Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality [Liner Notes] by White Town
Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality [Liner Notes] by White Town

Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality [Liner Notes]

White Town * Track #21 On Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality

Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality [Liner Notes] Lyrics

[all text stylised in lowercase letters]

An Idiot Writes

When I was young, no more than five or six, I had a friend called Catherine. She was a loud, proud tomboy and I loved her. Most of the kids would play the old 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' game but Catherine was the most infamous exponent. She was always intrigued by my tiny cock because it was the only brown one she'd ever seen. We used to play in this fashion for hours. She'd demand I expose myself and I, scaryfyingly excited, would pull my pants down. She'd always coo at the colour (What was I meant to havе as a little Indian boy? A pink one?) and then, fulfilling thе kid law, would show me her hairless pale cunt. Sometimes we'd touch each other, fuelled by a heady mixture of kid-sex and simple curiosity. Other times we'd pee in front of each other. One time I distinctly remember trying on her knickers and both of us nearly dying of laughter because we already knew, at that tender age, that only girls were meant to wear flowery underwear. Eventually when my family moved from Norwich, I cried for days, mainly because I missed Catherine. And also because Bristol was even more overtly racist than Norfolk had been

I loved Catherine for the way she saw me as just another kid, to the other girls and boys I was nearly always just a smelly paki, a nigg*r, a coon, or at best a darkie, similar to the charming submissive stereo-types so popular in those children's books mostly written by fascistic upper-class imperialists. The other children would point at drawings of smiling Indian women in gorgeous saris, waving Union Jacks at visiting British royalty, and say "See! We gave your lot railways! Without us you'd all be in mud huts! Stupid coons!" But to Catherine I was a friend. We were both outsiders. She was shunned for her boyishness (especially by the most coquettish, girly-girls) and obsession with 'down-unders', I for the dreadful social faux-pas of being born, (white) god forbid, with the wrong colour skin. Looking back, the most important component of my friendship with Catherine was that we were equal. Nothing we ever did sexually was dirty or sinful in that uniquely adult way. Even the urination was only us, er, pissing about. Now, as then, I never once think of Catherine as being a slut, whore, slag, tart, or any of the other names the 'normal' kids branded her with. She wasn't 'dirty'. Our sex wasn't 'dirty'. She was just a little girl. And she was my friend.

So what's happened to me in the last twenty-one years so that I now feel compelled to sit and type out happy personal memories I'd rather not share at all? Is it merely rampant egomania? Is it just a cutesy-wutesy way of packaging yet more indie-boy angst? No

Being Bolshy

What's happened is that I can't be silent any longer. I've taken enough beatings from fascists, I've listened to too many male judges condoning rape and child abuse. I've sat eating while on T.V. African babies shit themselves to death as a direct result of Western foreign policy, only to hear some smug Tory bastard suggest that 'perhaps these women should be sterilized if they can't afford children.' Hitler would be proud of you, you fucking racist, sexist idiot! I've had three girlfriends and two of them had been bullied viciously as girls, one had been physically abused by her father and one had been raped at fifteen. Of my female friends, the overwhelming majority have been pressured into unwanted intercourse by their 'lovers', subject to incestuous sexual abuse, or simply raped outright, often by husbands or long-term boyfriends. Now, whenever I meet a woman for the first time, a part of me is thinking, 'What horrors have you been through?' And reading through books like Marilyn French's 'War Against Women' or Andrea Dworkin's 'Intercourse' only confirms that the women I know are experiencing the 'average' atrocities women experience around the whole world, within every subdivision of race, creed or class

Because I refuse to be silent about the war against women being waged both by capitalist patriarchy and individual men, I get a lot of flak. Precisely from those men with the greatest vested interest in the subjugation of women - priests, politicos, bosses, boyfriends. I am sick and tired of being told by yet another 'revolutionary', 'Marxist' boy that feminist is only one small part, like anti-racism, of the great, mucho-macho fight against capital. How can you possibly call yourself a socialist if you believe that four thousand years of ingrained, carefully nurtured exploitation of women is going to vanish with the glorious revolution, like some nasty old cobwebs before the bright, red duster? Isn't it obvious that the worker's revolution will never happen without the empowerment and liberation of the half of the human race that does most of the work? Explain to me exactly how these parties can have the effrontery to call themselves revolutionary when they are vastly male-dominated, authoritarian institutions. They would rather engage in macho picket-line adventurism than organise a creche rota that would enable female comrades with children to actually be heard, instead of talked at and ghettoised as another 'single issue.' Unless a party has at least 51% active female membership, (or is trying it's damndest to achieve this) it is fundamentally not revolutionary, Trotskyist, Leninist, Marxist, or socialist. I've always thought that 'fighting fire with fire' was a scientifically dubious metaphor. I'm politically certain that patriarchy cannot be defeated by organisations which, no matter the fiery incentive they use, are in themselves patriarchal

