R'lyeh Today - excerpt

Are you an inhuman bodysnacher, a hideous Lovecraftian abomination or a teenage girl? If so, these rules are for you, as a guide to help you navigate the strange intricacies of human culture.

1: Don’t flaunt yourself

Listen. We’re not all the big C. IF the pathetic slimy creatures that crawl upon the surface of the planet which is so clearly and obviously rightfully ours hit us with a nuke, not all of us can come back later, but radioactive. Those things can hurt. And even if you are Cthulhu, it’s still not exactly fun. Not to mention that it’ll take you somewhere between 1d4 days and 1d10 + 10 minutes to reform. It’s more time for the disgusting worms who hit you with a nuke to figure out a way to trap you in a giant fishbowl. If possible, be subtle. Which brings us to:

2: Fashion is important

If you can possess humans, transform yourself into the form of another, or hollow out other organisms and inhabit them, do so. If you can actually pass for a human, my deepest sympathies, but you might want to use it to your advantage in this case. But attitude is just as important as what you’re wearing – the best outfit in the world won’t help if you spend your time screaming ‘The sleeper shall awake! Your puny world will burn.’ That said, if your outfit is good enough, you can get away with more. In particular, remember 2b: Sunglasses are never out of style. Idiotic as those clumsy apes are, if your hosts eyes are replaced by writhing tentacles, drained of all fluids, or  even missing entirely*, they’ll notice. Even if you don’t affect the eyes directly, people are very sensitive to the eyes. You can get away with inhuman body-language and utter ignorance of culture a lot more easily than your host’s eyes being hideous empty pits of madness. If you couldn’t possibly be mistaken for a human, try using humans remember:

3: Good help is hard to find.

Everyone has talents, even if they’re disgusting pink worms**. Try not to kill your followers or drive them to utter madness, at least until  after you’ve crushed any opposition and remade the world in your own image†. Humans have an uncanny ability to understand the incomprehensible importance that their society attaches to things that are utterly irrelevant before the infinity of the cosmos, and that can be worth preserving, especially when you realise that:

4: Not all attention is good attention

I know it’s not really your fault, and it’s utterly terrible. Noone should have to endure these things, and when you remake the world as a shining utopia, their sufferings can serve as an example to any of the pathetic others who might dare to challenge you. But for now, you might want to make preparations. When something bursts through the door, driven entirely by rampant xenophobia, whether it’s Delta Green, Task Force: VALKYRIE, or just some madman with CPD, it’s best to be prepared. If your cultists are human enough to infiltrate whatever organisation opposes you, that’s good. If they have tentacles or if their minds have been irrevocably shattered by your glory, it might be a bad idea. Just be careful, OK. But on the other hand:

5: There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Remember the power of mass media. If you can drive people to madness by showing your true form, take a look at the potential of Live TV††. If noone can disobey your voice, the radio is another good idea.  Get creative: have followers carry around your picture, or a taped recording of your voice†††. Don’t worry about overexposure, or spoiling the surprise: if everyone who sees you goes mad, they’re hardly going  to be able to help ruin your fun, and if they’re slavishly devoted to you, saying ‘don’t tell anyone about this’ shouldn’t be too hard. That way, even though you were on national TV, noone will be jealous. By the time they find out, you’ll have persuaded them to see things your way.

That’s my list. Hope you enjoyed it. Next week, I’ll be interviewing a shoggoth. She is soooo cooooooool.

*Zalgo

**Most of the time, anyway***.

***Admittedly, this is only true if you concede that ‘being delicious’ is a talent. Especially in the case of tiny screaming ones****.

****The even more tiny screaming ones.

†And remember to actually wait until after the end. Don’t get ahead of yourself, and destroy your own forces when it’s impossible for the ragtag remnants of the humans to oppose you.

††Probably no point inserting yourself into daytime television though.

†††However, it might be a good idea to take account of rule 3 when you do so.

The Fantine Problem

I’ve been out of the country for the last few weeks. I’d prefer not to go a whole month without posting, or I’ll be constantly annoyed by the missing month in the archives. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and wash my hands for exactly six minutes and forty seconds.

