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Am I a Misogynistic Dinosaur?

This blog has arisen out of a number of recent events. It all began with International Women's Day on 8th March 2010. That prompted me to tweet @jiminthemorning (Jim Hawkins) on Radio Shropshire. Jim invites extensive involvement from his listeners. After an off-air exchange with Jim, I was interviewed on his programme. This led to some lively debate on issues to do with women - and men for that matter and to the title of the blog being given to me by one listener! The term "misogynistic dinosaur is a quotation from the film Casino Royale, where M is describing James Bond). Later that evening, I watched "Women" on BBC 4 and commented on Twitter. All of that leaves much unfinished business and the result is this piece. My intentions are to review the feminist movement, argue my views and ask you to consider where you stand.

Historically, women were the property of men. They had nothing to call their own. Their views were given no consideration and their roles in society were restricted to domestic duties, including the upbringing of children. That has only changed, in essence, in the last half century. The world in which I grew up, in the 1960s was very different from today. In truth, most of us had nothing and in that context women's issues did not seem so out of place. The revolution which has taken place has encompassed much more than the women's lib issues which normally get highlighted in a discussion of this kind. Just about everything has changed. Nevertheless, some men, at least, had more than nothing and probably all had more hope for their future. If we all felt ourselves to be on the scrapheap then women were at the bottom of it. Let us remember, also, however, that women did have a historical contribution long before the Women's Movement began.

That aside, let me list the campaign issues of the Women's Movement: reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, voting rights, sexual harassment, sexual violence, sexual oppression. I guess we all agree with them, every one of them. In fairness to the present day International Women's Day it is specific rights around the world which are the focus of their attention, very much in keeping with this list. So why do I have a problem?

Let me now introduce a few quotations from prominent feminists:

"All men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes" Marilyn French, author of "The Women's Room", 1977, the best selling feminist book ever.

"Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" Susan Brownmiller "Against Our Will. Men, Women and Rape" 1975

"If it were admitted that the family is maintained at the expense of women capitalism would have to devise some other way of getting the work done." Ann Oakley "Women" BBC 4

"All women are lesbians except those who don't know it naturally. They are but don't know it yet. I am a woman and therefore a lesbian." Unattributed "Women" BBC 4

 "Till all women are lesbians there will be no true political revolution." Unattributed "Women" BBC 4

"We're at the end of a period of masculine rule, quite harsh at times... egalitarian rule..." Unattributed "Women" BBC 4

"Relationship between the sexes is a political relationship, therefore, we are in politics." Kate Millett "Sexual Politics", 1970

"There is no question that men are predatory on women - women are prey." Marilyn French "Women" BBC 4

It has been put to me that these are just extremist views of a left wing element in the Women's Movement. Well, I'm afraid that is simply not the case. I was there, growing up when all of this happened. I experienced appalling hostility from women in the movement first hand. I knew their views intimately.

They were a single sex organisation opposed to male supremacy - that's it in a nutshell and that much cannot be argued as untrue. I pleaded many times that there were men sympathetic to their objectives as per my first list and that we would help them fight the ruling class tyranny. No one ever took me up on it. The movement tried to forget men and create a lesbian society with no leaders in it. They were pretty well anarchists. They were certainly as sexist as any male organisation. So that's my first objection. Feminists should have realised that there were males on their side and worked together. They did not and could not.

My second problem concerns their view of the family. A sociologist, Ann Oakley, best described the feminist view. She was the first to put forward the idea that gender is not determined by biology and although it seems a little quaint today, because we have moved on even further, at the time it was revolutionary stuff. Today, we use profiling more or less exclusively to describe people, regardless of their biology and we are much freer in our interests and roles. The focus then, however, was on freeing women from domestic drudgery. Ann states that the role of the housewife must be abolished, the family must be abolished and gender roles must be abolished. She admitted on the television programme that they did not, at the time, think through how else they would bring up children. So here's my second objection. I believe that the family is the best way of bringing up children, one man, one woman and the children. I am not, in this context, going to say why I hold that belief but I might in another blog, another time. I also believe that most people aspire to a single, life long relationship with a partner and an unbroken family life. I accept that there are very important exceptions to that but I want to emphasise here that the feminists excluded the family at the expense of all those other considerations. I think we should start with the benchmark.