I Was Trotsky's Nun

When I was young, no more than twenty, I met my first lover. She was everything which a boy romantic looks for in an older woman. When she first kissed me I couldn't stop my hands from trembling and I was crying so hard that my breath caught like a child's. For the past couple of years I had been a political activist, marching for this, against that, organising demos and hawking Trotskyist papers in town every Saturday. Behind all this right-on fervour I was just as obsessed with love, women and sex as I am today. But left-wingers are adept at self-censorship. I'd valiantly condemn sexism while never confronting my own. I'd preach from that moral high-ground that only virgin men can occupy. I had never and would never hurt a woman. Oh no, not me. Ohh, all that sexual energy I had. What could I do with it but redirect it into hairshirt socialism, convert it into hatred for 'our enemies' or, inevitably, purge it with a guilty wank over a porn mag I'd swopped at school? I was the epitomy, the blazing ideal of the feminst man. If the world had valued hypocrisy I would have won the Nobel Prize

But when she kissed me something changed forever. I'd never, ever been wanted sexually by a woman before. And the way she wanted me - that went against all the homely little cliches I used to trot out about 'what women really want.' I couldn't understand it. She gave me ten quid and forced me to buy some medium-core porn from the local newsagents. I was so fucking scared that someone from the Labour Party might see me. What if they told my feminist comrades? They'd lynch me! When I tried to lecture her on the wrongness of porn she promptly told me to fuck off and proceeded to have a wank over the women whose footwear annoyed her the least. She fancied women more than I did and she liked men. Until then, having only understood two extremes, I thought women only came in two flavours, gay or straight. She loved fucking both sexes

A lot of the time I'd be impotent because she literally scared me limp. She was so powerful, so fucking intelligent, so sexual that I felt lost and pathetic in comparison. One or two times, when she was pissed or stoned, she'd try to force me to do things I found too disturbing and I'd refuse. She'd shout at me or taunt me until I started crying, then she'd relent and hold me and tell me that she loved me really. Sometimes she said that if I lost weight, I'd look like Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause. She thought I was pretty

The Shape of Love

I loved her absolutely. I still do and I always will. Maybe not forever, just till the day I die. More important than all the sex was the love. That's what changed me. We'd stay up all night, solving the world's problems with the thoughtfulness and gentle grace of lovers, too excited and happy to be bothered about making love physically. I'd criticise her smoking, drinking and drug-abuse, she'd criticise my fatness, abstinence and politics. She'd say that I shouldn't have left school at sixteen but carried on my education instead and gone to university, if only to shag around. We replaced foreplay with arguments about the necessity of democratic centralism in revolutionary parties. She'd take Luxembourg's side, I Lenin's. When she's win the arguments (which was mostly always) I'd pretend to be upset whilst thinking how brilliant she was and how much I wanted to have her babies

You see, for me it's not so much a question of love per se. What's essentially important to me is the shape of love. Do you love a woman for the person that she is or simply because it's expedient to love her? Will that love fade as soon as the affair loses that initial sparkle of newness or will it strengthen with every row and glitch as well as all those easy, romantic times? These are all my subjective value judgments, based on the three important relationships I've had in my life. People say they're in love when they're actually in lust. Then, when that new body and its possible experiences are worn out...hey look! A brand new love! Isn't that handy?

I'm not claiming a monopoly on true love, only my view from the fringe. In a broadly dysfunctional society, dysfunctional relationships are the norm. I'm the deviant, I'm the pervert because I'd rather have an open sexual relationship rather than comply with the sham monogamy most people choose to endorse. In this world, normal well-adjusted citizens watch men inflicting brain damage on each other in a boxing ring and cheer them on, baying for blood. But what about two men kissing each other or, say, tenderly sucking each other's cocks? Oh no, that's perverse...sick! What if children saw it! Little boys might grow up thinking that men are caring, loving and gentle instead of aggressive, brutal sadists. Can't have that, can we?

