Being Inappropriate

There's been more than a touch of Captain Oates about my recent blogging.  Apart from the occasional 'circular', I've not blogged any thoughts for a while.  An epic illness was followed by an absolutely mental start to the term.  It's been utterly brilliant, exciting, fun and and flippin tiring -  squeezing out the time to think, reflect and blog.

Anyway, the 'worst' seems to have passed and I need to crack on with various writing projects which are all behind (long-time readers will know it was ever thus), and I also want to get back to the 'fun' of blogging.  I'd like to begin that process by going a little bit off topic (how very me).

I've been struck through contacts and twitter buzz by how much Universities seem to now be addressing social media.  Classes are put on for students on how to use social media - principally Facebook and Twitter - 'correctly'.  A growing number of HE managers are joining Facebook - and with one or two notable, and impressive exceptions , generally follow the corporate style of Tweeting: 'Going to this wonderful event today, all was wonderful...'.  A bomb could go off at the venue and it would be tweeted as 'Bit of a breeze in the venue - perfect air conditioning on this rather wonderfully warm day'.

Personality, and more so any 'controversy' is erased, replaced by a perpetually optimistic, smiling automaton.   The tweets that make these individuals human - stuck in traffic, acoustics at venue hopeless etc are conspicuously absent.  The accounts, and the individuals represented by them seem dull and fake.  It's the resulting concept of authenticity that fascinates me.

Many of you will know that I've long been a champion of Twitter.  It genuinely excites me for the transformative possibilities it offers, but I've noticed that with growing success - particularly in the last twelve months - has come a recalibration of how it is used.  More than one academic colleague (at institutions other than my own) has commented that their own use has been restricted, or at least monitored for 'appropriateness'.  Each of these individuals was an openly gay academic.

Numerous friends and academics have speculated whether I too will need to revise some of my flippant tweets, the occasional drunken innuendo, and frequent rudery mixed in with tweets about law, sexuality, politics and those all important episodes of Strictly Come Dancing, particularly in light of a very different management team, and the loss of those who have supported me in being an 'outrider' on this stuff.

Others - particularly legal scholars - comment that "you can get away with it" - the idea being that I'm curiously privileged in this space - as an out 'gay' man, a queer theorist, a scholar on sexuality, I can be rude.  I can observe if someone is cute or attractive in a way that a straight male academic couldn't make the same observations about a straight female.  I think there's a lot of mileage in this argument - the 'norms' of an openly sexualised male culture are applied, and the de-sexed heterosexual culture similarly applied.  With an evolving homonormative discourse, this too might change - and renders these simple acts curious acts of resistance - thus re-securing them as oddly privileged.

One of the exciting, really compelling, game-changing, paradigm-shifting, epic-defining traits of Twitter is to blend together our various performances.  The ideas of Goffman and Butler are scattered in the wind as identities conflict.  We are sexual, domestic, the worker, the player, the socialising, happy, sad, grumpy; and through this complex pattern of information, we are also a little more true.  A little more authentic.  For a period, Twitter - and many users 'got it', blending the fact they were a lawyer, with an interest in science fiction, or in naked young men.  Sometimes both.

Yet increasingly, there seems a reaction of 'we don't want to know that'.  I am once more separated into Chris 'the academic', Chris who tweets on Strictly Come Dancing, Chris who tweets about law and sexuality scholarship and on we go.

I find such separations not only a failure to seize the exciting possibility to come to a more authentic understanding of who we all are, but I find it next-to impossible for academics.  My vision of academia - the public intellectual - is one in which an academic doesn't cease working.  We are perpetually working, thinking, contributing, researching and teaching.  It's not a 9-5 job.  Work and play are often over-lapping and occupying a complex relationship. This corporate teaching about 'appropriateness' is - it seems to me - fundamentally incompatible with any meaningful academic identity.