My third issue concerns power. As a Strategic Family Therapist power is my base currency in human relationships. It is fundamental in all human systems, be they a couple, a family, a workplace, a corporation or an entire society. When I look at human relationships I see the "rape" of which the feminists speak but I don't see what they see. I see it everywhere and in many ways. I never see it exclusively in a whole sector of society. That would be prejudice, sexism, racism or whatever. The feminists rightly saw the abuse of power but wrongly understood it. They attacked an entire species - man - and that may make them the most sexist organisation in history.

It's a bit like the French Revolution. You start off agreeing with the objectives because you see the injustices that have taken place - but then the heads start to roll. Within the movement women remained egalitarian. There were never any leaders. In society, it's a different story. We do now have women in roles at all levels, not enough, perhaps, but it's certainly not a novelty. We still have families and the roles of the adults are shared much more and so is the distribution of power. I suppose the unfilled woman, trapped in a lonely house all day long with nothing to do but housework was, in reality, the nightmare of the 1950s.

So, to return to my original objectives. Am I a misogynistic dinosaur? Are you a feminist? Or, like me, do you applaud the civil rights achieved by the Women's Movement but disagree with their wider vision of society and their take on male and female relationships?

Tags: misogynist dinosaur International Womens Day Jim Hawkins Radio Shropshire women twitter feminist men society 1960s scrapheap campaign rights reproduction domestic violence maternity leave equal pay voting sexual harassment sexual violence sexual oppression rape Marilyn French Susan Brownmiller BBC4 family capitalism work lesbian revolution egalitarian predatory single sex Ann Oakley gender roles profiling power human systems sexism racism civil rights

IPhone Sleep Cycle App - A Clinician's Review

I am writing this review because of feedback from my Twitter friends. Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of interest in all things iphone and I believe the best seller in many countries, if not the world, is an app called "Sleep Cycle". The picture you see here is a readout of the app, kindly provided by a colleague, Lewis King, who was one of the people who tried out the app and then wondered what it meant. At first sight a graph such as this, with a lot of spikes in it might seem alarming, especially if you have had a restless night. This is, in fact, a near "normal" reading, as I will explain presently. 

The app retails for $.99(US) or 59p (UK) and does exactly what it is meant to do which is to measure your sleep cycle. It also wakes you up within a half hour window with music and the timing of that is meant to be the moment when you are approaching an awake state. It is produced by Lexware Labs. The idea is not new but in the past such machines have been considerably more expensive and it is very much to the credit of the software developers that they are prepared to offer this app at such a price. The principle is very simple. The iphone has an "accelerometer" which is able to detect the extent of your movement in bed. Since different phases of sleep are characterised by different amounts of movement it is possible to map the one to the other, the result being what you see on the screen. From what I have seen of it so far I have to say it works and if I were still in clinical practice I would have a few uses for it without hesitation.

The obvious problem which arises is that people don't actually know much about sleep so they are at a loss to interpret the data. In fairness to Lexware Labs their website does explain what you get for your bucks and what various graphs mean. So at least if you have had a bad night's sleep and you see a graph that suggests you have had a bad night's sleep you know you have had a bad night's sleep. Perhaps that is just a little bit too cynical. After all we live in an age of freely available medical information and much of that, I don't doubt, will be misunderstood. That is not an argument for restricting information. Anyone who really wants to know can read more about the subject and, hopefully, discover something useful about themselves.

 So where do we go from here? Much as I would love to write a detailed scientific paper on sleep and specific sleep problems, I am the first to acknowledge that all that information is available already on the web. The scientifically minded would do well to look at the wikipedia (I kid you not) entry on sleep and for those who like a straight forward approach the Royal College of Psychiatrists have done a brilliant job of writing the whole thing up to make it look easy, in their best bedside manner.