The socialisation of humans into diametrically opposed genders and one-dimensional, mechanistic sex-roles leads directly to the crippling of the capability to love. The oppression of women that patriarchal capitalism demands needs enforcers. If women are to be kept as slaves, then men must take up the role of slave-master. In accepting this role, men lose their humanity as surely as any Nazi ever did. But this holocaust goes on and on, generation after generation. Every little human child is taken from its natural state (whatever the fuck that is) and shaken, scolded and beaten into being a boy or a girl. Don't do that! Boys don't do that. Little girls shouldn't act like this. Hold those tears in, son. Let it all out sweetie, daddy's here. By the time boys get to six or seven the damage is done and the word 'girl' is the worst insult a boy can receive. From what I've read and personally observed, gender roles have far, far more to do with nurture than nature. If that weren't so then why are they so varied, and sometimes even inverted, from culture to culture?

The major way that evil wins is by our apathy. We don't question, discuss or debate. We simply internalise the values fed to us like obedient little goldfish. Then it's obvious, the world is easy to understand because everything is black and white. If we shoot rockets at civilians in suburban areas then it's okay. Sorry we killed those kids and everything but that's war. (And for god's sake keep those commie anti-war protesters off the six o'clock news!) But if some group bombs one of our planes or capital cities then they're evil murdering terrorist bastards! Violence is right when we use it and wrong when our enemies do. Simple. No worrying, thinking or guilt in that equation. That the men and women who run Western governments have the audacity to call themselves 'Christian' after sanctioning death so glibly is proof in itself that there is no god. Unless she/he's run out of lightning bolts

Against 'Common Sense'

We accept the obviously wrong as if it were the truest gospel ever spoken with the help of the old standby, 'Well, that's just the way things are.' The catechism of apathy. We let ourselves think in types, in discrete boxes, like male versus female, black versus white, gay versus straight, left versus right. As if these categories were real and not merely the extremes of any particular spectrum

Although I know the sexes are different in physical terms, I no longer believe in two sexes the way society conceives them. Most of what is thought of as male or female is only a matter of tradition, culture and power. The basic human template is essentially neuter with the capability of polarising sexually. Clitoris and penis are two words for one homologous organ. Yes, they end up performing different functions and with differing forms from their foetal state but they started as one human organ. The same goes for ovaries and testes. If you don't believe me, go and read some developmental embryology. As a man, I found the journey the testes take more gripping than Lassie Come Home. It'll also prove what I've always thought: men may bluster and boast but women truly do have hidden balls

But again, maybe that joke reinforces the blind bi-polarity that I'm trying so much to kill. Ovaries aren't balls, balls aren't ovaries. Women aren't just men without dicks. That view, pretending to be liberal, sneaks in the back door with a definition of womanhood based on lacking manhood. It's as patronising as saying that black people are just like white people but with dark skin. That may seem a positive, anti-racist statement but as an Indian I do not want to be judged against some supposedly racially-neutral white yardstick. If anything, that yardstick should be black as coal since we've all got African ancestors - you just have to go back far enough. The real Adam and Eve didn't have blond hair and blue eyes. Nobody did, until their great, great, great etc. grandchildren lived in cool enough climates to allow it

Bi-polarity sucks and, perhaps more fundamentally, it's not even true. Since language is essentially a compromise with reality, words like black, white, boy, girl, disabled, gay etc. have to be used so as to avoid the unwieldiness I've displayed in this pamphlet. But to believe that these words in any way represent true underlying structure is misguided. Who defines normality or deviancy? Are gay and straight opposite cliff-edges across a chasm with perhaps a thin pinnacle of bisexuality exactly in the middle? At least bisexuality seems to offer a glimmer of hope in the fluidity of sexuality but a lot of people, of all claimed sexual persuasions, see it as just an opportunity to replace bi-polarity with tri-polarity. Why do we love to belong to little, samey gangs so much? Does being straight mean you've never ever thought about homosex or just never had it? If lesbian parents can be accused of being 'virgin mothers' then can't I accuse every straight man in the world of being a virgin father? Perhaps we should force men to take a cock inside them before allowing them to be fathers, if it's that fucking important. Just to see if you've been paying attention, here's a little test. Put a cross where you think your sexuality falls along the line between the establishment labels:

Homo ____ bi _____ hetero
|__________|_________|

Have you been completely honest? Come on now, if you've put yourself down as ultra-straight, shouldn't that cross be over to the left a little more? You've never even thought about it? Yea, right. Don't worry, I believe you. What about at the extreme left? You're probably an activist, definitely out and rightly proud. But doesn't a label limit as well as define? It necessarily excludes. If things keep going this way we'll all be in our separate little groups and I'll be the only member of the straight-so-far, Indian, male, obese socialist party. What we'll lack in numbers will, I'm sure, be balanced by our absolute integrity. Even if you've put your mark in the middle, I'm sure you'll agree that maybe at different times, maybe with different lovers, you'll drift further towards a particular pole

Against Fascistic Philosophy

The point of the exercise is that I think it shows the shaky nature of bi-polarity. You could replace the extreme terms with any others currently fashionable and the same problems would crop-up. If it was black vs. white, some would consider themselves blacker or whiter than others. Able vs. disabled, male vs. female, the boundaries would blur. If it was political, there'd be no end of squabbling between the Marxists/socialists at one end and the capitalists/fascists at the other. When I use the term fascistic I mean the orthodox, rigid, doctrinaire philosophy that can come from any source, not just the stereotypical right-wing shitheads. I've met fascistic socialists, vegetarians, hippies, queers, bluntheads, liberals, students and sensitive songwriters. All these people considered themselves the antithesis of fascism but what united them with their enemy was their irrationality and their love of their favourite pastime - hating people that didn't look/think/eat/live like them. In that classic teenage way, these people knew they were right and that the rest of the world was wrong. Sometimes, like in bits of this pamphlet, I can easily slip into that mode of thought. It's very comforting and it makes you happy. Moreover, it's the intellectually easy option. Your opponent must be wrong, not because their argument is based on a false premise but because they aren't in your gang, whatever that may be. Soon, you can't even hear any dissenting voices because you've insulated yourself with a layer of like-thinkers. When fascism triumphs absolutely you silence dissent with machine guns in football stadia, gas chambers and state-approved mental hospitals

Freud vs. Reich

Narrowing this down to sexuality, isn't it obvious that all the perceived rights and wrongs, 'natural' and 'unnatural' have no meaning other than the one we construct. Yeah, I know any die-hard Freudians reading this will have me tagged as just another schizoid neo-Reichian but I guess we live in different worlds. The orthodox Freudian world is an absolutely deterministic, fascistically functionalist one where unbelievers are given the ultimate put-down: being labelled as mad by psychoanalysts

I don't believe a lot of Wilhelm Reich's obviously loopy theories but neither do I unquestioningly accept concepts like oedipal original sin, penis envy or the 'immaturity' of clitoral orgasm just cos Freud had more of his marbles when he croaked. As a thinking individual, I demand proof. By all means criticise Reich's orgone obsession and transition from scientist to metaphysicist (even though all science is philosophy in the purest sense) but treat Freud's ideas with equal empirical scepticism. When every study from Kinsey up to Hite names the clitoris as the major focus for female orgasm (and rates vaginal-only orgasm a relatively minor occurrence) should we conclude that all these women are, in fact, sexually immature? The wrong kind of orgasm? That sounds more like a Woody Allen punchline than an assessment of dysfunction. Do we adjust reality to fit our illusion or do we question our beliefs? I'm not for a minute pretending that I have all the answers. I know that my beliefs may be very easily ridiculed. But they have been filtered and abstracted from my personal experience. If I can see apples falling downwards around me, then I refuse to believe that apples fall upwards simply because that's the orthodox view. You're welcome to hate me for this

For me this means that I believe there is only one sexuality, which includes all possible sexualities. Since the demarcations between the established labels are impossible to see (or even to formally agree on as in scientific models) they do not exist. Also, whilst there may be biologically separate sexes, this is not the basis for human gender. Cock and cunt seem to have very little impact on our definition of feminine vs. masculine, otherwise butch women and camp men would be unable to exist. So, in the common gender sense, I only believe in one sex which contains all possible aspects of 'masculine' and 'feminine'. This all sounds worryingly hippyish and pseudo-Eastern, I know, but I promise you I'm not a part of a tantric conspiracy to take over the world