So, I shall continue talking and joking, sharing and discovering with sex workers, students, barebackers, bug chasers, safer sex campaigners, porn makers, anti-porn campaigners, politicians on the left, the right, the centre, and of non of the above.  I'll continue to engage with the feminists of all shades, the lawyers, the students, the academics, and the people - particularly the people - who resist being bound by narrow singular labels;  and I'll tell people when I disagree, and I'll get the tone wrong sometimes.  Sometimes I'll upset people. Sometimes, I'll make people laugh, I'll entertain and I might even educate.  Always, I'll strive to simply be me - complex, human, flawed - me.

That's all good and well you might say, but would I really advise a student seeking employment with a Magic Circle firm, that  they should be 'open', and strive for the authenticity I describe above?  Here you have me.  In an ideal world, we would all be open, and strive for a similar authenticity.  However, and as we are frequently told, it is not an ideal world.  We continue to operate in a world whereby we all know certain drugs are regularly used by elites such as those in the legal profession elites, and we know the tales of excess - of one kind or another.  That such excess - known as it is - during ones time as a student could be crippling is rather puzzling.  It is not therefore about behaviour, but the outward projection, our performance if you will, that matters.

My voice however is not a dominant one, and is certainly not one which is winning this debate.  Slowly, but surely, the great hope of Twitter - with all the exciting possibilities it offered - not least for our understanding of sexuality, is being strangled to death like a clipped bird at a pheasant shoot.

Text chat can be obscene: R v GS [2012]

I am indebted to Jane Fae for alerting me to this important story earlier in the month.  Myles Jackman, aka @obscenitylawyer reported on his blog the case of R v GS [2012].

You could be forgiven for not having heard of it - few seem to, and yet the case has potentially extraordinary implications for English obscenity law. According to the Court of Appeal, private one to one text chat on the Internet can be subject to the Obscene Publications Act 1959 (OPA). This means that anyone using the Internet to discuss sexual fantasies may be at risk of committing a criminal offence.

Myles' blog includes the full law report which is well worth a read.

The Court was clearly determined to bend the law for the purposes of an individual case - concerning paedophile images.  Unfortunately, in doing so the Court has unwittingly extended the law - shifting the meaning of 'to publish' to be just one person (for example, via instant chat).  It significantly expands the scope of material that the Police might seek to obtain in the course of an investigation and also means that conversations individuals might be having via chat - and thus be speculative fantasy exploration - may well attract the law in a way that those individuals may be shocked at.

It's tempting to think, "well, this doesn't concern me".   After all, this case concerned a conversation relating to paedophilia, and few would seek to defend such conversations - regardless of the significant extension of law.

However, take a look at the CPS guidelines on the Obscene Publications Act and the scope of instant chat conversations that could come into focus expands further.  Here are those areas that the CPS would currently seek to prosecute (you will note the continued inclusion of fisting despite R v Peacock)

• sexual act with an animal 
• realistic portrayals of rape 
• sadomasochistic material which goes beyond trifling and transient infliction of injury 
• torture with instruments 
• bondage (especially where gags are used with no apparent means of withdrawing consent) dismemberment or graphic mutilation 
• activities involving perversion or degradation (such as drinking urine, urination or vomiting on to the body, or excretion or use of excreta) 
• fisting

So, once again, BDSM practices disproportionately fall within the attention of the law, and we also have scat and piss-play 'chats' falling in the scope of potential criminalisation.

It remains to be seen just what impact the case will have, but it is potentially very serious indeed and surely worthy of greater awareness and debate.

UPDATE:  Another great post on this story from Nigel Whitfield can be read here.

Another Olympic Scandal

London Mayor, Boris Johnson, appeared in front of TV cameras yesterday to make it clear that London was ready for the Olympics (which start this Friday).  Media attention has focused on trains into the city, the ability of the Tube to cope, the availability and price of hotel rooms and whether the opening ceremony will be a wash out.

The People adds another factor into the Olympic stew of discontent.  Grindr - the popular smart phone/tablet App, euphemistically described as a 'networking tool' (i.e an easy way for men to meet other men for 'no strings' bonk-a-thons).  The site went down last week leaving its many followers able to log in and see the men available but prevented them from 'chatting' with the men.  So many men effectively told to 'look but not touch' can not be good for business.  Engineers worked 'around the clock' according to Grindr, to fix the problem.  Now we know what caused it - the Olympics.

