Posts: 27

1. 

   Perfection or Obsession?

   13.Aug.08, 10:58 EDT
   
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   Recent media coverage of former bulimia sufferer Debbie Francis has portrayed her as a healthy role model since recently winning the Welsh bodybuilding championships.
   
   Debbie has gone from being a yo-yo dieter of three decades to an award-winning body-builder in just three years. But has her attitude towards body image really changed that much and can body-obsession ever make someone a healthy role model?
   
   Having spent a lifetime with low-self-esteem, mother of one Debbie is now confident and proud of her body. But her preoccupation with her body and appearance as a competing ‘athlete’ is stronger than ever. Just as a perceived defect in her appearance had previously caused her emotional and physical distress, Debbie’s appearance is now being scrutinised more meticulously than ever, the audience’s assessment of which is qualified by an even more rigorous and unsustainable set of values.
   
   There is no doubt that her transformation has boosted Debbie’s confidence, but as a bodybuilder there is little doubt that she has even less control over her own body-image. She is, after all, engaging in a ruthless display of flesh that is not limited to creating cultural ideals of physical ‘perfection’, but actively transcends them.
   
   As Alan M. Klein states in Little Big Men, “Bodybuilding is a subculture of hyperbole.  In its headlong rush to accrue flesh, everything about this subculture exploits grandiosity and excess.”
   
   Considering the negative coverage Madonna’s overworked sinewy frame has received of late, there remains incessant media scrutiny of women’s bodies and scrupulous broadcasting of some celebrities’ ‘could care less’ bikini bulges (good for them, I say!) As far as I’m concerned, Debbie Francis’s obsessive exercise routine is as much an exercise in ‘health and nutrition’ as Madonna’s leotard-clad frame is an icon of femininity.
   
   In Western society we are too willing to concede to conventional notions of beauty. Not only are lauded perceptions of beauty unrealistic (even for those air-brushed lovelies supposedly ‘bearing’ the burden) but moreover I think the proliferation of such ideals by the British (and American) public is totally avoidable.
   
   Rather than advocating such extreme reactions to diet and fitness, we should be opposing rigorous beauty and so-called ‘health’ routines that can have such disastrous results (sorry Madonna) as haggard prematurely aged skin and fatigue, and will ultimately cause damage to joints and ligaments.
   
   Although ‘pumping iron’ in the vein of Debbie Francis can increase bone mass and density, the thoughtless notion that that she can be a ‘healthy’ role model is as ludicrous to me as TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith berating ‘big bums’. What’s next - banning child-bearing hips?!
   
   Besides, where does all this sculpting and honing get anybody? Fitness is not a means to an end, it is a lifestyle: we all have to live with what we are.
   
   By Amanda Carey/MOLI

2. 

   Ambition Graveyard

   29.Jul.08, 09:17 EDT
   
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   Fear of success
   
   Most people are familiar with the concept ‘fear of failure’, whether it spurs them on or leads to private stagnation. Yet, fear of success is something of a less orthodox principle, an anomaly of sorts, almost oxymoronic.
   
   Yet when many of us hesitate, or suck in a deep breath, it is not the fear of failure that we can taste but the fear of success.
   
   Whereas the fear of failure will spur you on to either triumph or defeat (and in the latter case also disappointment) fear of success has only one sure path, and that is regress.
   
   So what exactly does this fear describe?
   
   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, seminal early romantic novelist and dramatist, distinguished fear from awe. Whereas fear petrifies, awe incorporates something of the sublime. Likewise, fear of success can be said to inspire awe in the afflicted.
   
   Whereas the fear of failure is a precondition for success (if not at least akin to ambition), to fear success is failure personified - to fear oneself. If you don’t avail yourself of your desires or explore your potential, you will be consumed by terror, longing, and ultimately regret.
   
   The incarceration of faith and suppression of ambition poses a paradox: we only have ourselves to blame for our dissatisfaction, whilst those who fear failure are at liberty to blame their peers, genetics, or circumstances, when they fail to make the grade. This paradox calls to mind the Neil Young lyric,"it’s better to burn out than to fade away”, a quote made infamous by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note.
   
   Although Young’s lyrics should not be taken literally or as a solution to life’s problems, his words are proverbially astute and suggest that we should resist atrophy in favour of being proactive. If apathy were tantamount to success, then hundreds of thousands of economically inactive Brits would be signing autographs instead of signing on.
   
   Let us consider some other Proverbs, for example, ‘Winners make their own luck’ – I’ve had countless debates about the legitimacy of this claim, and have drawn the following conclusions:
   
   The first is that if luck only helps those who are able to help themselves, then luck is a counterfeit currency. Equally, that without a commitment to ones ideas and ideals, opportunities cannot and will not be realised.
   
   But let’s not delude ourselves, luck is a rather flimsy premise for a life philosophy; a better analogy would be ‘life is what you make of it’, that is, were we not to question the circular logic of such an idea. On the contrary, it could be said that good things do not come to those who wait, but rather to those of us that act.
   
   According to Goethe, events issue directly from decision. The literary master of happiness, longing, frustration, and fear, he had it right when he said:
   
   "Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."
   
   To give way to fear is to give up on ideas and success.
   
   By Amanda Carey/ MOLI

3. 

   LIFE&LOVE/Which Time of the Month?

   21.Jul.08, 13:36 EDT
   
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   ‘Gardening, yoga, bubble baths, medication...and I still want to smack somebody’.
   
   A popular satirical caption and mantra that I’m sure many women can relate to. Yet, when we women are irritable and aggressive is it simply our ‘time of the month’, or could there be something more sinister at play?
   
   We may feel that men are belittling our feelings when they propose our monthly cycle as the source of our rage or disquiet.  Yet for men this answer is more tolerable than the alternative, which has less favourable consequences. That is, that there is ‘nothing in particular’ the matter with us.
   
   In moments of such blind rage, male partners will often remark how sorry they are, and when you ask them what for they seldom know. Yet we are too quick to berate them for their lack of ‘understanding’ in a woman’s physiognomy.
   
   Our malaise reveals no degree of forethought or common-sense, and we are incensed by the slightest sign of dismay as we are by hope. The sight of a child smiling can reduce us to tears as uncompromisingly as the sight of a shopping queue that reduces us to a frenzied outburst on the sales assistant.
   
   A number of things can trigger hormonal imbalances: stress, discontent within our professional life, our choice of contraceptive pill, even sexual inactivity.
   
