It's Always More Complicated

This week's You Be The Judge column in Guardian Saturday: My dad wants to track my location on his phone. Should he leave me alone?:

My dad and I disagree about whether he should follow me on the Find My Friends phone app, which lets you track people in real time. He used to, but when I went to university I removed him as a follower. I don’t think he needs to know where I am all the time.
I’m 27 now, but it’s still a bone of contention. Dad says I don’t call him enough – I think that’s why he’s being so persistent about being re-added. He says: “I would know what you were up to if you let me follow you on Find My Friends.”
But I don’t want him tracking me, as he used to take it too far when I was younger. Once, when I was in a coffee shop, he texted me saying: “Hope you enjoy your coffee.” It’s nosy and I felt like I was under surveillance. It was funny for a bit, but then I thought: how often is he looking? That sort of thing happened several times as a teenager.

But honestly. She's just going about her usual normal daily business. We think Father needs to get a hobby, and to reconsider the claim that 'it’s not stalking, it’s love' (surely what all stalkers think/say?).

Am having visions of Victorian Papas putting Airtags in daughters' crinolines.... wouldn't they have been all over it, eh?

(I have been and gone and got my latest Covid booster this pm, yay, because I am An Old and they summoned me.)

I really liked this, because I have oft thought and even remarked that 'throughout The Whole of History' so often comes down to, actually the 1950s, which was a really weird blip in long duree terms.

The 1950s And The Myth Of The “Traditional” Family

It's USA-ocentric but a lot of this, mutatis mutandis and allowing for the Welfare State, applies to UK:

In the post-war 1950s, big social and economic changes were happening in the Global North. Men returned from the war and went back to work while women retreated from the labour market, economic prosperity grew, and people started to have more children. It’s during this time that a change in family structure occurred; the nuclear family (2 parents, 2 kids) became increasingly popular among the middle classes. Typically, this means a male-breadwinner family, where the husband does all the paid work and the woman does all the unpaid household work.

Not sure the article really delves into the 'fewer children because a) massive decline in infant mortality meant the ones you had survived (this was a longer term pattern) and b) contraception more acceptable'.

It also leaves out - but it is a short article - the rise of married women going out to jobs that could be fitted around domestic duties - e.g. once the children had reached school age - so family could afford the delights of the new consumer society.

But yes, as the author states 'HISTORY DID NOT BEGIN IN THE 1950s'.

And to continue the theme of, will you please think a bit about actual periodisation?

I may have mentioned, from time to time, the confabulation of the 1950s and 'Victorian', and this is pretty much literally the case in this report about rise in patients with Victorian diseases. I have just done a quick check on that invaluable resource London's Pulse and scabies and erysipelas were still being routinely notified to London's Medical Officers of Health well into the 1960s. So, of course, was measles.

Another instance of, just how long do you think Queen V dragged out her mortal coil? I was looking up a fairly obscure (I will not say forgotten or neglected) work of the 1880s by a secularist lady which deals with Malthusian matters and came across an article on the 'Victorian' censorship of works on birth control which includes MARIE STOPES. (Quite apart from the fact that you have to stretch the term 'censorship' very considerably to apply it to anything that happened to Marie, the publicity hound....)

I was a bit jarred to come across this in review of book that sounds probably worth reading on children's books and their authors, who often had rather sad traumatic lives:

'One of the few authors to suffer little pain in life, AA Milne'

Okay, Milne does seem to have had a fairly idyllic childhood, without a lot of the things that impacted other writers for children, BUT what he did have was

The Great War?

In 1915 Milne, in spite of strong pacifist convictions, eventually volunteered and was commissioned into the Warwickshire regiment. He became a signals officer and years later wrote: 'I never, as they say, fired a shot in anger' (A. A. Milne, Behind the Lines, 1940, 90).... In July 1916 he was in France, on the Somme, in a 'nightmare of mental and moral degradation'... about which he wrote very little. In November he left the front line, invalided out with trench fever. He spent the last part of the war in intelligence, but was glad he had known the real horror, as it gave him so much more right to speak out against it.

I was also a bit 'huh' about somebody who is more or less of my own generation (somewhat older, okay) who 'mentioned that since older people didn’t grow up knowing about trans people'. But while there were certainly a number of high-profile 'sex-change' cases and scandals all over the papers in 60s/70s, a) perhaps they were regarded as really rare occurrences and b) I am probably more aware of these than most because of revisiting the entire period when writing the textbook even before cataloguing the papers of a social scientist researching the topic. So I guess that even if they'd heard of e.g. April Ashley or Jan Morris they would not have expected to encounter a trans person in day to day life.