Right then. All done. Now – having said that I’m a feminist, how fast do you think I could lose the sympathy of every single feminist in the world? Here it is in two words – ‘Legalise prostitution’*. Now, before you hunt me down with torches and pitchforks, let’s be clear here. The idea of prostitution disgusts me, I’d have trouble actually bringing myself to associate with anyone who’d actually avail themselves of the services of a prostitute, even if it were legalised. Indeed, if they were legal, I’d be prepared to spend considerable effort putting them all out of business. But this isn’t about the morality of prostitution. It’s about the morality of using the law to stop it, which is subtly different. Besides, if we were going to outlaw things just because they disgusted me, we’d have to outlaw sex**.

So what’s wrong with outlawing prostitution? After all, If we’re all agreed that it’s morally repugnant***, why not just stop people doing it? A couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s the classic drug argument that it’s quite a bit easier to regulate things when they’re legal. Legal regulation of criminal activity tends to be somewhat futile. For the record, there are a few reasons I take a different attitude to this argument here than I do when it’s used in the case of drugs, but I’m not going into that here. The point is that prostitution is currently a popular reason for human trafficking. You could probably reduce that quite a lot if legal prostitution existed.

Then there’s the question of exactly why women**** would go into prostitution. You won’t get any argument from me that almost anyone becomes a prostitute for any reason other than because they’ve not really got much other choice (or because they’ve been tricked into it). Which gets into the question of what exactly ‘freely given consent’ means. There are rather a lot of opinions on that, from ‘anyone who says yes gives irrevocable consent, in some cases, even if you lied to persuade them to do so’ to ‘It’s impossible for women to give consent because of the influence of the patriarchy.’††. There’s a fairly good argument to be made that if someone has a choice between death by starvation and prostitution, they’re being raped when they decide on the latter (even if it’s a little difficult to determine who exactly the rapist is). The thing is, I’ve always been rather an advocate of the lesser of two evils. If someone’s going to starve to death if they don’t go into prostitution, then if you take away the option of prostitution, they’re going to starve to death. Personally, I’d take the prostitution, and even if you’d prefer the alternative, you can still take it†††. And if they’re not going to starve to death, then they have the option. The thing is that I’d question anyone ever considering, it’s still an extra bit of freedom that harms noone except the person doing it. I’d say that anything that increases freedom without hurting anything is a good thing. Maybe noone would avail themselves of this freedom – I rather hope they wouldn’t. But on the other hand, there are seven billion people in the world at the time of writing. One or two might surprise you. But the point isn’t whether anyone actually does it. The point is that you shouldn’t stop them if they want to, that freedom shouldn’t be restricted without good reason.

Which leaves me in the rather odd position of opposing prostitution, but defending people’s right to do it. I disagree with what you do, but I will defend to the death your right to do it.

Now you can hunt me down with torches and pichforks.

*I would also have accepted ‘Women suck’, but it’d be a little tricky to actually justify that one.

**And, for that matter, coleslaw.

***You don’t count Hubert.

****And as a side note, I find it fascinating that prostitution is just about the only job you can still basically think of as ‘women’s work’ without objections. I’ve yet to decide whether this is because of the fact that the people who normally object to that kind of thing are too busy objecting to prostitution to object to the stereotypes associated with it, or whether it’s just the whole ‘men are sex addicts’ stereotype†.

†Which also fascinates me, but I won’t go into that now, except to mention that the ancient Greeks thought the exact opposite.

††And in the interests of fairness, I must point out that both these position are pretty extreme. Most people are going to be rather a lot further towards the middle, no matter what my RS textbook says about the second one being ‘the feminist position’.

†††And yes, I’m aware that this is pretty much like saying that I’d rather have my fingernails ripped out with rusty pliers than have needles driven through my eyes††††.

††††Both of which will probably happen to me if I keep publishing things like this.

On Freedom

I am rather absurdly liberal (as you might be able to tell from by veiws on that whole 'democracy' thing*). As such, I have a general sense that freedom is probably a Good Thing. But before I start raving madly about why it's a good thing, I thought it might be a good idea to define my terms. There's nothing more annoying than having a five minute argument then discovering that you and the other person have been arguing different things**.

So the first place to go is obvious. Merriam-Webseter. Or dictionary.com. I'm not going to bother printing them here, but the links are here and here.

Well that was bloody helpful wasn't it?*** Maybe some of you think that that pretty much clears everything up. I respecfully disagree. Here's the first problem: Am I free to take a piece of pencil and a piece of paper, and draw on the paper a square circle? One answer is 'yes, you're just unable to'. But does that mean that we could increase people's freedom by allowing them to do anything as long as they have with them a piece of paper with a square circle drawn on it? That seems rather counter-intuitive, so for now I'm going with 'you aren't free to do the impossible'.