   Dichotomously, the contraceptive pill, in its various manifestations, has assorted side-effects that can either deplete adverse affects such as spots, mood swings, and physical discomfort, or function as the culprit.
   
   As an agonist, other symptoms can, with the Oestrogen-dominant pill, also include weight gain and PMT (pre-menstrual tension), or with the Progesterone-only (‘mini’) pill, a significant loss of libido (a guaranteed contraceptive) as well as unwanted facial hair - as if feeling un-aroused wasn’t enough to put you off getting up close and personal with your lover.
   
   Breast tenderness and nausea are two other unwelcome side-effects of all birth-control pills. No wonder we unduly have our lovers tearing their hair out with worry that we’re pregnant when we’re not – at least, those of us who rely purely on second-hand medical knowledge than first-hand experience.
   
   Worse still, coming off the pill altogether can send your hormone signals haywire, leading to further physical and mental imbalances.
   
   So how can women identify and control our emotional and behavioural patterns when our hormonal processes are so elaborate and difficult to dissect, and when we seem to be (so cynically) at the mercy of our hormones?
   
   Perhaps it is all in our minds, but guys: you can be certain it is almost never that time of the month.
   
   By Amanda Carey/MOLI

4. 

   LIFE&LOVE/ Queen of Mean

   10.Jul.08, 11:28 EDT
   
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   Animal welfare over human life?
   
   New York heiress Leona Helmsley and her white Maltese dog came under fire this week in Jeremy Vine’s afternoon show (aired on R2, Thursday 3rd July). Ironically named Trouble, the pampered Maltese bitch was reported to have inherited a meagre $12 million when Helmsley passed away in August 2007, with an estimated $8 billion of her assets allocated to a canine welfare trust.
   
   Dubbed ‘The Queen of Mean’, Helmsley has left her two disinherited grandchildren along with the rest of the world in moral scepticism over the sanity of someone that values animal welfare over human life, and further question the legality of such a move.
   
   Speaking on Jeremy Vines’ programme, James Patton, politics lecturer at St John’s College, Oxford, suggests that Helmsley’s canine favour exemplifies her ‘abhorrence’ for human beings and is indicative of a more widespread problem within society. He makes the brazen assertion that ‘we are’ (he is) ‘unsure about the value of human beings’ and furthermore that ‘society’ has lost its ‘moral compass’ and ‘its faith in itself’.
   
   Although he justifiably disapproves of Helmsley’s indifference to human welfare, Patton does not think we should empower the state by approving of the state’s intervention. Instead, he urges us to learn a lesson from the attention that has been placed on animals and the absence of concern for human beings.
   
   But is the motivating force behind Patton’s criticism of Helmsley, really to reproach her social or moral ethics, or even the broader concerns surrounding the value of human life? Could it be that this compelling story about a potty woman and her pampered pooch simply makes them ideal scapegoats for a society obsessed with duty, underpinned by an abhorrence for rich folk as ‘spoilt’ and ‘alienated’ (Patton).
   
   Quoting a friend, Patton makes further attempts to discredit the value of our furry friends by suggesting that ‘Dogs don’t love you they just have Stockholm syndrome’. Further to this cause he criticises the way that people endow animals with human qualities, describing them as ‘loyal’, ‘friendly’, and ‘innocent’.
   
   However, does this supposed exaltation of animals to the realms of human existence really undervalue human life, or does it aptly describe human experience and thereby reinforce human value, just as different religions use these terms to help us relate to a God or higher being.
   
   In support of Patton’s animal veto, Vines speculates about the justification of an exchange of money between humans and dogs. But this is contradicted by one listener’s observation that money is not in fact passed to dogs, but to the human beings that care for them.
   
   This is an important point, as it suggests a human motive – and thus a public benefit – that can be associated with dog and other animal charities. Consider SPANA (The Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad) which protects working animals in some of the world’s poorest countries, including Morocco and Ethiopia, and actually has a human object to sustain the livelihoods of the farmers who depend on these animals.
   
   Charities are meant to provide a ‘public benefit’ – but who decides what constitutes a ‘public benefit’ and how is it defined?
   
   In November 2006 a new Charities bill was passed through parliament designed to ensure that charities benefit diversity i.e. all of the ‘public’ rather than just a cross section of society.
   
   If we consider this theory in light of the Helmsley case, human charities that benefit people of the Third World, for example, and thus don’t benefit the British public could be just as easily and arbitrarily dismissed as animal charities that don’t benefit humans. However, those terms are not only preposterous, but bureaucratic, and therefore do not benefit the common good of the ‘public’. In fact, every charity benefits only a percentage of the public directly and never everyone all the time.
   
   Under the new Bill, a charity’s endowments may be seized and redistributed ‘accordingly’. But is it wise to bestow any state with an arbitrary power, considering how in Britain, Cabinet Ministers and MPs are squandering taxpayer’s money on expensive furniture and home improvements?!
   
   In opposition to such Bureaucracy, Carla Lane, writer and animal rights protester voices her belief in ‘money for everybody’, promoting both animal and human lives in terms of people’s experiences, whilst recognising that people aren’t the same, and that means that each of us (yes, even Helmsley) has a right to our opinion. It is not so much about moral obligation, but personal choice.
   
   As appealing as Lane’s democratic position is, the vast sum of money remains a contentious issue, not to mention Helmsley’s stint in jail after being found guilty of tax evasion! In fact, as Ray Madoff pointed out in an article for the New York Times, because charitable donations are tax free, taxpayers could actually be funding Helmsley’s ‘charitable whims’ to the tune of around $3.6 billion.
   
   US website Newser reports the estimated $8 billion windfall to be worth approximately 10 times the combined assets of all of America’s animal charities, making sources question whether Helmsley’s animal trust is even a worthwhile investment, considering such charities’ limited scope for development.
   
   The money could be redistributed ‘fairly’ amongst charities that have a more direct human benefit or urgency, but when billions are wasted on human conflict every day, as Lane asserts, how and ‘where do you draw the line?’
   
   By Amanda Carey/MOLI

5. 

   BUSINESS/ Job Interviews: Cheating with a Conscience

   09.Jul.08, 12:14 EDT
   
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   There’s nothing wrong with a little white lie, as long as people are prepared to believe it - right?
   
   Whether or not you agree with this tenet, it seems to be de rigueur within the recruitment business, which comprises a series of near misses and necessary compromises. If we are honest, we’ve probably all been guilty of telling people what they want to hear from time to time, and often for our own benefit.
   