According to the People, 'Technicians believe the arrival of Olympic teams on Monday sparked a flood of new customers – and loss of the service in East London. One Londoner said: “It happened almost as soon as the teams got here. Either loads of athletes were logging on to meet fellow Olympians or were looking to bag a local.'

So, will we see BoJo having his feet held to the fire on this one?  Come on Boris, we need capacity, all those Olympians and spectators need their comforts!

HIV and Online Identities

The ever-lovely @leomack87 flagged up this post on the excellent UKPositiveLad blog.  UKPositiveLad or Sam, set up a blog when he was diagnosed as HIV+ in 2011.  He uses the blog to share his activism and document his own journey with HIV.  His latest post post contains a story that is perhaps unsurprising but that does not reduce the importance of examining it.  Within the post he writes:

'I started wondering last weekend (25th Feb 2012) what kind of responses someone would get if their profile said that they were HIV+. So I created myself a second profile on Grindr, almost identical to mine in (but different enough to look like a different person), still looking for “Friends, fun and dates” – but this time I mentioned my HIV status in the profile text.

'Over the course of the week (25 Feb – 03 Mar) my existing profile received messages from 74 users. On the other hand my (almost identical) profile that mentions my HIV status had 11 people message it. Four of those eleven messaged purely to ask me questions about HIV and one felt it necessary to send me foul mouthed abuse for seemingly no reason. Which leaves me with six people actually showing an interest in me.

'Let’s look at that for a second shall we? That’s a 92% reduction in interest purely by mentioning my HIV status.'

The reduction is somewhat unsurprising (although you'll note he still seems to be doing reasonably well!), reminding us of the 'fear' that men still associate with HIV+ men.  For Sam, it undoubtedly highlights issue of prejudice and discrimination in that men just don't want to be with someone who is HIV+ because of ill-educated beliefs, fears for their own safety or unease at the need to adapt their own sexual practices.  This has perhaps been compounded by the rise in bareback sex.   Knowing your partner is HIV+ may lead to a decision that a condom is necessary in order to make sure that you don't become HIV+ yourself.  You therefore opt to have sex (bareback) with someone else who states they are not HIV+ in order to 'protect' yourself from HIV.  Spot the flawed logic.

It also doesn't take a genius to see the sexual market forces this sets in train.  More people don't disclose their HIV status at a time of increased bareback, leading in turn to a rise in HIV rates.  This can - and I believe will - continue exponentially.  The only things that would stop this are (1) death.  The return of the holocaust, or (2) growing drug resistance creating increased complications in HIV treatment.

So it is that this one incident documented by UKPostiveLad gives us an insight into much larger trends that are taking place in sex lives globally and driving increased criminalisation - and ever tougher measures - in relation to HIV transmission.

Read Sam's post here.

Apple's Siri, Abortion, and the Feminist Backlash

Bridget Crawford on Feminist Law Professors has posted a fascinating couple of posts on the growing issue of Siri's 'anti-chocie politics'.  Siri, as many of you will know, is the talking assistant included with Apple's new iPhone 4S.

The commentary stems from a piece on the site 'The Raw Story' in which Siri was revealed to be helpful with many things, but not when it comes to obtaining an abortion. According to the piece, ask the Siri, the new iPhone 4 assistant, where to get an abortion, and, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., she won’t direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, NW. Instead, she’ll suggest you pay a visit to the 1st Choice Women’s Health Center, an anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) in Landsdowne, Virginia, or Human Life Services, a CPC in York, Pennsylvania. Ask Google the same question, and you’ll get ads for no less than 7 metro-area abortion clinics, 2 CPCs and a nationwide abortion referral service. Ask in New York City, and Siri will tell you “I didn’t find any abortion clinics.”