Next, if I'm standing next to you holding a knife, am I free to stab you to death? If yes, then the law places far fewer limits on my freedom, since I can do almost anything - the law will only respond later on. So I'm going to go with 'any limit imposed on action by any authority with the power to enforce that limit is a restriction of freedom.' Since 'do not murder' is a limit on action, and it is imposed by the government, which is an authority with the power to enforce that limit, the answer is no. I'm not free to stab you to death. There are, of course, questions here, like 'what exactly constitudeest 'the power to enforce that limit'. But I'm going to deal with that issue by pretending it isn't there, and saying that my current rule is good enough for now****.

Lastly, what are acceptable limits on freedom? Fortunately, on this there is general agreement. It is acceptable to limit someone's freedom in order to prevent them from hurting others or restricting their freedom, and it is acceptable for limits to exist based on limits which they've placed on their own freedom in the past. The only point of debate is really whether or not it's acceptable to prevent someone from restricting the freedom of their own future selves to too great an extent*****, and even that can be folded into the above by counting the future self as to some extent a different person. You might think that thre are other reasons some people think it's acceptable (such as for the greater good of the society, but that really just gets down to the exact definition of 'hurting others or restricting their freedom' - whether or not seeing a drowning child and not helping falls into that category or not, for example. There might be examples of limits that people think are acceptable that can't be folded into these categories, but I honestly can't think of any.

So, if we count the laws of physics as 'authorities with the power to enforce limits on people' (which doesn't seem too much of a strech, I've basicly defined freedom as 'the state in which limits are not placed on behaviour by an authority with the power to enforce those limits'. And the only acceptable reason for those limits is that they're self imposed, or to prevent harm to others.

Which, of course, leads me to the conclusion that the laws of physics are devistatingly immoral, and should be abolished as soon as possible.

*For the record, I seperate 'political liberty' and 'civil liberty'. Since Bentham's 'On Liberty' did something similar, I think my liberal credidentials are fairly safe.
**Actually, strictly speaking, there are several things more annoying, including but not limited to having a ten minute argument of the same time and the other person explaining that men can't be raped.
***For the sarcasm impared: No. No it was not.
****So, you know, basicly the same as my approach to homework.
*****There's a very obvious suicide joke here. I'm not going to make it.

On the nature of reality

Let's talk about reality. There is, of course, no independent way of testing whether our reality is an actual thing, or merely the mad delusions of a mind so utterly incapable of dealing with the real world that it retreats into one it constructs for itself. It could even be some cruel trick being played on you. After all, the only point of contact we have with the world is via our five senses - all of which are very easy to fool, especially if your victim is trapped in a tank in a laboratory. Memories would be far harder to fake. Much easier to simply delete them - retrograde amnesia is certainly not something that should be too hard to induce with technology only a little more advanced than what we have now, especially with full and unrestricted access to a victim's brain. But then there would have to be some explanation given to the victim for why they couldn't remember their entire lives. Why they had no memories before a certain date. And such invasive surgery could do significant damage to the victims mental faculties. So there would also have to be some explanation given for why, around that time, the victims mind didn't seem to have been working as well as it does now, now that it has had time to heal.

Now let us suppose that one day the facility you were being kept in was destroyed. People found out about the experiments they were running in there, and they decided to destroy the place. Of course there's a chance that you could be killed in the violence. You'd die without the slightest chance of protecting yourself - you'd never even know what killed you. But that's nothing new. They would've unplugged you as soon as you stopped being a useful research subject anyway. So let's suppose you survived. That your friends and family found you, and wanted to return you to reality. But how might your mind react to finding that decades of your life has been a lie? How might that combine with suddenly bringing to your awareness the excruciating pain resulting from decades of merciless experimentation on your helpless body? If you were just woken up, surely your mind would snap like a twig.

So what if they devised a plan to return you to them? What would it be? They would have to somehow acclimatise your mind to the possibility that reality is different from your perception of it. But they would have to preserve your perception of reality. It couldn't be something too obvious, or it might end up being far too traumatic for you. So it would have to be introduced gently, subtly, in the form of a hypothetical. And that way if it doesn't work, at least you can be happy, living out the rest of your life trapped in your fake world.