   Having attended two dreadful job interviews last week and feeling thwarted by the ever flimsy prospect of intellectual and economic progress, I’m tempted to retreat back to my simple pint-pouring existence.
   
   The initial interview was arranged through an agency (grumble) by a surprisingly forthcoming (tenacious) recruitment consultant who made a sales job in a shop masquerading as an art ‘gallery’ seem illuminating. In fact, besides the prospect of writing for a living, I would go so far as to say it sounded like my dream job.
   
   Unfortunately the prospect of promoting artists work had clouded the reality of working in a target-driven shop-fronted work space, and I looked forward to the interview date with appropriate anticipation and (unwarranted) enthusiasm.
   
   Nerve-racking moments before the interview the consultant reassured me that I had nothing to worry about as the ‘gallery’ Manager (and interviewer) ‘wanted’ me just on the strength of my CV. I had been set up for disappointment.
   
   Worse still, I suspected that this was a bad omen as I know expectation leaves little to the imagination. Having interviewed me, would I be as uniform as the paper I was written on, or would my ‘sales’ experience belie the unconventional blonde who spoke candidly of her own creative ambitions?
   
   Had I answered all of the interviewer’s questions correctly (and without deviation) - suitably flattering her interview technique and whilst assisting with her examination - I would currently be commuting to London to begin training for yet another unsuitable job.  Much to my belated relief (delayed by my initial displeasure) a less fortunate interviewee was deemed a ‘more suitable’ candidate.
   
   I wondered if, like me, this pretty blonde had disregarded convention, or whether she had simply simulated generic responses to the interviewer’s staid questions. But even the most elaborate and contrived answers can’t prepare you for all the questions, as I discovered upon my second interview.
   
   Overjoyed about my invitation to attend an interview at a prestigious print factory, I arranged a lift to ensure my punctuality. Throwing me off my methodical (now contrived) course, the less churlish of the two initiated some polite (awkward) conversation about my journey.
   
   Explaining that I would be taking the bus ‘in future’, the self-important Operations Manager haughtily remarked, ‘You make it sound as if you don’t have any intention to learn how to drive’
   
   A strange question, I thought, considering the position advertised was for an Account Controller within Customer services, not Transport services. Suffice to say, the interview resumed under an expanding cloud of uncertainty, inching closer with each defensive answer to every inflammatory question or remark relating to my personal and professional background.
   
   But for the most part, as uncomfortable (and tedious) as such an intense cross-examination can be, the worst thing about the interview process is the aftermath. The ominous wait for feedback, reminiscent of the excruciating interval between exams and results as you agonize over misplaced thoughts and unexpected questions.
   
   That is, if your mind even has the aptitude to recall them.
   
   By Amanda Carey/ MOLI

6. 

   WORTHY CAUSES/ The Placebo effect

   26.Jun.08, 15:47 EDT
   
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   Obecalp: well-meaning or worthless candy?
   
   Is Obecalp (the ‘placebo’ pill for kids) a well-meaning testament to the influence of wishful-thinking, or (more than likely) is it quite simply a worthless sugar pill?
   
   Like any placebo effect or response, Obecalp is supposed to work as a therapeutic ‘medicine’ by placating an individual’s symptoms without actually remedying them.
   
   On the placebostore.com homepage, well-meaning ‘mommy’ of three spuriously claims to have invented Obecalp as ‘the first standardized placebo’.  If by ‘standardised’ she means uniform, well then we may as well be talking about Love Hearts or any other sugary sweet.
   
   Of course, the notion of ‘standardising’ or homogenising something that’s effectiveness depends on heterogeneous conditions is essentially nonsense. The power of suggestion deeply depends on the element of surprise or unfamiliarity.
   
   As soon as kids identify Obecalp as a rogue Placebo-effect drug moonlighting as a well-intentioned ‘medicine’, its value will be negligible. And this may be sooner than a mum may think, if they make the same gross underestimation as the pill’s inventor, who has clearly forgotten that the old trick of holding a mirror up to a word to uncover its meaning is quite literally child’s play.
   
   Candy-coating the issue further, the matriarchal architect of this double-edged wonder makes a considerably naive comparison between a mother’s comforting love and a sugary tablet – she would do just as well to liken her affections to a tube of Love Hearts wrapped in plastic.
   
   Actually, cuddles, unlike sugar, release endorphins (‘happy’ chemicals) that make us feel better.  Even so, if a kid really needs a sugar ‘fix’, then their mum will probably buy them some proper sweets (like Starburst) or chocolate (which also releases endorphins), which will no doubt make them feel better psychologically, even if they O-D and feel sick with it.
   
   However, as with any palatable (addictive) sugar-based substance, it would not be advisable to consume large quantities of Obecalp. Yet, with such an ineffective ‘treatment’ its intake would be difficult to moderate.
   
   In the midst of the investigation into Red Bull that revealed that the ‘energy’ drink aimed at the student market, is regularly distributed on campus, has resulted in one school implementing a ban on the toxic sugar-based substance, controlled intake of Obecalp would be advisable until some further research is done into what constitutes a ‘safe’ amount.
   
   More crucially, people should be more aware of the risks that a quick-fix solution poses to what may be deeper unresolved issues that a child is experiencing, or conversely, that could be fixed with a cuddle.
   
   Put simply, Obecalp should be held up to a mirror and exposed for what it really is.
   
   By Amanda Carey/MOLI

7. 

   Richard Burton: The Last Action Hero?

   17.Jun.08, 09:21 EDT
   
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   “The man wants to wander, and he must do so, or he shall die”- extract from Burton’s Arabian Peninsula, 1856
   
   A fitting abridgment of the life and times of vivacious Victorian explorer and writer, Captain Sir Richard Burton, whose famously documented travels to Asia and Africa were explored last week by actor Rupert Everett in a witty Channel 4 documentary: The Victorian Sex Explorer
   
   Defining Burton as the ‘ultimate escapologist’, similarly flamboyant narrator-actor Everett venerates Burton for his maverick attitudes towards death, pain, and the forbidden. Exalting the journey of the unknown above and beyond the ordinary, Burton was no simple observer, but a kind of active anthropologist.
   