Just England. And so, here is my list of words which, for me, are on probation because they hide more than than they reveal:

Boy/girl able/disabled black/white gay/straight left/right normal/abnormal evil/good young/old

Every time I read or write one of the I remind myself of their inaccuracy. This is why I can have a three-hour argument about the gender indoctrination implicit in the Head and Shoulders adverts

Love and sexism (with a small 's')

Last year, when I was a lot younger, I fell in love for the third time. The girl that I saw was the one you can hear at the beginning and end of the album. As usual for me, I held on and she let go but I don't want you to get the wrong idea. Where my songs about her fail is in obscuring how much sheer fun it was to just know her. I still have that joy now cos we're still friends. Of course, nowadays she slaps my hand off her if I try to feel her tits and gives me her best scolding look. But we still laugh and talk. I tell her my crap theories (like the ones you've read here) and she humours me and tactfully suggests that perhaps there isn't a world conspiracy orchestrated by Mi5 and the C.I.A. to prevent hip-hop from getting on Top-of-the-Pops. If I can, I'll get her to write something for this insert but she probably won't cos she's too shy. And yes, all the samples of her on the album were included with her blessing. In fact, she wanted more sexually explicit ones but I'm afraid I chickened out. My reason is that some idiot indie-geek might use them to humiliate/threaten girls with but she still thinks I'm a pretty cowardly revolutionary

I remember the day we decided to have a threesome with my DAT-machine as the third, listening partner. That's where the happy samples are from. We spent ages rolling around, snogging and rubbing and then badmouthing each other, all those tender lover's rituals. The last few samples were from much later, after she'd dumped me because she couldn't cope with how much I loved and needed her (ohh such teenage terms! Was I a blameless victim of feminine caprice? Was it that black and white?). My love frightened her because she wondered how far she'd fall if I ever let her down

I'm not bitter. I'm not tragic. I'm the happiest I've ever been in my whole life, thanks to what I learned from her last year. Her love for me then is still with me now. It always will be. That isn't altered by the fact that she loves another man now - why should it be? And I love her more than I did last year. I'm glad she's got someone who respects and loves her, her happiness makes me happy. Yeah, alright, I wouldn't want to have him as a best mate or anything and I think he's a bit of a git but that's just me being childish. Because I love her, I know the most beautiful thing in the world is that she's alive and happy. I believe that I'm sexist. Take a look at my lyrics. They're not whitewashed. Whilst I may not have choruses that go 'Bitch! Slag! Whore!' the content is still sexist, but in that soft, romantic way. I can't help feeling that when I used to meet her the sun would always shine, everything would seem to be glowing and she'd look so pretty that I couldn't look at her while I was driving for fear of crashing. This summer, although the sun's still bright and the sky's just as blue, the world doesn't seem as beautiful to me

Of course, I don't see all women in this way but I have to admit that I have a sexist preference for women. I prefer being with women and the people I've learned the most from in my life have been my lovers, who happened to be women. Maybe that's not sexist because if I was gay, I'd be saying the same thing about men, if I had the same personality as I do now. I dunno - you work it out. But I do know that every second with a girlfriend has been as intense and moulding as a year of my normal, solo life. Yes, I learned a lot standing on picket lines, or from books, friends, whatever, but I learned far more just lying in bed with someone who loved and cared for me. Again, I don't know why. It's certainly true that I used to be far too obsessed with having a girlfriend and feeling that I must be worthless unless I was half of a couple but I don't feel that anymore

The Death of My Desire

The strangest new feeling that I have is what I call, in Marc Almond fashion, the death of my desire. There are some parts I can't express in words alone (which is why I write songs) but the major part is that for the first time in my life, I feel completely comfortable about my sexuality. When I was a kid, I thought I was a bit warped, throughout my political adventurism I despised by carnality and even with my first couple of girlfriends, I sometimes used to feel guilty about wanting them, despite their reassurances. But now that's all gone