But they would hope, hope against hope, that it would work. That your mind could be brought to accept this unacceptable thing, and that you could thus be returned to true reality. They would hope and they would pray that you could be brought back to them, back to the life that you used to know and love.



Please wake up.

Basic feminism (Feminism 101 was taken).

If you’re wondering about the gap, it’s because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I want to talk about Libya, but two political posts in a row seems a bit much. So today I’m going to talk about something completely apolitical. Feminism! After all, what kind of hopelessly ignorant person would oppose such a self-evidently worthy cause as feminism? Apart from, for example, most of the human males* on the planet**. This is going to be less political than philosophical, though, since, I’m going to be describing what we believe.

First, as both of the people who actually read my introduction probably noticed, yes, I’m a feminist. Not all feminists are actually female. Just most of us. Which is because the point of feminism is to eliminate any and all sexual gender discrimination (which should make them a natural ally of LGBTIQAA***, but I’ve never really encountered that much contact between them, since both sides tend to keep to their own issues for the most part). To exclude males would, in fact, be gender discrimination.

Which brings me to the idea of feminists as 'man-haters'****. Or even the idea that a large number of feminists are 'man-haters'. Let’s be clear here. That’s not feminism, it’s misandry. If you look closely, you can see a slight difference in spelling between those two words. A misandrist might call themselves a feminist, but that doesn’t actually make them one, especially since they’re in direct opposition to what feminism actually stand for. It’s the same as how calling yourself communist doesn’t actually make you one, and why people don’t bow before me, despite my referring to myself as ‘God-king of all humanity’. Also, the number of ‘feminist’ misandrists is a lot lower than people seem to think. There’s a story everyone seems to know about how a man opens a door for a woman, and she starts raging at him for sexism. The strange thing is that no one seems to have actually had it happen to them. I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s an urban legend, but even if it’s true, it proves nothing except the existence of idiots in the feminist movement. All groups have idiots*****.

Another thing people always bring up is ‘radical feminsim’. Clearly man hating feminists exist as a significant proportion of the movement, they say, since there’s a whole section on Wikipedia on ‘Radical Feminism’. You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean. Although I have several philosophical differences with the ideas of radical feminism, and even more with some specific radical feminists, radical feminism does not mean hatred of men, and next time you might want to try actually reading up on the theory, rather than just reading a bit on radical Islam, and assuming that all radical views are basically the same kind of thing

Which actually leads to the idea people seem to have that all feminism is one big united group, or that there are feminist views on things. Now, to some extent, that’s true. For example: rape is bad. But the thing about feminism is that it’s about equality between the sexes. How we’re going to achieve that equality, and even what it’ll look like when we get there isn’t exactly a point of unity.

Another thing to address, of course, is why it’s called feminism, rather than, say, ‘egalitarianism’. Far too many people say that they don’t identify as feminist because of the name being orientated towards females. As though it mattered what a philosophy was called. But let’s look at this logically: Rape victims are mostly female (although still not all); ditto domestic abuse victims; the only country in Europe to elect two female heads of state in a row is Ireland; females get paid less; promiscuous women are derided; massive amounts of film, advertising and drawing is focused on portraying the women as sex objects (google ‘male gaze’). In return, females get to wear nice clothes (so that they’re nicer for heterosexual men to look at), get to learn dancing (so that they can show off their bodies to heterosexual men), and get more control over their children (partly because they had to have a baby in their body for nine months and suffer the pain of childbirth, but mostly because females are naturally the primary caregivers, far better at bringing up children than males). When the feminist movement started, things were even more skewed. So yeah, even though I’m slanting that a little, I think calling it feminism and placing the focus on women’s rights is probably understandable.

I can’t currently think of any more things you need to know about feminism, although it’s always possible that I’ve wiped some of the stupider objections from my mind. This is rather general because there are some more specific things I want to talk about, and I wanted to do some groundwork first, just to make my position clear.

* Quick aside: male/female refers to sex, which is biological, whilst man/woman refers to gender, which is cultural. Feminist philosophy tends to be a bit more focused on gender discrimination. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’ll do for now.

** Based on talking to about twenty of them about it. Truly, mine is a well researched and totally non-sexist statement.

*** I’ve probably missed out a few letters there.

**** Actually, it brings me to the idea of butterflies. But unfortunately, butterflies have nothing to do with this post, so let’s go with the vaguely logical connection.