   Although he was a man of action and empirical values, Burton was an anti-hero of sorts, perpetually facing prosecution by the British authorities. A courageous and esteemed captain in the army of the ‘Honourable’ East India Company, Burton’s fascination with the indigenous people and customs of 19th century Bombay was much maligned by his army after he published detailed accounts of a male brothel he was sent to spy on.
   
   As Everett walks the streets of Egypt, a gay white man in a religious world that staunchly rejects him, he describes the feeling of being an outsider, perhaps the same attraction that Burton had to a culture to which he did not belong. But exclusion is the handmaiden of observation, and it is precisely this alienation, observes Everett, which enabled Burton to detach himself and therein understand this unlikely paradise.
   
   What masculinity meant in Burton’s time is not the same as it means today, in particular current attitudes towards sexuality, pain, and death. Burton, however, was an exception. His arcane existence made him a man of dubious sexual orientation in an age where homosexuality was a crime.
   
   Last month The Daily Telegraph printed an extract from TV Historian (think Castaway) Neil Oliver’s new book, Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys, in which Oliver laments the spurious decline of so-called ‘manly men’. By Oliver’s definition, such ‘manliness’ can be qualified by a man’s striving towards and ability to succeed within the realms of heroism, honour, and recognition, whereby ‘heroic’ status is obtained on an ill-fated mission, typically upon death.
   
   According to Oliver, in addition to the loss of ‘manly’ values, the so-called ‘decline of the manly man’ is ultimately to do with the loss of clearly defined roles between men and women. I wonder what Mr Oliver would make of Captain Burton, whose courageous trans-continental excursions and honourable literary achievements belie his contentious penchant for eunuchs and the bizarre.
   
   Yet the act of corset-wearing as principle attire was not limited to females in Victorian Britain. ‘Gentlemen’ of the period were also advocates of the male ‘girdle’, by ‘gentlemen’ of the period, and boys in their early teens were encouraged to lose an inch off their waist every year – a manly and venerable practice, indeed!
   
   The Victorian repression of the body (as in corset-wearing) and ignorance surrounding its erogenous zones was in stark contrast with Eastern lovemaking practices, laid out in the Karma Sutra, and controversially translated into English by Burton in the 1840s. In spite of its explicit sexual content, in its native India the Karma Sutra is considered a lifestyle guide, and by enabling people of the Western World to access its secrets, Burton had a manifest influence on the burgeoning sexual revolution of the 20th century.
   
   Herein lies the dichotomy: as Everett implores, ‘up for empire, up for a fight’, yet Burton was horrified by the treatment of natives by fellow officers, to whom hundreds of illegitimate children were born and baptised to avoid infanticide. A noble cause, no doubt.
   
   But is Neil Oliver’s laboured lament about the loss of nobility really just a sentimental deprecation of female entitlement, and a diminution of male values?
   
   These days, in the Western world, we at least have a chance (if not a choice) to close the gap between out-dated masculine and feminine ‘distinctions’ that undermine the fortitude of cultural integrity that Burton’s boundless zeal for understanding and knowledge sought to liberate.
   
   Rather than doing things ‘for the sake of doing them’ (as Oliver would have men do) Burton’s intentions were honourable. Pioneering ‘sexual adventurer’, maverick writer, and explorer, he did things for the sake of self-discovery - the ultimate journey - in the name of Discovery. If anything, his aptitude for disguise and his uninhibited nature pays tribute not to ‘manly men’ but to the very spirit of nobility.
   
   History is not, as Everett claims, so much ‘what you want it to be’ than what you make of it.
   
   By Amanda Carey/MOLI

8. 

   LIFE&LOVE/ The Unwanted Guest

   09.Jun.08, 14:46 EDT
   
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   Ever had your space usurped by an unwelcome guest in a public place?
   
   Ok, now imagine the location is a cafe that’s entirely empty besides the table you’re sat at, and your visitor literally just plonks themselves down in front of you, as if attending an appointment at the sexual-health clinic, where all physical and eye contact is stringently avoided with other patients. I fall victim to such onslaughts almost daily, yet on each occasion I am equally disarmed by the situation, showing the same visible signs of mock-adherence, while I quietly simmer.
   
   Bearing in mind it’s difficult to initiate conflict when someone has already seated themselves in front of or beside you, and it’s even harder to respond to a closed question, the easiest option might be to move to another table. However, the table where you are sat has the only comfortable seating arrangement in the entire room, so to placate you’re unwelcome visitor would not only be an admission of defeat, but would also mean sacrificing your own comfort and wellbeing.
   
   Us stubborn Brits are often criticised for our ‘stiff-upper-lip’, preferring to appear to capitulate than say what we really mean. A smile is forced through tight lips pursed in aggravation, a mere squeak escaping through bitten tongue. 
   
   But let’s suppose you tell them what you really think of this proposed imposition: ‘I’m tired and hungry and I’m trying to steal a couple of precious minutes away from the noise and chitchat of the busy office to which I have to immanently return. So no, I’d rather you didn’t join me, and yes I do mind’ – Such resilience wouldn’t make for a particularly relaxed atmosphere, for you or your ill-mannered table partner.
   
   Besides my obvious abhorrence towards uninvited dinner guests, what I really can’t understand is why anyone would want to sit with a total stranger as they gorge themselves on what can only be described as a malodorous and gory array of processed foods whilst intermittently tapping away at their laptop and slurping their latte.
   
   In future, you might think twice about parking yourself and the entire contents of your office on the single sofa of a public space, especially in the kind of place attended predominantly by retired gentlemen and mothers with pushchairs who will certainly raise their eyebrows at your occupation of the ‘comfy’ corner.
   
   The exception to this rule is the pub, or ‘public house’ – the hub of social interaction by its very definition.
   
   Although I’ve been guilty of using my laptop in a cafe, I think there is something inherently austere about doing so in a pub.  And if someone starts talking to me or motions towards my table, I still feel a compulsion to oblige them, not in the same stiff-upper-lip kind of way as I might in a cafe, but rather out of some forsaken or displaced sense of duty.
   
   Unlike a cafe a pub is not simply a pit-stop or a production-line, but a place of paradoxes: a sanctuary for serene and sometimes sombre reflection, where one may be engaging or equally disparaging, according to his or her mood. Here an unwanted guest can turn into a stalker or become a friend for life.
   
   By Amanda Carey/MOLI

9. 

   LIFE&LOVE/ Stale Mate: Channelling the Wine of Life

   02.Jun.08, 09:40 EDT
   
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   “Friendship, ‘the wine of life’,” said James Boswell, should like a well-stocked cellar, be thus continually renewed.”
   