Anyone who has been reading around here for very long will have noted the occasional explosion about Woezery about The Yoof of Today and in particular, some particular phenomenon which was unknown to previous generations which is rotting their morals and their brains.

E.g. reading (or particular kinds of literature)/the movies/comic books/rock and roll/etc etc etc.

So have never been entirely on board with the whole moral panic around mobile phones thing, especially when someone has just come out with Big Panic Book and is all over the media with it and people are rushing to Big Simple Solutions.

So I found it agreeable to see an It's All More Complicated and 'perhaps we need to think more deeply about adolescence in general and in wider context' article here:

I’m an expert on adolescence: here’s why a smartphone ban isn’t the answer, and what we should do instead

Which, among other things, points out that there are positives:

[I]t’s an oversimplification to blame social media for the rise in adolescent mental health problems. First, there are many other factors at play. Second, social media affects individual teenagers differently. The majority of teenagers do not have mental health problems, and do have social media, so clearly it’s possible to use social media without incurring notable harm. Some young people are merely unbothered by social media, but some will benefit from it. Teenagers use social media to enjoy all the aspects of friendship that exist offline: providing and receiving social support, being validated, having fun. This is especially important for marginalised or minority groups of adolescents – such as those who are autistic, LGBTQ+ or have chronic health problems. For some teenagers, the internet has opened up a new social world, allowing them to understand themselves and foster relationships in a way that wasn’t possible before. There are at least some young people who will be happier with social media than without it. When understanding the overall impact of social media on mental health, this has to be taken into account. Instead of assuming that social media is bad for everyone, we need to ask more nuanced questions about who exactly is vulnerable to experiencing problems from this technology[.]

Okay, so I've finally completed my Simon Raven Alms for Oblivion/First-born of Egypt re-read, after I forget how long since the last time.

I am not saying I would entirely recommend these works to my dr rdrz because not only are there are a lot of Of Their Time and also Of Particular Class/Educational Background attitudes, even In Their Day I suspect there were a lot of people who thought Raven was A Bit Much.

Although Raven himself wasn't really all that quite-quite, and he does cast a fairly cynical eye, there is also that sense of being embedded in a certain time/milieu and being at odds with a wider world which was moving in other directions.

Anyhow.

A major difference between the two sequences is that AfO is non-linear, at least if you read in publication order and the order the volumes are in the omnibus edition. So the reader is bopping around from 'story set in more or less same time as the time of writing' to 'story set in different time & place and quite probably a different set of characters with maybe a few overlaps but they are younger/older'. Which gives an interesting and I am trying to think of a word - ?stereoscopic - perspective. Effective.

But the FboE is linear, and actually switches genre from something that is predominantly the story of a loosely associated group of individuals with occasional gothic notes and slight touches of the supernatural to becoming more and more an occult thriller, involving ageing surviving characters from AfO, and their descendants (or adopted offspring/associates).

I mentioned in an earlier post that I did not think plots in AfO were Raven's strong point, they were an excuse to get people in certain relations and situations - I make an exception for Bring Forth the Body - and honestly in the FboE I think the Evil Manipulator who is Secret Cathar plot takes over - and rests on certain rather weak foundations, I cannot care that much about the main object of his manipulations.

But I did keep reading!

My dearios will have heard over the years, nay perchance even the decades, the sounds of whingeing coming here from about people woezering on about Modern Life, one thing being 'these days people have no attention span and can't concentrate wo wo wo death ov civ etc etc'.

And in today's Guardian Saturday there is a lovely piece by Prof Emma Smith pointing out that actually immersive reading also has a history, and that in C18th it was wo! wo! wymmynz b getting lost in NOVELZ to detriment of their morals, duty to society etc etc etc and that was seen as Bad Thing.

Also made interesting point about earlier practices of a) re-reading and annotating a fairly limited selection of texts and b) filleting out bits and bobs into commonplace books, which I guess people who are 'read the book the whole book and lots of book' might diss on?

But, dammit, it is not yet online, chiz chiz chiz.

In the realm of codswinging debunkery, I offer up this: Dr Eleanor Janega: You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn:

[T]he women who were killed during the early modern witch trials were not, in fact, witches. They were just people. This is not to say that some people accused of witch craft didn’t confess to it on occasion, or maybe even think they were doing some witch ass shit. But that doesn’t mean they actually were doing it.
....
[T]he great majority of people who were killed for witchcraft did not think they were witches. In the majority of cases if they confessed that they were witches it was usually because they were tortured repeatedly and at length in order to obtain a confession.