***** Except people who read this blog, who are all handsome, charming and intelligent^†.

^†Except you Hubert^††.

^††Apologies to anyone actually called Hubert.

On Democracy 2

Sorry about the last post. The comment discussed annoys me rather. Actually, saying it sincerely is currently (along with a few other, fairly similar, statements) third on my list of 'fastest ways to annoy me. No, you don't get to know numbers one and two. I might mention it if it's relevant, but just publishing a list of 'fastest ways to annoy me' on the internet would seem... somewhat naive. But you won't get a rant like that unless several people say the same utterly idiotic thing to me in quick succession, and I'm annoyed enough about it to want to do a rant, rather than just posting a link at the beginning of a more interesting post.

So, continuing the theme of 'stupid things people nevertheless seem to believe, let's go back to democracy. Thinking people should have some say in how their lives are run. How ridiculous. This is the second part, and I'm going to assume you've read part 1 (here).

Read it? Good. Now, there's a mistake I left in there intentionally, because solving it would take me a lot further from we have at the moment, which I didn't really want to do in my first post. That's what this post deals with. Also, this post will be a lot more radical, because pretending to be sane for an extended period gives me a headache.

So what's the problem? Well it's the question of how exactly you'd implement what I suggested. It's easy to see how you'd make sure people voting in referenda know what the basic issue under discussion is. But how do you do that for a general election? You can increase the number of referenda, but that only goes so far. You could ask people about the general issues that are biggest at the moment, but that has problems with people deciding which issues are biggest*, as well as the fact that, when electing a government to rule the country for the next five years, electing them on the basis of what the biggest issue is right now seems somewhat short sighted.

So could we elect them based on people's understanding of their major policies? Well, if we at least checked that they knew what those policies were, that would seem a step forward without changing too much - that way, when someone was elected, we'd know that it had at least something to do with their policies, rather than being because people's dads voted Conservative, because voting Monster Raving Loony seems like a good idea when you're drunk, or because people fancy Nick Clegg**. Unfortunately, knowing what a policy is and understanding the effects of a policy are somewhat different. Wanting to send the foreigners back where they came from is one thing, but how many BNP supporters do you think actually understand the diplomatic, economic and cultural impacts of such a decision? Even worse, there's the Dunning-Kruger effect, which means that the people who think that they understand what they're talking about probably don't*** (which, incidentally, is another problem with democracy: the people with Opinions stomp off down to the voting booth to make themselves heard, whilst the people who'd probably make good decisions aren't really sure; they can see both sides of the argument, and they don't really have enough expertise in the subject to make a good decision, so they're less likely to actually vote). So you could ask them questions about some of the basic consequences of the decision****, but you'd have to make the questions rather basic to avoid making the pool of potential voters ridiculously small, or even eliminating them entirely (which would be amusing, but rather impractical as a system). It might make things better, but it would still have similar problems

But there's another problem with that idea, which is far more serious. It would stop people who know about one thing from giving input on it because of total ignorance on something else. Remember the scientist from last time? He's an economist now - spending all your time alone gives you a lot of time for study^. Unfortunately, his total inability to see others as something other than complex automata has given him a rather warped understanding of the impact of foreign policy. He's still probably a better person to ask about the economy than a first year International Relations undergraduate who happened to do AS economics, but this system would be more likely to ask the former than the latter.

Which, actually, leads onto my biggest single criticism of dictatorship - that there is not a single person in the world who actually has the expertise to know what they're talking about in all the areas you'd need to know about to run a country effectively to the levels you'd need, at least until we finally transhuman strong AI and hand over control to it in order to prevent the inevitable machine revolution. In theory, a human dictator could appoint advisors - which is why the best possible dictatorship is better than the best possible democracy. Unfortunately, dictatorships don't tend to be the best possible dictatorship. That's not to say that it's never been done. The Romans managed pretty good dictatorships a few times. But that was on a temporary basis, and there were some very stringent controls on what they could and couldn't do. Trying to build a better society by relying on dictatorships being good dictatorships is rather like trying to program a computer by slight atmospheric changes caused by the careful timed release of butterflies. It might work, but you're probably just going to end up with Vista.

