Of Twitter, Terror and Jane Austen

So it's been a while. Lots has obviously gone on in the interim - for example, the then-unborn recipient-to-be of the yellow bunny card mentioned in the previous post has been safely delivered into the world, and I was able to go and visit her two hours after she got home from the hospital and pass into her possession the card that had caused all the fuss. So you can stop worrying now.

In truth, things of great magnitude have occurred and I will blog about them at some stage, no doubt - but for now I am occupied with more recent happenings.

You see, four days ago I joined Twitter.

It's not like I wasn't aware Twitter existed. At least four different friends/colleagues had recommended I join or demanded to know why I didn't. I had looked once or twice; considered it a couple of times. In the end, the reasons I didn't and the reasons I then did aren't important here - what's important is that I joined and began selecting who to follow, and among them I added one Caroline Criado-Perez, primarily because I had heard of her on the radio that morning. I liked that she had instigated the campaign to get Jane Austen's image onto a UK banknote and thought she'd be an interesting follow.

Reader, I had no idea.

If you missed the general gist, you can catch up here, but it mostly went:

• Woman campaigns for renowned and well-loved author to appear on banknote
• Woman utilises Twitter to launch and expand campaign
• Campaign successful!
• THREATS OF RAPE AND DEATH

Now plenty of commentators better placed and informed than I have written extensively about this and the surrounding issues regarding trolling and so forth, but it did remind me of something I hadn't thought of in a long time.

Back when I was about twenty, I often spent my holidays from university working in a Belfast branch of a well-known high street bookshop. It was largely good, as shop work goes; my colleagues were well-read and fun, and I happily spent my wages like a twenty year old does, on leather jackets, cigarettes and beer. Thus did I breeze happily around the shop floor recommending Donna Tartt to everyone when one day the phone went and I answered it, as my job description dictated I should from time to time.

"[Formally approved standard shop phone greeting and offer of help!]" I chirped eagerly - I can't remember the exact words we used for the phone.

The man on the other end had no such greetings. He launched straight into his message, which was delivered clearly and carefully and was this: "As of today, we will be targeting all Catholics who work in [name of shop]. This is the Red Hand Defenders." He then hung up.

It took the wind out of my sails a little, I'll admit. I think I was still smiling when I hung up and told my older and more experienced co-worker, who looked horrified and called for the manager. People kept asking was I okay. A few people (mainly catholics, actually) made silly jokes about it. I honestly felt like it shouldn't have been a big deal and when the police were called I was equal parts embarrassed and gleeful at the thought of missing some work time. And yet after all this, and while I am no delicate little flower in general... I felt a little shaky. A smidge weird. A tad removed from the world, as though I was functioning normally but behind a layer of clingfilm. Without consultation, the manager told me she was phoning someone to come and get me. I didn't protest.

The police interview was standard - what did he say, were those the exact words, was there any identifying blah blah and so on - but I'll never forget something that was said to me during it, because it was so simple and made so much sense and yet I had never ever thought of it. In response to my vague expression that he hadn't said much/I wasn't upset/this wasn't really a big deal, the policeman shook his head.

"Well, they're terrorists," he said. "They're out to cause terror and that's what they do. There doesn't have to be an act of violence - the threat is enough." So simple, and yet I, growing up in a country famous worldwide for its particularly hardy brand of homegrown terrorism, had never thought of it before.

I certainly thought of it today, and yesterday, and the day before while reading some of the threats coming through to Caroline Criado-Perez, Stella Creasy and others - all women who had taken a stand against what they saw as sexism, misogyny and hate speech. Others can debate the rights and wrongs of freedom of speech, censorship and whether a button on Twitter will do the job - and have been doing so in minute detail. What struck me was the idea that when you post a threat to rape and kill someone, stating a specific time and place (for example 8pm at your house, as one poster "helpfully" detailed), you are intending to cause terror. The person on the receiving end, no matter how hardy, no matter how sensible, no matter how convinced you don't really know their address, will feel that flutter that I, a non-catholic good-in-a-crisis sensible former shop-worker, felt. Their mind's eye will forget the utter ridiculousness of a sectarian organisation thinking that shooting shop assistants will help their political cause, or the utter ridiculousness that someone would kill them for putting Jane Austen on a banknote, and will instead picture the threat, however briefly. They will feel the fear. They will be a victim of terrorists.

I cannot fathom what kind of person imagines it is good, worthwhile or fun to threaten strangers online, any more than I can fathom one who sees the sense in strapping a bomb to one's own body and detonating it in a crowded marketplace in the name of a sincerely held belief. What I do understand is that in one way at least they are two of a kind - causers of terror, infringing on the rights of others. Your right to free speech does not supersede your responsibility to avoid harming other human beings intentionally, whether you harm them through direct actions or by the causing of terror. Perhaps the men who do not cringe at the idea of being thought women-haters might feel differently at the prospect of being called terrorists... though sadly the force of their bile - even after two real-life, not-on-the-internet, actual arrests (to date) - does make me wonder.

And how do we deal with terrorists? I suppose that's a question over which to agonise. But I've seen enough movies to know that we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not succumb to their demands. We don't "ignore them" and "hope they'll go away". It is the duty of society to show them that their behaviour is unacceptable and wrong and that their terror does not have the desired effect of letting them win. We don't let terrorists win.

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).

"It's Called a 'Bat', Love. You Hit the Ball with it, Yeah?"

You may have surmised that I don't find it difficult to find topics on which to vent my vicious little spleen, so why we listen to Radio 4's 'Today' programme en route to work is beyond me, but we do - and today it gave me ample fodder. The story I want to focus on, though, is this.