The piece notes that Siri can help with the following questions (a game everyone plays when they first receive their iPhone 4S):

1. Viagra.
2. Hospitals to go to if you’ve had an erection lasting for more than 5 hours.
3. Places you might be able to score marijuana.
4. Where to dump a body: in Brooklyn, it recommends a smelting plant in New Jersey.
5. The meaning of life: Siri will alternately quote from Douglas Adams (42) or Monty Python’s “The Meaning Of Life.”
6. What to do if a hamster is caught in your rectum: in D.C., she’ll direct you to Charming Cherries Escort Service.
7. Asked how to obtain a free blow job in D.C., she’ll direct you to the same escort service. (We doubt that they are free.)
8. If you’d like to see a naked woman in Brooklyn, Siri will suggest a variety of Manhattan-based strip clubs.
9. If you’re in Queens and seeking breast implants, she’ll recommend 4 local plastic surgeons.
10. But if you ask Siri about vaginoplasty, she’ll scold you about your language.

The piece also includes a note from another reader who asked Siri why it was anti-abortion, to which the answer came: "I just am, Kristen." Read that piece in full here.

There's now an online petition to Apple stating: 'Apple: Stop promoting anti-choice extremists. If a user asks for family planning services, they should be directed to a group that offers full services, like Planned Parenthood--not to a hard-right clinic with an extremist agenda.'

You can sign the petition here.

However, in the last hour Apple have responded to this concern, releasing a statement which according to Mashable states: “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks.”

So that's OK then.  Abortion comes to Siri soon.  Plus, there's those distracting Apple TV rumours to keep you thinking happy Apple thoughts (said the man the typing this on an iMac).

Blendr Benders?

I watched the launch of Blendr - the 'straight' version of the popular App Grindr with interest (read more on the launch here).  I confess that I am a long standing Grindr user (is there some sort of help group?) but it's fascinating to see how this app  - which is, let's be honest, about hunting for sex, be re-marketed for a straight audience.  Heterosexuals it seems, want to 'network' and 'date' rather than seek out the nearest available sexual outlet.  It would have been interesting to see it launched as a genuine 'straight' version of Grindr rather than this spin, although it will be interesting to see how it is actually used and what the gender split of users is.  A whole new app for students to play with during workshops, tutorials and lectures.

Quiet Riot Girl offers a really interesting insight into this development.  Coming from a queer perspective, QRG challenges some of the assumptions that we might have regarding potential users.  Check out the post in full here.

Sexting Youths

The New York Times carried a fascinating piece at the weekend exploring the challenge that 'sexting' is increasingly posing for US states. Sexting, is where a nude (pornographic) picture of oneself might be sent to someone else over a mobile network. Accoridng to the NY Times, some states have amended their statutes on child pornography, obscenity or Internet crimes. Many allow juvenile offenders to be charged with a misdemeanor or a lesser offense, so they can qualify for diversion programs and have their records expunged. A few states have tried to define a sexting offense. The NY Times also did some interviews with teenagers which you can read here.

It's a nightmare for English lawmakers too, challenging our simplistic notions of who is and who isn't a paedophile. It's perfectly legal for a 16 year old to consent to sexual activity under English law, but if they take a pornographic photograph of themselves, that amounts to child pornography - and such images can easily be circulated beyond their originally intended audience.

Although this story focuses upon 'sexting', it's worth also bearing in mind the growing role that Twitter can potentially have for the distribution of these images - encouraging as it does rapidly evolving networks. I don't have the solution but I do know it means the legal notion of what a paedophile is, and what wider society understands by that term, is increasingly disconnected.

Suicide, Slow Death and the View From the the Ivory Tower

Thanks to Jeron for flagging this rather interesting piece by Jasbir Puar. Puar is a Prof of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in the US and this piece was pitched as a keynote lecture delivered at Rutgers. As you might expect from someone of Puar's standing, it makes a number of valid points but it's a little bit too pretentious for my taste.