Cracked tiles, wonky gutters, leaning walls – why are Britain’s new houses so rubbish?. Roughly speaking, for the same reason that our rivers and coastal waters are awash with sewage: cutting through the red tape that was holding things together:

Building control used to be run by local authorities but, like so many other public services, it has been progressively privatised since the 80s.... between 1984 and 2017, a culture shift occurred, from one of inspectors “policing” developers to one of them “working with clients” under commercial duress.

Can we imagine an initiative like this these days? (Sigh): The Amazing History Behind London’s Green Cabmen’s Shelters.

There is an immense amount of woezery being expressed by the decision (which, I think, could have perhaps been better expressed? - I feel that the messaging was not of the happiest, or at least, phrased as so to bring out the trolls) to close and redo an exhibition gallery in the museum portion of an institution with which I have some historical connection.

The exhibit, we may remark, has been up for a lot less than the duration of this present century - it does not constitute - as e.g. the galleries at the Horniman do as an example of 'how we went about to eddicate the workers in ye Edwardian dayz' - a historical artefact in itself. (The Walrus is an Exemplar of Misguided Taxidermy!)

But you would think that what was proposed was dragging everything out and throwing it on a Bonfire of the Vanities (rather than just putting it back in store) -

- not to mention, surprisingly little concept that what's there is a minute proportion of what's in the entire collection (some of which is in fact available to view in Another Institution, just pop into the nearby Tube station and hop on the Circle line...) . Besides viewable online.

Okay, I know enough about the extremely troubled and very messy history of The Entire Collection (but if I told you I'd probably have to kill you, there are some secrets we were Not Meant To Know) that I don't have a lot of patience for people getting Ever So Precious over this as though it was the Elgin Marbles -

- An irony here is that I am sure a significant percentage of the woezerers would be 'Give The Marbles Back!'.

And museums are changing around their displays all the time (it is good conservation practice, no? quite apart from the whirligigs of fashion) and sometimes people look at a particular museum and say, um, no, perhaps that should be closed? When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view. (People with a serious need to look at creepy pathological specimens can still gain access.)

What I read

I finished Always the Bride and posted my further thoughts about it here. Do rather have anticipations about the other forthcoming biography...

Further exhumed 'Golden Age' mysteries: Moray Dalton, The Art School Murders (1943) - set far enough into the War for blackout to be an issue, but still early enough that call-up doesn't seem to be affecting characters. I was fairly prepossessed until this pulled a rabbit suspect more or less out of the hat towards the end without sufficient foreshadowing.

Francis Vivian, The Singing Masons (The Inspector Knollis Mysteries #6) (1950) (assume this is contemporarily set but not a lot of period feel for the era). BEES! Bee-keeping! Hives! Possibly rather TMI on apiculture generally. But in fact the murder is not down to bee-sting of allergic person (unlike one of Ruth Rendell's non-Wexfords), although victim is (plot-relevantly) thus set up. Another colourless hawkshaw from the Met. There was such elaborate pushing at 'X must have done it, Y couldn't possibly', that I was betting on some means by which the woman carted off to hospital with a miscarriage could nonetheless have managed to commit murder first (I was wrong). The actual solution was - well, yes, I had a side-bet on him.

I'm not sure if this was a freebie from the publishers or a Kindle Deal: Patricia Wentworth, Will o'the Wisp (1928), which is more suspense/domestic gothic than crime mystery. And really good. After a row of puzzle mysteries with flattish characters (the Dalton was not that bad) this really stood out.

There was also the most recent issue of The Scribbler.

On the go

Matt Cook and Alison Oram, Queer Beyond London (2022), which is very good but not really something to sit down and read end to end perhaps. It's got a lot about how different LGBTQ scenes and subcultures were in the different cities studied, with their own different traditions (boho alternative Brighton, radical Manchester e.g.), and how these changed over time, with social/political change, impact of HIV/AIDS, Section 28, the pink pound, gentrification, equality legislation etc etc. And even how in the same general area there could be several different subcultures going on (It wasn't just that Leeds had a very strong separatist lesbian thing going on, there were huge rifts between different groups?).

Up next

I have several unread Patricia Wentworths on the ereader, so very likely one of those. Plus, new Literary Review

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Honestly, the idea of this thikks bludd wiv cold: The internet is a constant recommendations machine — but it needs you to make it work:

Part of the whole promise of the internet is that platforms and services would take the web’s infinite supply of everything — the stuff to watch, read, look at, play with, buy, eat, invest in, comment on, listen to, or have feelings about — combine it with a deep understanding of who you are and what you like, and feed back to you an endless supply of all your favorite stuff.

