Testing...testing

I'm too conflicted to deal with Carmichaelgate, so in the time-honoured fashion, I'm just going to dodge the issue altogether in favour of something else. 

I read a couple of weeks ago that women working in Hollywood have been protesting about the number of films and TV shows that appear to glorify the rape, torture and murder of women. I watch a few American shows in the style the French call 'policiers': Gotham, CSI, Criminal Minds, NCIS. I've started watching them with new eyes since I read this. And I have to report there are a few nasty things going around but not that many.

The least awful is NCIS, which is really a comedy vehicle for Michael Weatherly, Mark Harmon and the producer's son-in-law Sean Murray (who proves there's an acting job for everybody but only if they're well-connected). But no violence against women: this has a navy setting so most of the victims are men.

CSI is now just daft, so daft I've starting switching off: the CSIs seem to be doing the work of the cops in this series and even I know that's just never going to happen. Ted Danson can't be so short of cash he needs to lend his name to this, surely? There are a lot of serial killers but the focus is on the investigation stage. There are snaps of bodies on tables in the morgue but always with their bits delicately covered by a towel. 

Criminal Minds does the before/after bit, showing people being stalked by crazies and then the investigation stage. With its resident speed-reading genius and the mouthy computer brainiac, it has pretensions to being clever but it's not. It's also not scary, although there's far too much emphasis on 'home invasion' and 'family annihilation' so the body count can be pretty high. Maybe this appeals to the target audience? 

The daddy of them all is Gotham. A woman popping her own eye out. Another strung up by ropes from the ceiling and having her mouth stuffed with a ball gag. Shootings, stabbings, drownings, kidnappings - all routine and quite often featuring women. The Gotham cops are utterly corrupt and as likely to be murderers as the gangsters. As far as I can see, there are no good guys. Now that I think about it, I don't know why I'm watching this at all. Pretty nasty.

In movies, women have come up with what's called the 'Bechdel Test.' If you want to know if a movie is misogynistic, apply this test: 

1. The movie has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

On that basis, all of the series above fail the test. I suspect most TV does...

Coming back to Carmichaelgate, I am thrilled to read at least one report that mentions a possible conspiracy theory because Lorne Campbell of the BBC and Alistair Carmichael went to the same school, Islay High School. We all know about the Lewis Mafia, but maybe it's time for the good folk of Leodhas  to move over and make way for the Islay Mafia...

Wimmin who hate wimmin

Stop me if you've heard me say this before: women are their own worst enemy - more exactly, women are the worst enemy of other women.

Today's paper has an article about Mhairi Black MP written by a woman.

The article - as all the other articles have - focussed on her age (or lack of it), on the fact that she took a selfie eating chips in London and when she was 15 she and her pals used to go out under-age drinking and post messages about it on social media. Her age isn't an issue - time will take care of that. Eating chips? Who cares? And if you can claim you did nothing stupid in your teens, you're either Mother Theresa or you're lying. The image the press seem to want to project of Mhairi Black is that she's what we in Glasgow used to call a keeley - uneducated, a bit dim and, heaven help us all, common.

But the most important things about Mhairi Black are, in my opinion: she's a woman; she's working class and has a different take on life from her predecessor in the Paisley seat; she's clever and has got elected even though she hasn't completed her university course, although she plans to; she's committed to politics (even if I personally don't agree with her politics); and she is a fantastic and passionate speaker. In speaking, she is focussed and direct and uses language that the rest of us can understand. She doesn't know about sound bites but she doesn't waste words. (Gordon Brown could take a few lessons from her in that respect).

So why do I single out the writer of today's article for being anti-women? Because the approach the writer took is lazy. She went for the obvious and added nothing to our knowledge of what Mhairi Black hopes to achieve in Westminster.

It's also about fairness. Kirsten Oswald (now my MP) has been singled out by a newspaper that should know better (the only one that supports independence) because her husband has joined the Labour party. If you have a male MP, do you really expect to know - or care - which political party his partner belongs to?

The odds on any woman in politics getting support from the UK press are pretty poor. There's talk of Yvette Cooper being 'tainted' because she's married to Ed Balls. And the rightwing press which hates John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, has leapt on Sally Bercow's adultery as a stick to hit him with.

And, yes, if you're asking, I do expect women working on newspapers to set a higher tone than men. Or at the very least to be able to spot the difference between writing comment and writing fluff - and fight for their right to comment on women's politics, not on the trivia around them.

The truth? Whose truth?

I'm reading Dennis Skinner's reminiscences in Sailing Close To The Wind. He's the Labour MP for Bolsover who is famous for his comments on the Tories in the House of Commons, having once said:

"Half the Tory members opposite are crooks."

When told to withdraw this remark by the Speaker: "OK, half the Tory members aren't crooks."

He doesn't look like this now. He's 83 and still in the House of Commons after 41 years. He's Old Labour. The party whips must have despaired of him often. Some of his reminiscences are interesting: he was a miner and describes that hard life of his family and his tight-knit Derbyshire community very well. He also describes the Miners' Strike of 1984 and its aftermath, which devastated many communities that are still struggling to recover. It's all a long time ago for most of us. The UK has changed so much it's hard to believe that Dennis Skinner and his fellow trade unionists ever wielded so much power - or even that the Labour party at one time considered itself a socialist party. Dennis Skinner thinks the Labour party should go back to what it was then. His view of matters before Tony Blair became leader of the Labour party can be summed up in two words: cosy and rosy. He ignores the excesses of some trade unionists and some left wing politicians. 

On the House of Commons, Dennis is less interesting. He refused a job as a minister. He loves the House and its procedures. For most of us, he describes a political world we know nothing about: using Erskine May (the rule book) to play about with the system, making his sometimes witty and always cutting asides from a spot just below the camera on the bottom right hand side of the picture. 

He's been an MP too long. No one should be in the same job for that length of time, no matter how good they are.

Today I also found this on Facebook - again. It reappears every few months sometimes with a small change of words. The inclusion of the word 'immigration' this time makes me wonder if Ukip or Britain First had a hand in it this time:

I'm not sure what period in history this is about. Maybe 60, maybe 80 years ago? Maybe it never existed at all. One thing I'm sure of: being able to batter people either in a police station or a school or at home didn't make for a happier, safer society. I don't think the young people of the UK are 'selfish disrespectful little assholes.' We have our share of assholes, sure, but look at the outpouring of sympathy in the West of Scotland on the murder of Karen Buckley; the fact that the UK raised 19 million quid in three days for Nepal after the earthquake; how that poor wee unknown baby was laid to rest in Lothian; the vast amounts of food raised for food banks by many groups in our communities: churches, football fans, political activists, businesses. 

We still have some of the old violence in our society in the way we tolerate wife-beating and child abuse (both physical and sexual), but these are being tackled. And we still blame people who are victims of rape for bringing it on themselves. We have to work on this. But do I want us to go back to a time when contraception was refused to single women, abortion was illegal, hanging was legal, homosexuality was illegal and homosexuals refused any kind of equality?

Maybe the answer is to avoid the extremes of both the Dennis Skinners and the hang 'em/flog 'em brigade. Neither group represents most of us. We need to work on building a kinder society. And yes, contrary to what Margaret Thatcher thought, there is such a thing as society. It's called us. And we don't need to be battered into doing the right thing.