Shopping with dinosaurs

“People who push for this should be shot and burnt.” What do you think has made Daily Mail commenter Ben (now deleted) so angry? Yep, it’s the labels on John Lewis’s kids’ clothes. According to many tabloids’ commenters, by not labelling clothes as boys’ or girls’ John Lewis is pandering something something librul snowflake SJW muslins etc etc etc it’s political correctness gone mad.

One of the items that’s attracted a lot of comment is a cute wee dress with dinosaurs on it. And I just happen to have an opinion on both dresses and dinosaurs.

I’ve got two kids, a boy and a girl, and when my daughter was 5 she was told by her male classmates that she couldn’t be interested in dinosaurs because they were for boys. She’s also been told that girls aren’t allowed to play with dragons, because they’re for boys too. Girls have to play with unicorns.

You don’t need me to tell you that this gender bullshit starts very early and is reinforced by the unnecessary pinkification of so much girls’ stuff. Finding practical, comfortable shoes for my son is easy. It’s much harder for my daughter, whose trainers are hidden in shops behind a wall of high heels, glitter and sparkles. It’s the same with t-shirts and tops: it’s not unusual for us to leave a shop with an armful of stuff for my son and nothing for my daughter because she doesn’t like pink, sequins or slogans about being pretty.

This is a relatively recent development: children born in the 60s and 70s lived in a more gender neutral world, at least in terms of clothing. Here’s a Lego advert from 1981, before pinkification.

It’s not pink that’s the problem. It’s the constant reinforcement of exaggerated gender differences, to say that girls can’t do A, B and C and boys can’t do X, Y or Z.

John Lewis isn’t trying to change biology, as Facebook poster Susan Perkins suggests. It’s making a little change that tells my daughter that hey! Dinosaurs can be for girls too!

But that’s not what’s caused the “backlash” and “anger” the tabloids report. As ever with gender things, it’s the prospect of boys wearing dresses that’s got people upset, because it’s okay for girls to do boyish things but not the reverse. And discussing that opens up a great big box marked Pandora: it’s a very visible sign of a society that doesn’t value supposedly feminine traits, where what Grayson Perry calls Default Man dominates “the upper echelons of our society, imposing, unconsciously or otherwise, their values and preferences on the rest of the population.”

As Perry writes: “The most pervasive aspect of the Default Man identity is that it masquerades very efficiently as “normal” – and “normal”, along with “natural”, is a dangerous word, often at the root of hateful prejudice.”

Boys in dresses? We’ll be letting girls play with Lego next. Or as one Daily Express commenter puts it, it’s…

The ongoing Marxist plan to feminise boys, who wont have the desire to fight for their country when it all kicks off.

Hmmm.

Ultimately, though, it’s really very simple. John Lewis isn’t forcing anybody to be gender neutral. It’s just saying that maybe we shouldn’t force dinosaurs to pick a side.

If your son doesn’t want to wear a dress, don’t buy him one.

Focus, man, focus

I know this lifeless blog makes it seem like I’m doing nothing, but behind the scenes there are many things, only some of which are frightening. David and I have nearly 70 unfinished DMGM songs at the moment, which says a great deal about our inability to focus on one thing and actually finish it, and I currently have three unfinished books on the go: two fiction, one non-fiction. And I’m doing loads of work too, so I haven’t really had the time for much more than the odd tweet. EXPECT CONTENT SOON. Honest. Not like before. I mean it this time. Etc.

Too fast, too soon

I wrote a piece for Beyond The Binary on how not to come out as trans.

Coming out as trans/NB was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Not because I did it, but because I did it in a spectacularly stupid way. I didn’t so much come out of the closet as roar out of it on a glitter-powered rocket cycle, waving the Trans Pride flag and putting all of eBay on credit cards I already couldn’t keep up with. I binned my boring boring boy clothes, wore skirts to the supermarket, talked about being trans on national radio to 400,000 people and spent months getting dirty looks from old women in ASDA who don’t think bolero tops go well with manly beards.

With the benefit of hindsight, that wasn’t the best way to do it.

Quiet, quite busy

 

This is one of those sorry-for-the-lack-of-updates updates: I’ve been neglecting the blog for ages due to a combination of work, creative stuff (writing, songwriting) and extreme barbecuing. I’ll share some of it soon, but in the meantime if you want to stay in touch and we already know one another please hit me up on Facebook, or come and say hello on Twitter.

This is a low flying panic attack

From the wise owls of MetaFilter to the comedians of Twitter, I follow a pretty diverse bunch of interesting people online. It’s generally a pretty left-of-centre bunch, because I’m a pretty left-of-centre guy. So you can imagine the howls of despair in my various feeds over the post-Brexit landscape, the outright hatred being peddled by the UK tabloids and now, President-elect Trump.

In most cases those howls aren’t coming from armchair warriors or the professionally offended. They’re people who see the world becoming nastier, more selfish, less tolerant – and in many cases they’re people who are experiencing that nastiness, that selfishness, that lack of tolerance first hand. Scared trans kids. Married gay couples. Pro-choice women. People with the “wrong” skin colour, the “wrong” accent, the “wrong” sexuality, the “wrong” gender, the belief that, hey! Maybe sex offenders should be punished rather than celebrated!

It feels rather like a bunch of straight white old folks are burning down the house to prevent the kids from inheriting anything.

And, well, they are.

But there are more of us than there are of them.

Or at least, there are if we celebrate what we have in common rather than what divides us.

