued that all kinds of other targets of jokes were similarly unable to retort in any meaningful way and added that the kids couldn't care less, and he retorted with something else and so it went on.

I admit I mostly took the opposing council in that instance because I love a good old debate and playing devil's advocate against my father is... well, it's just a ton of fun for me, because I'm warped like that. Because I am still a little conflicted about the idea of respecting there are some topics that are off limits clashing with the idea of anything being fair game. Which is it? Are we duty bound to censor things that may be hurtful, or do we just get over ourselves and admit that everything is ripe for comedy?

I do genuinely find it a conundrum at times. Some days I think of the likes of Sean Lock or Steve Hughes, talking about the nature of 'being offended', and think how stupid it all is, how people are too sensitive, how you do indeed 'have to laugh' at some pretty rotten situations. I think about how hard it is to legislate for what is or isn't funny, and what is or isn't offensive. Who decides? For fairness' sake, I'd imagine it has to be either everyone or no one, and if it was the former, we'd probably have no comedy at all. I think about controversial things I really love - all the works of fellow (much better) ranters like Charlie Brooker or Bill Hicks; South Park and other brainchildren of Trey Parker and Matt Stone; everything Chris Morris ever did, said or thought. Yes, I think to myself. That has to be the answer.

Then I read something like this article here. I remember what I know about implicit acceptance of lazy assumptions, and how humour can be used to hurt and debase people as well as expose and ridicule stupidity. I recall I live in a society where widely circulated mainstream newspapers frequently equate sex with violence towards women in all kinds of fun and interesting ways that make the world just a little more vile for everyone. I remind myself of the importance of empathy, and think about how funny an 'edgy' joke might be to someone who has actually been forcibly pushed over that edge, for example. And so on it goes, round in circles. Which means that I usually have at least partially mixed thoughts about items of offence and outrage brought to my attention by others.

That fact probably makes the subjects of this article all the more special. Because when I saw the piece online today, I didn't have to 'hmm' and 'haw' about decency vs censorship or anything like that. I didn't have to wonder how I felt or whose rights were affected. All I really had to do was think "Wow... exactly what kind of guy would want to go round wearing a t-shirt that said 'KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT'? And exactly what kind of person would want to be seen with that guy?"

We could probably tease out a lot of different answers to those questions, but they'd all have one thing in common - none of them would be people with whom I want to share a world.