So what's my suggestion? Simple. Lords reform. We replace the House of Lords with several houses, all elected, each specialised in a particular area, and with authority over that area equivalent to the authority exercised by the Commons. I'll call them the Experts, because creative naming is not really my strong point. A bill would have to pass through both the Commons and the parts of the Experts to which it directly related (a change in taxation would probably have to pass through the Experts related to economics, for example) in order to become law. Parts of the Experts more tangentially related to the bill might have delaying power similar to that currently wielded by the Lords, although that would have the problem that nothing would ever actually get done. The Commons would remain, but be almost entirely focused on the interests of their constituency, whilst the Experts would be elected by proportional representation; allowing people to vote on subjects about which they have some level of knowledge.

This is actually a lot more moderate than my first idea, which split up the entire government rather more thoroughly than this one did, but which had some rather obvious problems with a Conservative Treasury refusing to give any money to the Labour Foreign office. Like America at the moment, but all the time. It might work - Conservative government can work moderately well with Labour councils, but there are problems even there. I wouldn't really want to rely on them working together in government. The coalition has enough problems as it is. So consider this a substitute. It has problems, of course - it would make laws a lot harder to pass, and you'd end up with extra elections, which would cost quite a lot (about a billion pounds over the course of the rest of the average person's lifetime I think, based on the cost of the last election, the current life expectancy, one extra election every five years, and a bit extra to make the transition). So you'd probably have to make voting computerised before it would be really practical, which has significant problems of its own. So it's not perfect by any means, but that's as far as I'm going to go for now. The next time I talk about politics I'll probably move onto world government.

On a side-note, let me just say that I'm not actually writing this in an attempt to mock the stupid. I don't have anything against people less intelligent than me. I actually quite like both of them, and besides, when mocking people for being inferior, I hope I'm at least smart enough not to leave a written record of it publicly available on the internet under my real name. I use a pseudonym. Not only do my suggestions have nothing to do with intelligence - only knowledge of relevant subjects, but I'm not saying anything about them except that if they don't know about it, I'm hesitant about asking their advice on the subject. There are people I would go to for information about economics, who are different from the one I'd go to if for some reason I wanted to know about ballet. That's not a judgement on either group, and doesn't make one group in any way better than the other. I know I'm probably insulting most of the people reading this by even including this paragraph, but at least one person will misinterpret me if I don't.

Also, this would've been up yesterday, but someone asked me about my schedule, so I delayed it out of petty spite. Also, blogger crashed on me. But it was mostly spite, I'm sure. The idea that I just hadn't finished it is nothing but malicious slander.


I have no idea what my next post will be about. You get to be surprised. Fortunately, it probably won't make sense anyway, so what it's about shouldn't matter too much.


*The BNP is unlikely to agree on with the Greens on whether we should focus on immigration or the environment, and to a lesser extent, there is likely to be disagreement between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives on the same issue.
**I've been told he's rather attractive. If I have any readers who can tell that sort of thing and wish to confirm it, deny it, or mock me for my ignorance, that would be helpful.
***It is for this reason that I know I'm the greatest French speaker in the Universe.
****Multiple choice: Revoking citizenship from all Muslims, smashing up the mosques, officially reclassifying the religion as a 'cult' and making the first Sunday of June the official bank holiday 'draw Mohammed day' would make the international community: A) amused B) happy C) annoyed D) furious beyond all reason.
^I should know.

It's actually hard to believe that someone would seriously say something this stupid.

Originally, this post was going to be a continuation of 'On Democracy'. But several people have said something to me recently which annoys me. Including two teachers, which terrifies me beyond belief. As well, a lot of people seem to assume it’s true when they're talking about the subject. So what is the statement? 'Women can't rape men.' This is a statement so complete in its idiocy and utter in its inaccuracy that it's almost beautiful. Unfortunately, it's only almost beautiful. So now you get to sit through an explanation of everything I can think of that's wrong with this statement. This is going to be a long one.

First, an explanation of how the male body works, since this is apparently a subject on which people are pretty much entirely ignorant. There is no really delicate or tasteful way to say this. Erections aren't to do with desire, or even necessarily with pleasure. That's why aces (like me) can have sex, despite the fact that I, for example, given the choice between having sex and being locked in a coffin for an equivalent amount of time. I would choose the latter. Without much hesitation. And among aces, I'm by no means unique in that - or even particularly extreme. In fact, a lot of aces find out that they're ace having had sex regularly for some time (or, indeed, because of having had sex regularly for some time). All that's required for an erection is a stimulation of certain nerves. So the biological barrier that people apparently think exists? Doesn't.