The diagram you see here is borrowed from the wikipedia entry and shows a textbook "normal" night's sleep. I put the word "normal" in speech marks because many people who are otherwise symptom free do not have this pattern and might, therefore, be considered "normal" and because, although there have been significant advances in the field, there is still much we still don't understand so, ever cautious, I remain unsure about what is "normal". Anyway, the pattern is of a series of 90 minute cycles starting at the far left in a state of consciousness and progressing into deep sleep and then rising into a lighter phase of sleep. The pattern is repeated throughout the night with the deep sleep phases diminishing as the night wears on. Deep sleep is dreamless sleep but the shallower parts are what are called REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep when dreaming occurs. These are marked in red on the diagram. There are also around 3 periods of only a few minutes duration when we wake up but often we don't remember this. If we do we may think it lasts a long time when, in fact, it is only a few minutes.

If you compare the diagram above with the iphone one you will notice that the progression toward lighter sleep is less obvious in the iphone diagram. I think the correct interpretation of the iphone diagram is that Lewis was very tired at the start of the night and fell into a deep sleep very quickly. At the end of the first cycle his body attempted to bring him into REM sleep but failed because he was still very tired so off he went into more deep sleep. A second attempt to bring him into REM sleep was mounted by his body but this also failed and more deep sleep followed. I would argue that this is a good example of his body knowing what is best for him and giving it to him. The next 2 phases see a return to REM spikes suggesting he can, now, cope with lighter sleep. The only difference here from a "normal" pattern is that the deep sleep end of each of these 2 cycles is just as deep as at the start of the night. The final section is a fair compromise with a total absence of very deep sleep and, curiously, of REM sleep also. The graph finishes before we can see the final stage but we can assume that if he remained at this mid position of sleep he would have woken up feeling quite dazed but if he was able to progress nearer to a waking state he would have awoken feeling relaxed.

I chose this particular example because I suspect that many of us are a lot like Lewis - overstimulated. We cram as much as possible into the day, whatever our interests happen to be. Even people who do nothing more than watch television most evenings are still stuffing as much stimulation into themselves as they can muster. The trouble is many of us don't know when to stop and the result is that we don't sleep in a still, dark room and we don't spend as long as our bodies need recovering. We are a sleep deprived culture in a light polluted world. It is reckoned that around one third of us have some kind of sleep disorder and yet we don't give this anything like the prominence it deserves. Perhaps when we know more precisely how sleep repairs the body and what happens when it all goes wrong our attitude will change. We don't have figures to show how many people developed cancer or diabetes or heart problems because they didn't get enough sleep. One day we will.

So, is Lewis normal? He's certainly typical. What of his graphs? Do they show a body coping with what he demands of it or has he got some terrible ailment that makes him so often tired out of his skin? Medically and psychologically I have to say he is fine. Does the iphone app help him? Yes, it shows how much of a strain he puts on himself. It also indicates that he needs a bit more sleep. He might do wonders for himself by aiming for 7 and a half hours a night and I guess he didn't know that before.

I suppose for people who have a more worrying condition they might be alerted to it and be that much more inclined to go and see their GP. Many just won't make a good diagnosis but then, many think they can diagnose using common sense whereas, in truth, it is the hardest thing we do.

Tags: iphone sleep cycle review twitter app Lewis King Lexware Labs sleep wikipedia Royal College of Psychiatrists REM overstimulated diagnosis

The Return of Wally

http://www.wallymusic.co.uk/index.php?page=music

Many, many years ago a group was formed in the stunningly beautiful Yorkshire dales town of Harrogate. They were called Wally. For my sins I have never heard of them - and me a proud Yorkshireman. How I missed them when they were active at the time when I was single and in my prime, I don't know. I refer, of course, to the 1970s. Anyway, the good news is that they have reformed and are due to perform again, appropriately, in their native Harrogate on Saturday 17th April 2010. This is not their first concert since reforming and they even have a CD out, called Montpellier. However, it is their homecoming performance. Just to make all things right, the Royal Hall, Harrogate, where the performanace takes place, has been completely refurbished and looks totally stunning in all its historic glory.



Tags: Wally band Yorkshire Harrogate concert gig CD Royal Hall Montpellier historic 1970s

Pierre

PS If you tweet @peterpastry you will find an enthusiastic follower (and a good cook).