‘He taught me about love, affection and great sex’: the untold story of Terrence Higgins. It was very much another era.

Butler tells me how attitudes have changed since he was a young man – largely because of legislation. “The prospect of marriage, civil partnerships, adoption – of joint property ownership, even – were not on the cards. If I was 16 coming on to the scene today, I’d want a husband, a family, a career. I’d want it hassle-free and have every right to expect it. When I came out, all I was ever told was: ‘You’re going to be very lonely when you’re old.’” The doom-mongers were wrong on all fronts, he says.

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Another pioneer, Bob Cant, who was fighting Section 28, the product of the moral panic around HIV/AIDS: ‘Promoting homosexuality’, 1987-2017:

Thirty years later, the phrase ‘promoting homosexuality’ appears again, now used by regimes around the world to indicate their opposition to debates that encourage people to consider how gender and sexuality are socially constructed, that they are not biologically fixed. If the gay liberation movement of the 1970s seemed to propose a revolutionary transformation of the ways homosexual people saw themselves, then the very notion of ‘promoting homosexuality’ can be seen as a warning from the forces of a counter revolution: nothing must be allowed to challenge the belief that there is a fixity about sexuality and gender.

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ODNB entry for Mary McIntosh, whose essay on the 'The homosexual role' significantly predated Foucault's formulations around the social construction of homosexuality.

McIntosh, one of a relatively small minority of lesbians involved [in the Gay Liberation Front], immediately became a leading figure. She was a key member of the group that wrote the influential GLF Manifesto (1971), and a leading light of the Counter-Psychiatry Group, pioneering opposition to psychiatric practice in relation to homosexuality. When women later left the GLF because of its masculinist bias, her energies were increasingly deployed in the women's liberation movement, though unlike many feminists of the period she never broke her friendships and work with gay men. She took a prominent role in the socialist feminist strand of the women's liberation movement, bringing to it a distinctive Marxist position, with a particular interest in state policy and women's economic dependence in the family. She was active in the Fifth Demand Group, which campaigned for the financial and legal independence of married and cohabiting women, and Rights of Women, concerned with legal equality. In the late 1980s she was active in Feminists Against Censorship, arguing strongly against radical and separatist feminist critiques of pornography, and placing herself clearly with the pro-sex movement among feminists.

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I thought I might have posted this before but the date seems recent: Female Husbands: A Trans History.

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And I probably have posted this before, but it bears recirculation: LGBTQ+ visibility and archives: History between the lines,

I was so cheering for what Polly Toynbee was saying about the 70s: Are the 2020s really like living back in the 1970s? I wish …:

Most 70s imagery is a deliberately manufactured caricature, with its garish wallpaper and avocado suites, an ignored time zone between the swinging 60s and glitzy greed-is-good, big bang, big hair 80s. It’s an image that obscures the radical social changes and great progressive leaps forward that took place then....So why does history record the 70s as nothing but a time of strife, shortages, hyper-inflation and decline? Well, it’s because history is written by the victor. And that victor was Margaret Thatcher, whose 1979 election conquest sought to uproot, marketise and diminish the role of the postwar state. Her political tribe used all their media power to expunge inconvenient 70s memories that didn’t fit her narrative, as surely as Stalin purged Trotsky from the photographic record. It was a goodbye to John Maynard Keynes’s generous social democratic state[.]

For me, personally, it was the best of times it was the worst of times, in that I was in a dreadful relationship but I was on (after an initial wrong direction) The Right Career Path.

On, at any given time a lot of things are happening, and not all of them are the things we remember, or rather, some people will remember some things and others will remember others and not always will the twain coincide: 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year by Nick Rennison review:

In this enjoyable slice of popular history, he assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture. It makes for some unlikely associations. So, for example, January 1922 saw the second trial of Hollywood comedy actor Fatty Arbuckle for rape and manslaughter, the first successful treatment of diabetics with insulin, the death of Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica and Edith Sitwell’s debut performance of Façade to William Walton’s score.

I happened to have a Zoom meeting yesterday of one of the bodies I have got involved with because of being involved with its archives over an extended period. During the course of which I happened to deliver myself of an apercu of mine that just because something does not look like an astounding success (an institution that did not last, a small and insignificant society, a legal case that was not won) it may in fact have had long term effects.