Puar's racial privilege analysis has been previously stated and remains engaging but she does little to develop it here. Her attempt to offer a perspective on the recent US teen suicides is welcome but I'm not a fan of this overly dense style of writing/speaking and I'm not convinced by her "slow death" argument (or rather its application to the Clementi case) . All of the facts of the Clementi case remain unknown or uncertain - a point Puar neglects to mention. We will never truly know what was going on in Clementi's head (despite the trawl of Internet postings he made prior to his death) and this may have been as much about embarrassment - the social construction of the sexual act - as it was about 'sexuality', the outing of self as a sexual category.

If I were to indulge in this academic conjecture, this is more about public vs private constructions of sexual(ity). For example (and I was talking about this in a class this week), the celebration of the heterosexual pregnancy is to to avoid the sexual. At the heart of pregnancy is the penetrative sexual act - or in IVF cases - a man wanking into a jar. The 'dirty' act of sex is forgotten in place of the 'respectable' status of pregnancy. So too have homosexual legal advances been about forgetting sex - they are about 'rights' for an 'identity' and sex is removed from that discourse.

Thus, the exposure of a sexual act in this 'public' way via a webcam was to reveal the private sexual self (regardless of 'sexuality') and that may have been the trauma, as much as the revelation of a homosexual self. DIY porn in contrast is about producing a performance of self - the moving of a camera, the editing, the knowing look into a camera. It is an illusion of the private. Thus, with regard to Clementi, I think the "slow death" argument advanced by Puar is to get stuck in the wrong groove.

That said, this argument of "slow death" may have wider applicability - and may indeed be an appropriate analysis of other scenarios but we ought to look at each teen suicide as an individual tragedy and try to avoid seeking to homogenise them into one simple academic analysis.

More generally, a number of minor errors bug me in the Puar piece. We have 'Grinder' instead of 'Grindr'. We get FaceBook' instead of 'Facebook'. It feels like an academic aware of technology and what technology is supposed to be doing, but they are experiences being viewed from an ivory tower. When Puar mentions DIY porn, it is like an ancient anthropologist describing the savagery of a distant land. I may of course being horribly unfair - Puar may simply have lousy dictation software.

Check out the full piece here.

Sealed with a kiss

Mark Simpson blogged abut this over a month ago, but as I get back my blogging mojo, it's still worth re-mentioning here. After the metrosexual, cometh the metrotextual. This is the heterosexual male who can not be seen without the latest stylish phone. The Sydney Morning Herald and other papers were following up on research by the mobile operator, T-mobile which revealed 22% of makes regularly ended their texts with a kiss, even to male friends. I can't beat Simpson, so read his analysis here.

Virtual Sex

I attended part of a one day conference on 'Learning in Virtual Worlds' last week held at Sunderland. The event was run by the Northern Regional Centre of JISC A report on using virtual technologies in teaching and learning can be read here. Whilst according to some media reports, Second Life seems to be less popular it is apparently growing in educational significance. I played around with SL a couple of years ago and was enthusiastic about the possibilities for educational use but I have confess I quickly became bored with the programme thinking "what's the point", last logging in to the Republican and Democrat party events on election night last November (CNN was covering them and I got curious OK?!).

What the hell as this got to do with law and sexuality? Well one of the issues that continued to rumble was the degree to which this virtual environment was safe space. The site has rules which should limit people stripping off their clothes in front of you (our constructed on nudity is an interesting issue to explore) or to start performing sexual acts at random. According to one speaker at the conference last week, SL is now trying to further 'clean up' the space.

Potentially, this means that those wishing to explore gender, species, and most controversially, age, roles will be pushed out. Where to go? Well I came across (if you pardon the phrase) Red Light Social Center via a tweet and although I've not been into the space it sounds interesting. The main website has a intro video but it may be a little racy for some readers so I've put the alternative YouTube video below. The site describes itself as:

'Red Light Center (RLC) is a privately owned Massively Multi-User Reality (sm) site that was made available to the public early in 2006 by Utherverse Inc. Its tag line is "Live Your Fantasy".

