To Write About Nothing

2013 has not been a great year for this blog.

Several times I made the decision to stop writing but either through inherent inconsistency or perverse stubbornness (not sure which) I recanted and elected to continue.

In the lead up to 2013 my blog had suffered several attacks from work based sources (as a consequence I can no longer write about work issues) and also, most damagingly, was attacked by a close member of my family. A family member who dismissed this blog as self aggrandisement, self-publicity, a fantasy ego trip and bizarrely as a means of fencing memories and feelings that they plainly thought I had no right to air to the anonymous, fake "sycophants" who read every post that I write [I wish].

The aftermath of all this was that I began to question every flowering of inspiration, every issue that motivated me to write, every idea for a post that happened to impinge upon my brain.

I went from writing three posts a week to barely managing to cough up one.

I accept that for some of you that was a positive outcome.

For me it lead to a year when this blog stopped feeling like it was mine. When my voice was muted, censored, diminished. When it was no longer enough for a subject to be close to my heart in order for me to write about it; I had to somehow justify it to these "other voices" that had insidiously invaded my head and presented me with a list of rules and regulations that I had to obey.

It's taken me the best part 2013 to realize that these voices have no right to be in my head and I have no business at all to be listening to them.

In that sense 2013 has been a great year for this blog.

The blogging landscape has changed enormously since I began writing here in 2006. Many wonderful blogs have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by automated shop windows and market stalls. Blogging has become less about sharing the experience of the everyday (and sometimes the unusual) and more about selling product.

Call me a puritan but I believe the only thing that should truly be sold on a blog is the writing. The words. The language. [So do buy my books.]

The disappearance of wonderful bloggers means less wonderful readers around to comment and bolster the spirits of flagging writers. You few who visit here regularly are very definitely diamonds in the rough. I know there are amazing blogs out there but having tried to find them I can tell you it is like searching for a needle in a haystack that is made of straw pretending to be needles.

But I have come to realize that that too doesn't really matter. Chasing a readership is just another way of obeying a voice in one's head that has no right to be there.

So at the end of 2013 and the start of 2014 - at the end of 1000 posts and hopefully at the start of another 1000 - it is time to rededicate this blog.

Not grandly or overly ambitiously. Not fakely or servilely.

But honestly.

To write as I see fit about things that matter to me and mine. To share and not to impose.

If you don't want to be here then - please, in the nicest possibly way - don't be.

But if you want to stay then know that you are most welcome.

Happy 2014 to you all.

Pornification

So the Co-operative has issued an ultimatum to the UK’s lad’s mag publishers: cover up or push off.

Basically, the publishers of such literary gems as Nuts, Loaded and Zoo have until 9th September to start issuing their journals in “modesty bags” or risk a firm refusal from the Co-op chain to even stock the publications on its 4,000 shelves.

While part of me is smirking at the thought of the busty models on the cover of Loaded being forced into an opaque polythene chastity belt I can see that this is a complicated issue (unlike the content of the issues at the centre of the conflict).

I don’t think anyone would disagree that the sheer amount of virtual female flesh that is currently on display around the Western world is deeply disturbing in its volume. Bus shelters, newsagents, internet, calendars, television and computer games all over our technologically advanced hemisphere are awash with tanned cleavage and airbrushed thigh.

Time was when I was a kid you’d have to strain your neck up to the top shelf of a newsagent to see an exposed naval or the slightest hint of pokie action. Nowadays you have to shift aside glossy images of buoyantly racked soap stars and pop singers exercising their diaphragms by sitting legs akimbo just to get your hands on the latest CBeebies magazine for your children.

Now I am not a prude. I’m a normal, sexually dynamic bloke. If I see a picture of an attractive woman (doesn’t have to be a supermodel – in fact, personally, I have leanings towards the real woman end of the spectrum) I’m going to have the expected response.

But.

It’s a no-brainer that to commodify women and use them to sell product is morally, sexually and intellectually wrong. It’s actually worse when the product that is being sold is sex itself. There’s a weird kind of slavery ethos at work at that point that is worse because it is so insidious. Everyone is compromised by it. Everyone is cheapened.

I really don’t want my boys growing up in a world where one half of the human race is seen merely as a mass marketing tool and the other responds unthinkingly like the tools they undoubtedly are.

And yet I look at some of my blog posts – the last one is a good example – and it is plain that I’m not beyond throwing up a picture of an attractive actress to draw attention to my blog. Sure I don’t take the pictures and I don’t ask the models in question to pose so provocatively but I still use them to attract readers to my blog, to boost my stats.

I’m guilty as charged, milord. I guess it’s a good job my blog isn’t published as a glossy magazine because maybe it would be in a brown paper bag under the counter at the Co-op along with Zoo. Though I would hope that the articles contained inside mine would be a darn sight more thought provoking.

The issue at the heart of the problem is sex education. It hasn’t kept up with the march of progress. The hearts and minds of the young are ceaselessly influenced by the online world. And that world is, to quote shadow health minister Diane Abbott, completely pornified and the pornification has spread out into the real world too. This totally skews the attitudes of the younger generation towards sex, to each other and to themselves. Kids these days have far easier access to hardcore pornography than my generation ever did. Too easy access in my opinion. And it is barely regulated meaning that there’s a lot of nasty stuff out there being passed off as “the norm”. That is highly dangerous to an impressionable mind.

Sex education needs to catch up with this technological boom, catch on to what is happening and redress the balance. Because what is missing from this huge deluge of objectification and sex marketing is emotional content and emotional context – the most important aspect of any kind of sexual relationship. Without it objectification is inevitable.

With it the only thing that is inevitable is a just and righteous sense of outrage.

We need to teach people to re-engage with their hearts and minds – not just their genitals.

At best, chastity belts and modesty bags just sidestep the issue and make the whole topic even more fetishized. At worse they collude and allow the status quo to continue.

And surely nobody but nobody wants the Quo to continue?

Ho ho.

Strapline

Straplines and folds are important.

They are important in life (particularly if you plan any nude sunbathing) and they are doubly important in marketing (where they mean totally different things).

It doesn't matter whether it's a poster, a flier, an advertizing leaflet or even a web site.

You need to get the important stuff above the strapline. Above the fold. With a web site it is good practise not to force your prosepective customer to scroll down too much. People don't like it. It is tiresome. Carpel tunnel syndrome, etc, and all those other health problems that regularly afflict couch potatoes (e.g. swollen right wrists).

Get the exciting stuff up there at the top. Right up where people can see it. All the sexy stuff needs to be there in pole position - the glossy photos, the amazing once-in-a-lifetime prices, the bogof offers, the shiny teeth, the perky ice-cube hardened breasts of your advertizing model (doubly important if the model happens to be female).

People shouldn't have to scroll downwards, or unfold a sheet of A4 to get to the point of what you are trying to sell.

Doubly important is where you place your banner headline.

I cannot stress this enough.

Take a look at the photo above. I scanned this advertizing flier into my computer yesterday exactly as I pulled it from the envelope. It illustrates perfectly the point I am trying to make.

Now. I know what it is supposed to say. Suite Clearance Event.

But that fold... occurring where it does.

When I first saw it, I could have sworn blind the U in suite was an H...

And, yes, when I opened it further I realized that, yes indeed, it should have been an H.

Tits and teeth, people. Tits and teeth.