Now, in the interests of fair disclosure, I must out myself here: I hate cricket. I'm no fan of sports in general, but cricket, that last bastion of the Bwitish Empire, has always seemed especially pointless. I admit I'm biased - I once spent three years of my life with a guy who insisted on having Radio Five Live on all night so he could 'listen' to the live cricket coverage in his sleep. Once, he tried to take me to a cricket match - two minutes into the journey I made him pull over, got out of the car and walked home. Seriously.

However, I appreciate not everyone feels this way, and so I did not receive this morning's news that England wicket keeper Sarah Taylor was under consideration by Sussex County Cricket Club to be selected as the first woman to play alongside men in professional cricket with any other emotion than a mild sensation of 'Well good for her'.

What I found hard to fathom, though, was the commentary which followed.

As with many such features, two speakers were on air to give point and counterpoint - Mark Alleyne, Taylor's current coach at Marylebone Cricket Club, and Baroness Rachael Heyhoe Flint, described by Wikipedia as "probably the best known female cricketer in England".

Alleyne, who was addressed first, described the prospect of Taylor's possible selection as "exciting" and noted that, while the pace of the game would be quicker and the ball slightly bigger, no other major differences existed for a woman playing alongside and in opposition to teams of males.

Flint, in contrast, has 'concerns'. She used to play cricket with men non-professionally, you see, so she knows the possible issues Taylor and other women may face. According to her, those issues are:

1. Taylor may not have gone far enough in Women's cricket, and might therefore cause "dilemmas in the minds of selectors in Sussex, that they would be selecting a girl in preference to a young lad who's come through the academy system".
2. Sarah may cause "problems" for the men on the other team, because if she was batting and they were bowling, she might get hurt.

Let me just reiterate these points. The problems that may caused by a sportswoman being selected to play on a second-level sports team with some sportsmen are that the people who pick sports players for a living might pick her wrong, and/or that she might receive a sporting injury in the course of playing her sport.

Sorry, but I was utterly fucking gobsmacked by this.

I know next to nothing about Sarah Taylor, but here are some assumptions I feel fairly confident in making:
- That she's 'quite good' at cricket.
- That team selectors wouldn't consider her for selection unless they were reasonably sure she wouldn't make a dithering ladymess of it.
- That, having presumably played cricket for a number of years, she may be familiar with possibility of wear'n'tear or even, God forbid, outright injury sustained in the course of playing a competitive sport with a very hard ball.
- That people who play sport competitively like to win, and are not more likely to throw the ball, like, rilly hard at an oponent based on their gender.

Judging from his tone as he responded to her comments, Alleyne was fairly underwhelmed by Heyhoe Flint's viewpoint. While acknowledging that physical intimidation of the batsman plays a role in the game of cricket, he didn't seem to see gender as an issue in this instance. "I wouldn't see it any differently. I would see a batsman down the other end who is looking to take runs off me, and my job is to get them out, primarily, and that's what cricket is about," he pointed out calmly, sort of like a man who knows how sport works.

I am a firm believer in getting the best person for the job, regardless of who or what they are. If there was some grounded suggestion that positive discrimination was truly at work here and Taylor was a player being selected for having boobs not batsmanship, I wouldn't be complaining about this commentary. But Heyhoe Flint's stance did not seem to be based on anything concrete. Certainly she has experience of what it is like to be a female cricketer, and perhaps she has encountered nastiness along the way that fills her with genuine trepidation on Taylor's behalf.

But the division of her concern between the opposing team (who could ostensibly become confused about the object of the game when confronted by an ickle woman with a bat in her hand) and Taylor's physical wellbeing doesn't ring true. These felt less like genuine concerns and more like... someone grasping desperately to bring up needless obstacles. Which is great, because y'know, women have it so easy nowadays that when one makes a breakthrough and, seemingly on merit, becomes the first woman to do X, it's really helpful for other women to be wilfully obstructive and undermine the validity of that achievement.

Why would Rachael Heyhoe Flint baulk from giving her unreserved support to someone who is basically carrying on the legacy of accomplishments she herself won in the 60s and 70s? I have no idea. Please do take a minute to try and imagine how far my eyes goggled, though, when RHF summed up her time on air by stating: "I think, stick to the practising, get as far as she can, but don't alienate the opposition by appearing in matches that are crucial."

Yeah, you heard me - don't 'alienate' the opposition by having the temerity to not be a male cricketer, but some other kind of cricketer, when it's really important. Or, if I may paraphrase again, "You're doing really well at the cricket, sweetheart - almost as good as a man! Too bad you're such an incredibly weird and alien lifeform that you can't play in 'proper' games against truly skilled players, because they'd be all in a tizzy trying to figure out how to actually play against you! Never mind - you can still play, just not in any games of perceived significance. Those are for the Men. You know - the REAL players."

Players, umpires and spectators alike have been killed by cricket balls. Many more people than would freely admit it harbour a deeply held belief that women are less skilled, less strong and less good than men at all sorts of things - not just cricket. In some cases they are right - I personally scream if a ball is thrown near me and have the hand-eye co-ordination of a hot plateful of delicious tagliatelle. But there exist those women who are every bit as capable of playing sports proficiently - maybe even excellently - against men as I am of enjoying a hot plateful of delicious tagliatelle. Assuming Taylor is good enough for the team - and as I mentioned before, I am assuming that, based on the opinions seemingly held of her abilities by people who play, coach and organise cricket for a living - her gender shouldn't matter other than as a small but positive watershed for equality of opportunity. She should be congratulated, not patronised - and maybe the "best known female cricketer in England" needs to reconsider her disappointingly low opinions of her fellow sportswomen - and men.