   The month of May, and its leisurely bank holiday weekends graced our oft-gloomy English shores with early summer sunshine, yet still my head was hung low. Before I moved away from my home of ten years (equivalent to my entire ‘adult’ life) I could find nothing more satisfying than alfresco drinking with friends during British Summer - that intoxicating glow you get from mid-afternoon sunshine mingled with wine.   
   
   However, since breaking my foot, it’s been difficult getting around, and I’ve made little progress getting to know people in a new location. In the absence of ‘drinking buddies’, the beer garden – the great British bastion of drinking holes and fine conversation, has become, for me, distinctly second-rate. If friendship is ‘the wine of life’, then the beer garden is the cellar, and without companions that cellar may as well be empty.
   
   If you are drinking solo, there are a number of ways you can keep yourself occupied, including smoking cigarettes, which serves a number of functions.  For example, the action of inhaling and exhaling can be meditative, and blowing smoke rings actually exercises the muscles around the mouth. Of course a cigarette may also be used simply as a prop to look at ease, especially when the person you want to want strangers to think you’re waiting for doesn’t show.
   
   Food is also a good focal point, as well as being a great mood-enhancer.  But let’s face it: a chip off someone else’s plate always tastes so much better.
   
   It’s not that I don’t enjoy my own company, in fact, I positively relish my solitude, and often at the most inopportune moments (when at work in a busy restaurant, for example). But it’s easy to become complacent when you’re options are limited to your boyfriend; not to say that he isn’t an ample drinking buddy, but co-dependency is not a sustainable condition for a healthy long-term relationship, and neither is alcoholism.
   
   Someone I shall name as a ‘Randomer’ requested my friendship on Facebook the other day. For once it was not a single forty-something male looking for no less than a ‘relationship’, but an attractive young woman (if her profile image was indeed her own, and current). But she already had four hundred and forty eight friends – did she really need any more? Apparently so, at least for the purposes of ‘networking’, although what she was promoting I cannot be sure. Suffice to say I rejected her request.
   
   You may think this was hasty, given my grumbling about being recently friend-deficient, but I already have seventy eight ‘friends’ and still not one drinking buddy among them. Had I accepted this random request, I would have been little more that a unit in an ever-increasing hierarchy of numbers. That said it’s not as if I call (or have possibly ever called) all of the one hundred and seventy two contacts in my phonebook...
   
   I’ve never been the kind of person that finds it difficult to make friends. In fact, I’ve often had the fleeting urge to shed a few over the years, simply to keep the numbers down (namely, the units of alcohol consumed per capita). I often hear of a similar kind of mass culling being performed on social networking sites, such as Facebook: the numbers are regulated on a much larger scale, but the ethos is the same: crowd control.
   
   But however many so-called ‘friends’ you may virtually ‘poke’, tickle, or remove from Facebook, genuine flesh-and-blood buddies will always be in demand.  In fact, having just spent a formidable day sorting out the abundance of nostalgic mementos collecting dust in my dad’s garage (old cards, letters and cheesy ornaments given to me by friends over the years) I was gutted to find out that my boyfriend – my sole ‘buddy’- has just been to see the new Indiana Jones film without me. 
   
   Apparently ‘Buddy’ sites are very popular these days: JOIN HERE NOW – the best value for money and the quickest way to meet new and interesting people. I’m considering joining.
   
   By Amanda Carey/ MOLI

10. 

    Pennies from Heaven

    21.May.08, 06:42 EDT
    
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    That which does not kill us makes us stronger (Friedrich Nietsche)
    
    With ensuing inflation and an unprecedented decline in the housing market, the bleak prospect of a Recession looms ever closer. As we reach the end of a decade of decadence some economists are calling the ‘golden age’, the economic forecast looks gloomy.
    
    In recent years homeowners have become greedy and materially affluent, naively overlooking long-term credit market trends. These greedy buy-to-let investors have accelerated the cost of rental properties dramatically over the past decade and prices are hugely inflated. After recently scrutinizing the rental market, I have come out of what appears to be its backside, convinced that the landlords have been having a private party at the public’s expense.
    
    In Norwich, a typical one bedroom flat equates to a studio (box) room with a separate bathroom, or if you’re lucky two ‘generous’ sized rooms separated by a dud wall, each large enough to fit a single bed or an armchair and small bookcase (what else would you need?) and at £425.00 per month on average, it doesn’t come cheap.
    
    In Brighton (in the ‘overvalued’ south) I was paying the same for a ‘bedsit’ where everything from the plumbing to the bricks and mortar was falling apart, not to mention the shared facilities, which were the subject of many dark hours spent listening sardonically to the agents (ironically) explain how the toilet and shower ‘rooms’ were cleaned regularly regardless of being so curiously dank and dirty after each (spurious) visit from the cleaning contractor.
    
    The current rental market has been described as ‘wobbling’, with rental yields dropping by 50 percent in just a few years. However, if the housing market continues to fall at a sharp rate then landlords will be forced to increase the rent as their rental income fails to cover related mortgage repayments. If (when) tenants cannot cover these repayments landlords will be forced to sell.
    
    'Buy to Let’ appears to be one of the factors causing increasing house costs, pricing the rest of us out of the market by forcing us to pay exorbitant rental fees: it seems to me a market adjustment is long overdue. With mortgage rates soaring, many families are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with mounting debt, with some already facing house repossession. However, more people want house prices to rise than to fall, and that includes homeowners, who will be looking for affordable housing (to buy or rent) elsewhere.
    
    We are currently living beyond our means, but as credit becomes harder for us to obtain we will be forced to consume less. In the West (of the world, not Britain) even the poorest of us are rich as a nation – in spite of what Britain’s environment ministers would have us believe given the £800m ‘loan’ issued ‘with interest’ to the world’s poorest countries in lieu of a sufficient aid budget - we can live on a lot less than we do.
    
    For the past 10 years we have been a nation of consumers lead by a money-driven globalised economy. A lower level of consumption would mean that we could be released from the straightjacket of celebrity ‘culture’, superficial ideals, and material waste. Even some economists have been waxing lyrical about the potentially ‘positive’ aspect of a downturn in the economy, suggesting that the credit crunch could make us stronger as a nation. After all, there’s nothing like adversity to build character.
    