If we challenge intolerance in whatever form it takes, even if – especially if – it’s directed at someone who’s not part of our own little bubble.

If we remember that we’re all here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.

Whoever we are.

Bye bye, blog?

I’m thinking of shutting this blog down and replacing it with a static site: WordPress is under pretty much constant attack and the hassle of removing dodgy files, patching vulnerabilities etc is becoming a bit too much for me at the moment. If there’s anything here you particularly treasure, such as my legendarily busy article about defrosting plates (no, really), then it’s maybe worth downloading it just in case.

I’m still on Twitter and Facebook, of course.

New free music from DMGM

It’s taken ages, I know, but David and I have finished some more songs:  they’re tracks 7, 8 and 9 on our ever-expanding second album, Battle Bruised and Broken Hearted. They are:

One Brick

Musically this one’s where my love of REM shows through – I wanted a World Leader Pretend kind of vibe, but we don’t know anyone with a pedal steel so we used synths to get the slide guitar effect.

Lyrically it comes from an article about the building of The Shard, a skyscraper in London; someone who lived nearby was interviewed and described how the building had taken away his view of the moon. With so much expensive property owned by outright villains, the idea that someone with stolen money would go on to steal the sky was too good not to use. The “sheets of glass” is from news reports of another London skyscraper whose glass frontage reflected sunlight onto the street and melted cars. It’s a little revenge fantasy, one of the darkest lyrics I’ve written, I think.

Magic Pill

This is our Everybody Hurts, a song about keeping on when you feel that everything’s falling apart around you. The song basically appeared fully formed in David’s head, but it took forever to get the vocal right. The one here is actually a guide vocal, because while I could probably sing it technically better I haven’t been able to recapture the feel of the vocal we’ve used here. That sounds wanky, I know.

Battle Bruised and Broken Hearted

We tend to pinball between guitar rock and electronic pop in DMGM, and this is one of the former: there’s a bit of Faith No More in there and a lot of ridiculously loud guitars. We don’t own any leather trousers, but if we did we’d be wearing them for this song.

As ever, the songs are free to stream and free to download. If you like them, we’d really appreciate it if you could tell somebody else about them. Thanks.

#leaveoutthetout

Fascinating and appalling statistic in this article about Adele’s anti-tout plans:

approximately 1.9% of the ‘first wave’ of Adele tickets ended up on secondary ticketing sites – with some today being sold for prices in excess of £1,000.

1.9%. It’s a percentage that’s much lower than the touts would have liked to have achieved, with experts telling us the average arena gig sees closer to 20%.

I knew it was a lot, but nearly 20%? That’s an astonishing amount of tickets, a huge pile of money and a bloody scandal.

In the absence of any legislation, the only way to stop this is to #leaveoutthetout (hashtag courtesy of Chvrches, who retweet fans’ last-minute ticket availability): if you’ve got spares or need them, there are ethical ticket exchanges such as Scarlet Mist and Twickets. The big-name resale sites are despicable, as are the people that sell on them.

Prince is right about ticket touts

Tickets for Prince’s UK shows were supposed to go on sale today, but he pulled the sales before they started. The reason? Listings were already appearing on secondary ticketing sites such as GetMeIn.

There’s something seriously wrong with the way UK ticket sites and touts operate: tickets for Jeff Lynne’s ELO went on sale at 9am this morning, and by 9.20am there were 4,264 tickets listed for resale on GetMeIn alone.

The government is currently consulting on the ticket resale market in the UK. If you think it needs reform or regulation, you’ve got until next Friday to make a submission. 

You’re so Venn

Bands are musical Venn diagrams: each member has their own tastes in music, and the music the band makes is located where those individual tastes overlap (in most cases, anyway: it’s different if the dynamic is more like Oasis, where one strong personality basically bosses everybody else about).

That means bands tend to be fairly consistent, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – for example if one of Chvrches wanted to do a death metal song or Angus Young decided to embrace jazz-funk, you’d hope the others would veto it – but it does narrow your musical horizons a little bit.

If you’re making music, is that a good thing?

I haven’t played in a band for a long time – ten years or so, I think, maybe more – but of course I’ve continued to write and record music with my brother and partner in musical crimes, David. And because there’s just two of us, and because we often write separately, and because we don’t have the issue of wondering how we’d play something live, we don’t have the consensus or compromise that you’d get in a larger group. The songs we’re working on at the moment include straight-ahead rock, grinding EDM, very delicate acoustic stuff, shimmery pop and at least one track that sounds like Donna Summer.

The thing is, though, while that’s an accurate reflection of the kinds of music we like, it isn’t a reflection of individual bands we like: each of them does a fairly specific thing. For example, Faith No More will do the odd bit of mexicana or a Commodores cover, but 99% of what they do is what you’d expect Faith No More to do. Eels are so consistent they often record the same song with different words. Chvrches aren’t going to start doing ska.

The only bands I can think of that don’t stick to a single recognisable sound or genre, who’ll flit from genre to genre without a care, are parodists. And that worries me, because I don’t really want to be part of a club that includes Weird Al Yankovic and the crap songs on comedy sketch shows. I’m not using arpeggiators and drum machines because I want to parody dance music, or big guitars because I’m taking the piss out of metal bands; I’m doing these things because they’re what the songs demand. The Donna Summer-esque song needs that Moroder chug. The shimmery pop needs those synths. The declaration of intent needs to sound like an invading army. And so on.

And yet I feel that I’m doing something wrong.

Am I?