I think it's because I've been relatively promiscuous in the last nine months. I finally experienced what I'd been fantasising for most of my life. The shock for me is that I didn't enjoy it. Apart from a couple of relationships that have turned into good sexual friendships, most of my one-afternoon-stands have left me more lonely and depressed than before the non-event. Of course, in fantasies the sex is always great, your partner can telepathically sense your inner kinks and kisses are blinding, passionate affairs. In real life, you're kissing someone and wondering what to have for tea, they nearly rip your foreskin off with their fingernails (maybe somebody's kink but not mine), the pleasure is not shared but one way - from you to her, and then you lose your hard-on because you get bored. The same kind of complains (with some obvious anatomical exchanges) I'd heard for years from female friends. Finally, I joined the sisterhood of bedroom tedium completely when I faked my first orgasm. If you're a man reading this you'll know this is easily done and maybe faked it a couple of times yourself rather than admit to temporary impotence. Every (straight) man I've talked to about sex has admitted some degree of faking, after careful reassurance that I wouldn't think he was queer

Sad, isn't it? All my dreams of wild tantric sex orgies collapsed into meaningless humping that was often less enjoyable than leg cramps. And the worst thing is that I know it's my fault. Because I'd been lucky enough to find lovers that I fitted naturally with, I thought the same would be true with anyone. You can see that in two ways. One is with me as the hopeless romantic, optimistically searching for a new love. The other is that I was again being essentially sexist - assuming that women are basically similar and interchangeable. I think both views were simultaneously true. Although I believe neither now

I still fancy women, in general, as much as ever. The swell of breasts and the curve of hips still affects me like a minor asthma attack. It's just that it all seems a great deal more...academic. What's the point in trying to seduce or persuade someone into having sex with me? How great her body is remains utterly unimportant if we can't connect as people. Unless we can share a joke there's precious little point in sharing a bed. I can't be bothered with all those corny games of flirtation I used to delight in. Amongst my friends, this is still the norm. The women, as much as the men, take up their roles and play by the time-honoured rules. Female friends of mine who are erudite, intelligent thinkers seem to magically transform themselves into their idea of what men desire, i.e. nympho bubbleheads. In this sense, I feel that Andrea Dworkin is absolutely right. Human sexual intercourse may be based in flesh-and-blood biology but it is ultimately a negotiated social contract. And if empowered, liberated feminists need to leave their principles at the foot of the bed so as to enable their being fucked, that doesn't bode well for the rest of us. Women compromise and are compromised. In the straight world, women get hurt more than men but the fact that I've heard similar things from lesbian and gay friends shows that anyone can end up getting shafted

All I can do is my best to change this. First, by refusing to take part in the whole stupid fucking charade. Second, by writing, singing and talking about it. The chances are that I won't change the world but I'm going to try. The death of my desire has let me take a step back. I'm still searching for someone to love and to be loved by but I feel so much less confused than before. I don't need to fuck, or to be fucked by anyone. I may want to make love with someone who wants me but that's entire different. The first is empty, meaningless, normal, average, just the way things are. The second is full, meaningful, abnormal, different, the way things could be. Really, all these bi-polars are linked and balanced as I said before

All these songs, all these words. Is it my attempt to communicate or my vanity? I hope it's the former because I know there are people out there who've heard my songs and hated/loved them. The same goes for the inserts. Either way I win. If you've read all this and thought it's utter crap or found a new bible, I've won. In fact, I take that back. I'd hate it if a thousand mindsets were converted to my one view. Yeuchh. How tedious. I think I'd rather you disagreed. Is it childish of me to enjoy arguing? All truth is subjective. The most I can say is that I've been absolutely honest (i.e. I think I'm telling the truth) in these songs and this pamphlet. Maybe you'll baulk at my sexism, my porn fetish, my criticisms of leftness, my over-use of brackets and under-use of capital letters. That's me, the first graduate from the school of postively-quite-happy nihilists. The negation of the negation. Amateur philosopher, semi-pro songwriter and career pervert. I'll probably be in prison by the time you read this. Unlike you, I'm far from perfect

Until this year I'd only experienced one side of the spectrum. My old desire, in fact my whole philosophy, was the result of my ignorance. I'm still ignorant about many things but I've learned a little too. Now, I feel even luckier to have been loved and I hope, not sadly, that I'll soon feel the beauty of that warmth again