    Faced with the current fuel crisis, a reduction in spending could mean that we get greener, curbing rising utility bills and food prices. A recession could force us to re-evaluate our priorities, and question what life is really about, resulting in the appreciation of other fundamental values, and restoring the natural rhythm of life.
    
    Lower consumption is not consistent with a diminished appreciation of life. Our ability to transform adversity into a challenge or opportunity to improve future prospects will determine our success in life and whether or not prosperity will follow. May we commit to memory the oft-overlooked maxim coined by Benjamin Franklin: a penny saved is a penny earned.
    
    By Amanda Carey/ MOLI

11. 

    LIFE&LOVE/ The Divide of The Sexes In the Age of Celebrity

    14.May.08, 06:19 EDT
    
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    ‘A kind of banalisation has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup’. (JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition)
    
    The present age is a simulation of Ballard’s world, where we are palpably aware of the displacement of so many values; namely love, duty, and integrity. In this “hyper-simulated” world we live amid growing concern over the legacy we will leave our children.
    
    The value of such ideals and their affect on the younger generation are explored in BBC1’s Child of Our Time series, which aims to document the lives of 25 British children until they reach 20 years of age. In The Divide of the Sexes (the first episode of series eight), the children (now eight) undergo a series of simple challenges designed to assess gender roles and the affect on values like wealth, love, and happiness.
    
    The study reveals that all the boys, bar one, value being ‘rich’ above fame, health, and kindness, whilst the girls, as well as one of the boys, favour the latter two qualities. Perhaps it is no wonder that the boy that finds value in health and kindness – who is unafraid to express his sensitive side throughout the programme - has four girlfriends (‘I used to have twelve’, he beams incredulously).
    
    The exaltation of health and prosperity may not seem odd for a generation exposed to adult sexuality, celebrity fame, and extreme dieting. Yet it is not unremarkable that these values are in keeping with those of male-female paradigms in post-war Britain, which marked the disruption of domestic bliss, and when controversy surrounding smoking and lung cancer meant that matters of health reached a heightened significance.
    
    In spite of contemporary parodies of the ‘50s ‘housewife’, the 1950s marked the beginning of social revolution with women entering the workforce in record numbers, marking their liberation from domestic drudgery. Yet in the current social sphere, with parents now striving for equality, children are choosing external role models - namely celebrities.
    
    The girls have unhealthy aspirations towards thinness, drawing a direct correlation between being ‘fat’ and being unhappy, the general consensus being that the bigger the girl, the fewer friends she will have. One girl even goes so far as to deem fat girls ‘nasty’, while the boys, who also associate size with predominance, favour the larger dominant role, with one of the boys declaring outright that he wants to be fat, so he can ‘push people over’.
    
    Here, as in the binary male-female, subjective-objective paradigm, the girls fear the dominant ‘other’, whereas the boys constitute it or are empowered by it. These gender ‘differences’ merely serve to reinforce gender stereotypes, and normalise male and female ideals that have always been in place.
    
    For women, appearances have always required the signature of cultural approval; for these children, the way they look is no different. When given the task of picking an outfit from a selection of clothes, the girls opt for bright pink figure-hugging outfits, reminiscent of their pop star role-models.
    
    These girls know that looking good is a recipe for female success, a landmark of opportunity, and directly relate the success of their female role-models to their appearances. One girl stands out – a self-professed ‘tomboy’ - preferring not to ‘waste time thinking about what to wear in the morning’. But this concern is not just something the other girls are concerned about. The boys, who all opt for hoody, baggy trousers, and a baseball hat cocked to one side, are similarly concerned with their appearance. However, unlike the girls, whose choice of clothes emulate the sex-encoded ‘heels and lycra’ look that adorns their idols, the boys dress to appear confidant, and are less concerned with their appearances to attract the opposite sex than for appearances sake.
    
    In a world where boys label cleverness as ‘so boring’, fathers think it’s wrong for boys to play with dolls, and eight-year-old girls worry about staying slim, there is hope that we are moving towards a future where tears are becoming emotion-related, rather than constrained by gender.
    
    Is the divide of the sexes growing?
    
    Western culture is synonymous with the ‘banalisation of celebrity’, yet the search for identity, the desire to belong, and the need to feel wanted remain predominant factors: the transcendent quality of which belies our pessimism.
    
    By Amanda Carey/MOLI

12. 

    Have Patience

    02.May.08, 05:52 EDT
    
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    "Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think”. (Chinese Proverb)
    
    Of the two-hundred and six bones that form the human skeleton, what difference could one small fracture make to your quality of life?
    
    More than you may think.
    
    I fractured one of the metatarsal bones in my foot about a month ago - twenty nine days to be exact – and have to endure another four to six gruelling weeks walking (hopping) on crutches prior to an indefinite period of time hobbling around in a walking boot. That equates to an incarceration period of approximately three months, during which time I will have missed out on countless walks in the park, innumerable showers, and approximately four hundred and twenty working hours.
    
    OK, so I can enjoy long, leisurely baths – that is, providing I don’t slip on a floor tile or knock my foot on the tap. I can also sit in a beer garden, as long as someone can give me a lift into the city and I don’t get so merry on wine I fall over (again). And let’s face it, there are more pressing things in life than serving drinks for minimum wage, but that’s beside the point. What is of consequence is that not only am I unable to enjoy life’s simple pleasures, but my ability to perform basic functions is limited - whether I want to or not.
    
    A publican recently told me that he didn’t leave his bed for three months after sustaining an ankle injury slipping on a bathroom floor tile (ouch). But the idea that this bold, burly man had yielded to his circumstances so readily (bed-pan and all) frankly alarmed me, and I am unable to identify with either his idleness or self-imposed exile.
    
    Perhaps I’m a sucker for punishment, but being a natural born fidget, I find nothing more miserable than doing nothing. I’m not the most patient person I know - in fact, far from it – but I believe in perseverance over passive waiting. As Leo Tolstoy once said, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”  There is nothing so deadening to the human spirit as inactivity.
    
    Even so - and I am loathe to admit – in the past month even I have succumb to the idle virtues daytime TV and lengthy siestas. Whoever said patience is a virtue clearly didn’t have to tolerate back-to-back talk-shows.
    
    Besides its obvious inconveniences, the impact of an injury to levels of health and fitness is also remarkable. And ladies: if your primary means of getting around involves hopping about on crutches, you will need to invest in a supportive bra. If you suffer with ‘bingo-wings’ (arm flab for those that don’t) you’ll wonder why you didn’t start training your upper body sooner.
    
