Arts

In May 2019 I published a blog titled The Alien inside us – the lower masculine victimizer. In it, I used Ridley Scott’s mandible and tentacle armed creature as a metaphor for patriarchy’s structural dynamic where everyone becomes both victim and victimizer. I recently learned Japan has an entire comic genre devoted to this: ‘tentacle […]

Humanity has had a long love affair with secret societies. The Illuminati, the Masons, the Knights Templar, the Order of Sion, the Rosicrucians—the sense of missing out, the frisson of secrecy, the cachet of knowing something others don’t—all this appeals to our sense of mystery. I recently stumbled on The Sect of the Disgraced, an […]

In recent months I’ve been binge-watching the BBC’s long-running heirloom restoration show, The Repair Shop. “What’s in the box?” asks impresario Jay Blades as each new—well, old and badly damaged—item arrives at the Weald and Downland Living Museum. In The Repair Shop today… I’m as eager as Jay to find out. I’m fascinated by the […]

British actress Keira Knightley, star of Misbehaviour, Atonement and Bend It Like Beckham, recently said she won’t participate in any more male-directed “horrible sex scenes where you’re all greased up and everybody is grunting”. What Keira Knightley is actually ending here is participation in patriarchal sex scenes. If we can move on from the downfall […]

A recently unveiled statue of Mary Wollstonecraft has caused outrage by depicting the pioneering feminist writer naked. The statue depicts a nude woman emerging from an amorphous mound of organic matter. The BBC described the statue as “a swirling mingle of female forms.” The problem isn’t the statue. It’s the underlying unconscious shame that precludes our ability […]

On the night of 25 June 1906, architect Stanford White was murdered at the rooftop restaurant of New York’s Madison Square Gardens. The subsequent trial revealed a double life where White had been seducing underage girls. Confronted with this lurid publicity, his family retreated into silence. As his great-granddaughter Suzannah Lessard recounts in The Architect of […]

Late in 2018 I chose to challenge myself. I joined a public speaking club, did a 43-metre bungy jump, and contacted Life Drawing MK about modelling. Why life modelling? Two decades ago, travelling frequently as an IT consultant, I became addicted to pornography. Through personal development I overcame the addiction—only to find it stemmed from […]

In a post a few months ago I posed the question, Does patriarchy traumatise the feminine? At the time, I was pretty certain that it did—that patriarchy arose through the institutionalised denigration of the feminine: It’s hard to imagine how the goddess-worshipping hunter-gatherer cultures of the Neolithic period gave way to patriarchy. What was that […]

Edwin Longsden Long’s 1875 painting, The Babylonian Marriage Market, is monumental in more ways than one. Firstly, in size: the painting measures 10 feet by 5 feet 8 inches. Secondly, in value: in 1882 it sold for £6,615, at that time a record price for a painting. Thirdly, and most importantly, it provides a window […]

It’s just a film. They’re all stuntmen. The blood isn’t real; it’s ketchup. The blood may not be real. The violence may not be real. But the underlying acceptance that violence is part and parcel of our world is very definitely real. This isn’t just an acceptance that others—some indeterminate ‘they’—will commit violence. It includes […]