Julian Assange: The Withdrawal Method or a season ticket?

LAST week, Louise Mensch, Tory MP, wrote in the Daily Telegraph challenging George Galloway for saying:   'Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion'.  Mr. Galloway, the Bradford MP, had reasoned:  'Some people believe that when you go to bed with someone, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you're already in the sex game with them.'  Ms Mensch wrote:  'While we were mentally vomiting at the term "sex game" used by Mr. Galloway in any context, he made matters worse' for Madam Mensch, by saying 'It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Do you mind if I do it again?' It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning.'

Louise Mensch then argues:  'Sexual consent is not football; you can't buy a season ticket.'   The participant inserter must clock-in, it seems, on each separate occasion.  And Ms. Mensch concludes her piece entitled 'Still Getting it Wrong on Rape' by arguing:  'This week shows us what so many male politicians really think about consent and sex, and the rights of a woman to withold it, or attach conditions to it (my bold italics)... There is still a long way to go.'

I recent read E.L James long popular porn book 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and was struck by the endless pages relating to negotiation of the sexual act and by the contractual nature of the content covering health and safety, butt plugs and nipple clamps etc.  At the same time I was reading Mary Midgley 'Evolution as a Religion' and came across this quote by Fredrich  Nietzsche:  'From a doctorate exam. - "What is the task of all higher education?" - To turn a man into a machine - "By what means?"  He has to learn how to feel bored.  "How is this achieved?" - Through the concept of duty....  "Who is the perfect man?"  The civil servant.'

This triumph of the civil servant in the post-post-modern society is indeed curious and perplexing.  I recently encountered a version of it while helping a member of my UNITE Branch - a binman - fight a claim that he was guilty under Bury MBC's 'Dignity at Work Policy', because he had raised his voice and engaged in an altercation; a charge which would have been laughable only ten years ago.  Now the bureaucracy has come of age in all its stupefying glory even in the bedroom as well as on the shopfloor.

In August 1936, George Orwell wrote a letter to Henry Miller telling him how he liked his book Tropic of Cancer:  '... first of all (I liked) a peculiar rhythmic quality in your English, secondly the fact that you dealt with facts well known to everybody but never mentioned in print (e.g. when the chap is supposed to be making love to the woman but is dying for a piss all the while),'.  Now Orwell raises the problem of withdrawal or when to clock-out of an encounter or close the contractual participation.  Decades ago, I'm sure that I used to clock-out far to early for the other party to the process, and what if the bloke is dying for a piss, does then have to ask for consent before disengaging?  How does Madam Mensch suggest we get our lady love to give us permission to leave the room in an emergency?

America's Black Spring!

Denver cinema shootings:  Some thoughts on Henry Miller's fantasy foresight

Henry Miller's book Black Spring, published in 1936, was described at the time as a book in which the ordinary events of everyday life are bye-passed in order to venture into a surrealist world of fantasy.  George Orwell accused him in a letter of moving away 'from the ordinary world into a sort of Mickey Mouse universe where things and people don't have to obey the rules of space and time.' 

Given the events over the weekend at the Denver cinema in which dozens of people were shot, Miller's book may not seem so fantastic or surreal.  Here is a paragraph taken from the book:
'... Men and women promenading on the sidewalks:  curious beasts, half-human, half-celluloid.  Walking up and down the Avenue their eyes glazed.  The women in beautiful garbs, each one equipped with a cold-storage smile.  ... smiling through life with that demented, glazed look in the eyes, the flags unfurled, the sex flowing sweetly through the sewers.  In had a gat with me and when we got to Forty-Second Street I opened fire.  Nobody paid any attention.  I mowed them down right and left, but the crowd got no thinner.  The living walked over the dead, smiling all the while to advertise their beautiful white teeth.'

That was from the book Black Spring by Henry Miller, written by an American at the time of Hitler, Stalin, and at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, but written while Miller was living in exile in Paris.  Yet at that time George Orwell considered this prose rather like a dream sequence that had drifted beyond the real world where the 'grass is green, stones hard etc', but to us, after the Second World War and 9/11, it may not now seem quite so unreal or so dreamlike.