    Adverse side-effects, such as calloused hands and muscular atrophy are counterbalanced by newly acquired strength in the upper extremities, in addition to significant improvement to overall balance and poise. You’ll find this new-found stability decreases your risk of falling over and hurting yourself, so you’ll probably be kicking yourself for not incorporating hopping into your exercise routine sooner.
    
    By far the most surprising aspect of a visible injury is the inconsiderateness of others. Not to mention so-called friends that give you nick-names like ‘Skippy’ and ‘Hop-Along’...
    
    Taxi drivers are, for the most part, a friendly and amenable sort, helping offload luggage and sometimes even adjusting the driver’s seat to make room for battered limbs and crutches. Unsurprisingly, such good humour is not de rigour amongst say, the typical stranger in the street.  But much to my horror and shame, even the average customer in a service establishment (bar/ restaurant) is determinedly unhelpful.
    
    When it comes to negotiating stairs and doors women are especially nonchalant. Whilst they wouldn’t hesitate to help either a pregnant woman or mother struggling through a doorway armed with a pushchair, the sight of a young woman using one crutch as a battering ram and the other to keep her balance only provokes the odd derisive smile, and at best raises a few eyebrows.
    
    I’m beginning to think the refusal to succumb to a slothful bed-ridden existence is an inconvenience – not so much for the hindered – but for everybody else.
    
    Amanda Carey/MOLI

13. 

    The Fallacy of Unrequited Love

    25.Apr.08, 05:42 EDT
    
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    'It is said that man experiences his world. What does that mean?’ (Martin Buber)
    
    In his essay ‘I and Thou’, philosopher and theologian Martin Buber speaks of the power of ‘the world of relation’. According to Buber, whilst relation is mutual, the world has no part in the ‘I’ singular, regardless of whether it relates to inner or outer experience.
    
    Now you may be wondering what this has to do with unrequited love. The answer is everything.
    
    When it comes to love, it is standard to give the ‘I’ singular predominance. But we cannot experience love until we are fully engaged in ‘the world of relation’, in a sphere of knowing, when we look at what is over and against us. But knowledge is not equivalent to Truth. It is composed of infinite ideas, whereas Truth is an absolute: the sum of knowledge and action.
    
    Often when we speak of being ‘in love’ (regardless of whether that love is reciprocated) we are trying to offer an explanation or justification of an experience of love, when in fact it is only a description of our feelings or wishes. When love is described but not reciprocated it adopts a limited role of substitution, occupying a fictional space otherwise filled with experience.
    
    Unrequited love is insatiable.
    
    The prefix describes the differences inscrutably innate within it. ‘Un-requited love’ is the ultimate dichotomy: defined by disorder and disequilibrium. The very imbalances concurrent with human experience that Love seeks to disavow. We might just as well call it ‘unborn love’, a mere twinkle in the eye of Love.
    
    Love is a state of revelation and influence. Without these fundamental conditions we cannot experience love, only describe it. In circumstances of ‘unrequited love’, love is an idea that we hide behind, an image onto which we project an idea of perfection, a boundless inclination (desire, impulse) towards love, rather than reciprocal influence:
    
    A girl in love wishes the faithfulness and devotion of her love could be tested by the faithlessness of the man she loves.’(Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals)
    
    According to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, we use love’s virtues to exploit our desires. He posits that when we claim to commit ‘self-sacrificial’ acts ‘in the name of love’, they are not wholly ‘un-egoistic’, as we do so not for love’s sake, but for our own: ‘man loves something of himself, an idea, a desire, an offspring, more than something else of himself.’
    
    In Ovid’s depiction of the Narcissus myth of Greek legend, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection and in doing so becomes a victim of unrequited love. The obsession proves fatal, and Narcissus dies staring at his own reflection in a stream, too vain to draw away from his image or to drink from the water, afraid he might damage his reflection. The prophet Teiresias foretells of Narcissus’ fate to Echo, a nymph who pines for Narcissus’s love, saying that he could live to an old age ‘as long as he never knew himself’.
    
    When love is deflected by the object of love (as in unrequited love) it is self-originating and therefore even less virtuous (‘un-egoistic’) than reciprocal love. But in the face of so much that is inexplicable, ‘unrequited love’ is just a complicated ‘idea’, a mere reflection or chimera of the realm of fear and self-doubt within which Love functions.
    
    Often when we talk of love we speak of loss and gain, winning and losing, giving and taking. But when love is forsaken it becomes a justification in itself, for itself. When one loves for the sake of love alone, there is no victor.
    
    Unrequited love is akin to Beckett vision of inertia in Waiting for Godot.  For those whom Godot will never come, waiting becomes an end in itself, his presence is substituted for ideas, and no one will be saved that cannot save themselves: ‘Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come –‘.
    
    'I know it's over, still I cling
    I don't know where else I can go.
    
    And I know it's over
    And it never really began
    But in my heart it was so real
    And you even spoke to me...’
    
    (The Smiths, I Know It’s Over)
    
    By Amanda Carey/MOLI

14. This Blog Post is rated Mature.
15. 

    ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT/ Rules of Attraction: ‘Sleeping with my Sister’

    11.Apr.08, 10:56 EDT
    
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    (Channel 4, Cutting Edge series, broadcast on 27 March ‘08)
    
    This documentary explores the intense connection felt between American couple Tom and Stephanie, and British couple Nick and Danielle respectively, as they face public scrutiny, and in the latter case, criminal prosecution.
    
    Both relationships bear the common feature that each party experiences a strongly emotional and erotic attraction to their partner: each one is extraordinary in that they are siblings.
    
    From a biological perspective, the two relationships that the programme follows are incestuous. After their mother finds them in a lovers’ embrace, half-brother and sister, Nick and Danielle, are arrested and consequently face life-imprisonment for the charge of incest. After enduring 244 days apart, the courts decide in favour of their co-habitation on the basis that they revoke any sexual relationship.
    
    Danielle is infertile, yet a sexual relationship is illegal. In spite of the moral and ethical ramifications of Nick and Danielle’s union, the realm of thought and emotion remains closed to the law: ‘I still love her and that is not going to change for anyone’, says Nick.
    
    Tom and Stephanie are also in love, despite the fact that they are also half brother and sister, meeting for the first time into their thirties. Similarly to Nick and Danielle, Tom and Stephanie hope for a future where their union might not bear the hallmark of incest: "I don't understand what the crime is," says Tom. "We are just two human beings in love."
    