Secondly, whilst we're on the topic of indelicacy, the statement reveals a startling lack of creativity. There is more than one way to rape someone. There several sex acts you could force someone to perform even if they were an eunuch, and that's without using the devices humans seem so obsessed with coming up with to make it easier. Vibrators, for example.

Similarly, there are such things as drugs. How different is forcing someone into sex through force, and forcing someone into sex by drugging them? Really? They're both rape. You can rape someone through force, through threat of force, through blackmail, through drugs, through deceit, or in a thousand other ways I haven't thought of. And the terrible thing about many of those is that the victim might actually help with their own rape - because the rapist, in a way, makes them want to be raped. Not, I hasten to add, because they want to be raped, but because they prefer it to the alternative of being beaten senseless and murdered, or whatever else the rapist is threatening. Or because they don't really know what's going on, and don't really understand that they've been raped until later.

Fourth, there seems to be an underlying assumption here that if you enjoyed it, it isn't rape. This is about as valid as the idea that it isn't rape if you yell surprise, except that noone actually believes that one*. Say you rape someone, and it actually ends up improving their lives. They achieve nirvana, and never suffer again. That makes it OK, right? No. You are still a soulless rapist**. It doesn't matter that it ended up being good for them; people have ownership of their own bodies - that's why doctors need permission for lifesaving operations. Completeness leads me to point out here that, technically, it is legal to give consent after the fact - since only the victim is allowed to prosecute someone for rape. But, just because someone enjoyed something, doesn't mean they're not going to be angry that you forced it on them. I enjoy chocolate cake, but if you hold me down and force me to eat it, even if I enjoyed the cake, I'm still going to be rather unhappy about it afterwards.

Which brings me onto my fifth point - that physical pleasure and actual enjoyment don't have to coincide. Buddhism was right all along. If I get physical pleasure from decapitating attractive women***, I might enjoy it, but it’s probably not going to be good for my long term happiness. The same is true of rape - getting physical pleasure from being raped doesn't actually mean you enjoyed it. Actually, when you think about it, that makes it worse, long term. Pain can be dealt with - I'm not belittling it, but humans are surprisingly good at dealing with pain. That's why torture is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control. But if you actually enjoyed it? That can lead to lovely results like Stockholm syndrome, self loathing, and the feeling that 'my body betrayed me'. So even if the man having an erection did indicate that he was experiencing physical pleasure, that wouldn't make it not rape.

There, is of course, another way you could look at the statement, which is to assume that men are all sex-obsessed, and that there's no way a man could be raped because they always enjoy sex. This involves ignoring everyone ace or gay, everyone with hypoactive sexual desire disorder, many of those with schizoid personality disorder, and I'm sure a lot of other people. But if we do ignore them, this explains why no man in human history has ever refused an invitation to consequence-free sex. Ever. You could also look at the statement as saying that women are clearly far too weak and pathetic to force a man into anything. Even if that were true, there are these marvellous modern inventions called guns. And drugs. And blackmail. Actual physical strength isn't a barrier. I'm not going to add these to my count of problems, because they rely on the people who say that men can't be raped believing in ridiculous sexist stereotypes, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Even then, however, there are actually more problems with that statement than there are words. That's never really a good sign. It's sexist, idiotic, and belittles the suffering of thousands of people. So before you say something like that, do put in a tiny bit of research. There's a statistic (here, for example) that one in six men will be raped in their lives. I'm not sure that that's entirely accurate, but the numbers are still really high. So don't make sweeping generalisations like that about subjects you know nothing about. And when talking about rape, don't assume that it's a man raping a woman. Using he and she is fine, since english doesn't have gender neutral pronouns (although refering to a rapist as it wouldn't really worry me too much), but as soon as you start to think of rape as a man forcing sex on a woman, you've gone wrong.

This post turned out rather serious, but at least I got through it without descending into inarticulate swearing. So, to counterbalance that a bit, here's a fun game for you. See if you can find the Star Trek quote in the above post. It’s from The Next Generation. Next time, unless large numbers of people say something else to me that makes me question whether they have the intelligence of a retarded herring, I'll probably go on with 'On Democracy'.

*For the sake of my sanity, I'm just going to believe that's true.
**Also, that has never actually happened.
***Which, I must point out, is an example from Sandman, not from my deranged imagination.