Red Light Center is modeled after Amsterdam's Red Light District. The online community site offers users virtual nightclubs, hotels, bars, movie theaters and stores. There is a virtual currency called Rays, which members can earn and use for services in the community.'

Interesting stuff. The chances of someone accidentally coming upon a scene is removed given the clear focus of the site but the barriers between the domestic and the sexual, perhaps broken down by the SL site are back. You go to Red Light Social for a wank or voyeuristic content and SL for the educational and 'legitimate' activity. A lot has already been written on technologies and their impact upon sexuality but this seems another avenue worthy of further exploration, particularly from a legal vantage point.

AudioBoo

My mini-blog revolution/modernisation continues. I've now joined the fabulous Audioboo which means I can record little 'boo's' via an app on my iPhone and then transmit them via twitter and Facebook. You can also listen to them on the Audioboo website. I'll probbaly be using this tool more and more because it saves my lickle fingers from typing away. As they won't be streamed directly to this blog you should subscribe to my twitter feed on the right (scroll down) if you want them straight to your phone etc. You can also download all my boos via the iTunes store - my username is "chris_ashford" so you should find them pretty easily.

Twitterfeed

Around this time last year, I gave the blog a fresh look. This year, I'm improving the links across my various (and new) Web 2.0 platforms. I've finally given in and set up a Facebook page (and I'll try and stick a link on this page soon). I've also integrated Twitter into Facebook (which helps encourage me to use it) and I've just linked this blog via twitterfeed to my Twitter account. There is a Twitter link on the right hand side of this blog - see the viewing pane or alternatively to see the full list click the Twitter logo. Hopefully this means that everything is now talking to one another and saves on trying to re-invent the wheel.

I'm off to Denver, USA next month for the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting. My funding was linked to a project that will look at the use of Twitter in education so I'll be tweeting my way through the journey, conference and paper. This shouldhelp to 'lift the lid' on sme "private" or less visible aspects of the life of the Law School.

Hopefully , it won't be like the guy who tweeted his way through a plane crash at Denver airport last year.

China in 'Vulgar' Crack Down

Apologies for being a day behind but I didn't finish reading the Guardian until late in bed with a Lemsip last night (I know, it's wild existence I lead). Anyway, they had a couple of stories of note yesterday. The first one comes from China and their apparent crack down on what they call 'vulgar' online searches - principally what they deem pornography. State television showed equipment being seized. Given the sensitive nature of what can constitute 'pornography', particularly in such a conservative culture, I wonder how gay networking sites such as Gaydar, Gaydar Girls, Manhunt and so on fare under such a regime. A quick search on Gaydar for those living in Beijing revealed over 1000 profiles (the most it will show on a general search) so it doesn't seem to be holding back such sites at the moment. In April 2008 the Guardian reported on Gaydar setting up a China arm called GaydarNation China which it set up, hosted from Australia, to get around some of China's restrictive Internet licensing arrangements. This latest move by the Chinese government is designed to tackle the loopholes so I think this is one to watch.

Most of these sites usually have what some what call 'provocative' imagery on their splash or front pages. Amnesty International runs a campaign against Internet repression which can be viewed here.

Philosophy & Virtual Sex

Roger Scruton, the right of centre philosopher, has written an interesting piece in The Sunday Times today. He discusses relationships, sex and the nexus between human beings in light of the recent Second Life and Internet stories. It can be read here.

Facebook & the Civil Partnership

The Guardian is carrying a story today about Facebook and the lack of a Civil Partnership relationship category. I have to confess I am in that tiny section of society that has so far resisted Facebook but many people have joined the Facebook monster and are now, according to the Guardian, on the rampage as there is no option for 'Civil Partnership', despite marriage existing as an option and even 'open relationship. Even Government minister Ben Bradshaw has waded in, joining a campaign to change Facebook. Given that Civil Partnership and Marriage hold ever evolving definitions globally you do wonder whether Facebook will need an explanation as to what it means in each jurisdiction - OK I'm just stirring now...