    The fact remains that incest avoidance (specifically interbreeding) occurs throughout the animal kingdom, and with good reason, where congenital birth defects are more likely to arise. However, if their bond is predominantly and instinctively a psychological one, the question remains whether Western society should criminalise intimate relations between couples like Nick and Danielle (who are genetically unable to bear children), or Tom and Stephanie (who choose not to).
    
    If the union does not pose biological or genetic consequences, is any sentence fair for perpetrators of a ‘victimless’ crime?
    
    Nick turns to the phenomenon of GSA (Genetic Sexual Attraction) to justify the extraordinary feelings he shares with his half-sister. A contributing factor to GSA is the lure of the familiar or similar.
    
    Siblings, like all close relatives, will share some common physical and/or behavioural traits that they are likely to find attractive in a partner. These two case studies are just two of innumerable cases where children are brought up apart – often in adoptive circumstances - then meet as adults. GSA examines the complex and powerful erotic feelings that such reunions can release, and which are contrary to conventional sexual and moral structures.
    
    Although GSA may explain these couples’ extraordinary bonds, an undercurrent of uncertainty runs through the programme: ‘In some ways it was weird...confusing’, claims Nick, but ‘it didn’t feel wrong’. GSA helps to explain that such strong feelings between siblings could belong to a delayed developmental process that brings them closer to their own identity, an identity that they may have felt disconnected from upon their early separation or as adopted children.
    
    Around half of the reunions between siblings result in obsessive behaviour, evidenced by both examples of incest that this documentary follows, and qualified by Nick’s remark that he and Danielle ‘can’t bear to be without each other’. Similarly, Tom and Stephanie, who were both happily married for fifteen years, are prepared to "risk everything for a romantic union.
    
    However, can this paradigm of co-dependency and exclusivity ever make up for their disownment by family and friends, or the impact on the three children that Tom leaves behind, as well as the wife that he ‘still loves’ but is no longer ‘in love’ with?
    
    Like a higher purchase arrangement, a relationship that is unethical in principle leaves everything to chance and someone will have to forfeit their possessions (usually immaterial) or compromise their integrity. If love is not immutable, where love has a past but no tangible future, we reach an impasse. There are so many reasons why love can be wrong, where love is futile: can transgressing those boundaries ever lead to a happy union? Just because we may feel intensely erotic feelings for someone it does not always follow that we should act upon these emotions or desires.
    
    Nick’s fierce convictions veil his underlying regret: "If I'd known about GSA before, I think forewarned is forearmed and I don't think it would have happened because I probably wouldn't have let it happen.”
    
    As powerful and brutal as human emotion can be, as in all action engaging the emotions Love and Desire comes with responsibility. As individuals it is within our power to prevent a relationship from developing significantly, and as we belong to a collective consciousness, we have a duty to control our behaviour and resolve our emotions where desire and ethics are conflicting values. Where love is reactive, impulsive (if it is anything but), where we bend the rules of genetic and accepted moral codes, we must ultimately be prepared to face the consequences.
    
    We live in the age of the sperm donor, in an age where jealous partners of murdered lovers are convicted of ‘crimes of passion’. The universal preoccupation with the theme of incest – and the avoidance of it (‘incest taboo’) – could be seen as a reflection of, or even a contributing factor to our deep-seated primitive fears.
    
    The condemning of incestuous feelings and acting upon those desires, as in the case of Nick and Danielle, and Tom and Stephanie, aims to alienate the accused and in doing so will ultimately reinforce their experience of the relationship as a profoundly spiritual experience and physical bond.
    
    By Amanda Carey/MOLI

16. 

    Setting the Record Straight

    26.Mar.08, 06:54 EDT
    
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    ‘Five Mistakes Women make in Bed’: Setting the record straight .
    
    When I read this article, I felt I had to set some things straight, on behalf of the female species. Let men have their say on women’s sexual ‘habits’ but let’s not pretend that just because a man expresses an opinion that he’s giving an honest or accurate response.
    
    It’s not that we expect men to be ‘mind readers’, but it’d be nice if men could perform oral sex on us unprompted, just as they frequently expect us to (and by the way, real life isn’t a porn film: we don’t all get off on it). Unlike men, who find no problem issuing verbal demands during sex (which can be a real turn off, by the way) a lot of women prefer to go with the flow, so to speak, and as many of my girlfriends will attest, it’s not always about achieving climax.
    
    In fact, I have three close girlfriends who have never reached a climax (through intercourse or masturbation). I used to attribute this to their partners’ shortcomings or sheer laziness, but more careful consideration of their natures led me to the observation they all share the common (dis)advantages: control and self-restraint. Although these can be admirable (enviable) qualities in small measures, I am strongly of the opinion that this common inability to reach orgasm is predominantly psychological: a fear of the sway or influence of another over their bodies (and yes, sometimes because we are ‘paranoid’ of our bodies). Another consequence of this is that women do require a lot more mental stimulation than men to work us into a sexual frenzy.
    
    That’s why I’m wary (weary) of the real value of ‘sex’ books. Sure, some of the ‘tips’ work (on some men sometimes) but a lot of them don’t, and they’re less likely to work on women. Besides what are you going to do – apply the ‘techniques’ step by step, referring to the guide as you go along, while your partner tries to keep focus? People are different: each with their own idiosyncrasies - isn’t half the fun finding out what these are?
    
    That’s why one night stands are generally well, less than mind-blowing. Both parties go into the experience a bit blind, and one or the other (usually both) usually come out the other end so embarrassed by their inability to please (or frustrated by their partner’s) that they never want to see one another again. The following morning, one party – either in reprisal of their dignity or in a desperate plea for a long-term relationship – will often seize the opportunity to improve upon their first performance, but by now doubt has invariably turned desire into disgust and any further intimacy (particularly in the cold light of day) can become unbearable.
    
    Guys really can be fickle: they moan when their partner’s goal is not simply to pleasure them (like in Porn, right?) but if their girlfriend initiates sex while they’re watching TV or downloading music, men get grouchy. And if a girl takes control during sex, or she does something unexpected, men get freaked out.  So, to suggest that most women ‘leave it all up to him’ really is delusional. Guys probably think about sex more than they think about sensuality: for them, sex is tantamount to gratification. For women, sex is more than a quick release: it’s about sensory engagement.
    
    By Amanda Carey/MOLI