Love and kisses, Jyoti x x x

Sources of inspiration
Some non-fiction
The War Against Women - Marilyn French (Penguin)
Dirty Looks - Pamela Church-Gibson + Roma Gibson (ed.) (BFI)
Intercourse - Andrea Dworkin (Arrow)
Hard Core - Linda Williams (Pandora)
Necessary Illusions - Noam Chomsky (Pluto)
Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle - Alexandra Kollontai (SWP)
The Art of Sexual Ecstasy - Margo Anand (Aquarian/Thorsons)
The Function of the Orgasm - Wilhelm Reich (Condor)
Frued or Reich? - Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and Bela Grunberger (Fab)
Culture & Imperialism - Edward W. Said (Chatto & Windus)
At Your Own Risk - Derek Jarman (Vintage)
Bully for Brontosaurus - Stephen Jay Gould (Hutchinson Radius)
The Transitional Program - Leon Trotsky (Militant)
In Defence of the Marxism - Leon Trotsky (New Park)
Wage Labour & Capital - Karl Marx (Peking)
Wages, Price & Profit - Karl Marx (Peking)
The State & Revolution - Lenin (Peking)
What Is to Be Done? - Lenin (Peking)
The Analysis of Mind - Bertrand Russell (Unwin)
Philosophy & the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists - Louis Althusser (Verso)
Alan M. Turing, the Enigma - Andrew Hodges (Vintage)

Some relevant fiction
Heart Throbs - Max Cabanes (Xpresso)
The Start of the End of It All - Carol Emswiller (Women's Press)
Carmen Dog - Carol Emshwiller (Women's Press)
A Small Killing - Alan Moore & Oscar Zarate (VG)
The State of the Art - Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (Abacus)
The Long Habit of Living - Joe Haldeman (NEL)
The Valis Trilogy - Philip K. Dick (QPBC)
The Two of Them - Joanna Russ (Women's Press)
We Who Are About To... - Joanna Russ (Women's Press)
Sacred Country - Rose Tremain (Sinclair Stevenson)
The Revolution of St. Jone - Lorna Mitchell (Women's Press)

Samples
The samples of speech are all (apart from the one before Save the Earth) used with the consent of the samplees. In order of appearance, thank you to Katy, Rob Fleay, Ian Almanac, Deirdre McSeal and, of course, Katy

Hello love & thanks to everyone who's helped White Town from '89 up till today

For Gizmo
My crazy mixed-up squid

This pamphlet and its contents, however bizarre, copyright 1994 Jyoti Mishra

Satya International Contacts

Are you an isolated loony? Bored of writing necessarily meaningless letters to indie kids who always reply in crayon? Fed-up with your boyfriend/girlfriend going glassy eyed when you want to talk about the essentially conceptual nature of reality? Do folks at car boot sales misunderstand you when you start talking about the tender romance of anal sex? Then fret no more! Satya International Contacts is just the kid of anarcho-syndicalist answer you've been looking for. All you've got to do is to photocopy this page, answer (legibly) the fascistically labelling questions below and then sent it to me along with six (6) first-class English postage stamps (or equivalent I.R.Cs) and an S.A.E. I'll enter your stuff on the Satya supercomputer and then send you back a list of fellow geeks you can write to with a view to changing the world/fucking/discussion modes of alienation. And remember, you too could find love!

Name: ________________________ Age: __ Sex: male/female
Gender (x marks your niche): masculine ________ feminine
Sexuality: gay ___________ straight (space) Politics: left ______ right
Desired matching: your clone __, your opposite __ or anyone __?
Address:

Send to: S.I.C., 49, Silverburn Drive, Oakwood, Derby DE2 2JH

Katy's handwritten letter

It's now been one year and nearly three months since me and Jyoti broke up yet I am still able to come round to his house and sit there half naked
This may make me sound like a bit of a [?] because as you've [?] read I am seeing someone else
[five lines of text scribbled over]
But in Jyoti's world then this doesn't matter. [two scribbled words]
I think that you should write to him but be prepared for a letter back that will possibly change your way of thinking in some way or will in the least make you think differently the next time you have sex before that turns into a admiration piece and - a [?] to sound
Like the founding member of the save our Jyoti society I'll end it
I really hope you like the album. If you do that's great but if you don't [?] as the master himself once said "Bah!"
[scribble]
Also remember next time you have sex make some noise
Love
Katy
P.S. If you'd like to write to [?] [?] please do through Jyoti

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