This aim is heretical in blogging circles. To most bloggers, there is no point in having a blog if you don’t have a loyal and regular readership subscribed to your RSS feed. Most visitors to this blog will be from search engine traffic. I’m all for random one off traffic. If one person learns something from a post on PMDD and another person downloads a free mp3 and neither subscribe to the feed, that’s fine. They’ve both benefited from the blog and found it useful – surely that is a success in of itself.

I do not need to follow blog rules about finding a niche to have an interesting and useful blog. It just won’t be “successful” in terms of the accepted norm. Why not diversity the meaning of “success” in the blogosphere? If someone is searching the internet for information on how to treat PCOS related acne, and they find the solution on my blog – that’s success. If someone is looking for information on a band they can’t find anywhere else but find it here – that’s success. For this blog, success is not about having 10,000 subscribers. If I achieve my goal by writing about the things I want to, and a googler achieves his/her goal by finding information on the specific thing he or she is after, we’ve both had a successful outcome.

You might ask, if I blog about PCOS and music, why not have a separate PCOS blog and music blog? The reason is I’d have to create 5 to10 blogs to cover all the things I write about, and some topics just don’t generate enough material to warrant a dedicated blog. I do have other blogs and they follow the successful blogging formula to some degree, but not this one and that’s fine.

If you are going to write about unrelated topics on the one blog, however, there are a few important things you can do to help your visitors and readers. One is to create categories for each topic you write about and use them effectively. When the punk nerd comes to my blog to download a rare live track, he does not want to find a post about my monthly menstrual blood harvest. Another useful thing you can do is create an RSS feed for each category. Having a single feed is fine, but it’s unlikely that some one who is interested in music posts will also want to read about Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. So it would be wise to create a feed for the categories you blog about regularly. I haven’t done this myself, but, it’s a good idea.

If you just want to write for pleasure and not glory, for your own development as a writer and not subscriber numbers, the most effective way to create an “unsuccessful blog” is to not choose a niche and enjoy your writing and blogging freedom.

Do you have an “Unsuccessful” blog?

‘Digital Ethnography and the Anthropology of YouTube’ is a fun presentation and a good demonstration of how anthropology, a discipline some perceive to only apply to the study of cultures past, is also the study of cultures current and emerging. I would think that in this digital age it would be an exciting time to be an anthropologist!

While watching this presentation I kept thinking about Erving Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and how the ideas contained therein could be utilized in a study of the presentation of self on YouTube, especially in relation to vblogs. As a sociologist with a keen interest in self and identity, I concur with Dr. Wesch when he says YouTube is a fascinating place for those who share this interest.

You can also view the post about this video on Professor Wesch’s blog. The video he produced which he refers to in this presentation can be viewed here.

One of the most exciting elements of the hit BBC series Spooks is that it is often filmed on the streets of London amongst real people. Working with a small crew the actors perform their roles right in thick of the hustle and bustle of daily London life. This approach to filming grounds the ambitious plots in a genuine sense of reality that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. The resulting visual authenticity aids in minimizing any possible implausibilities of the intricate story lines for which Spooks is renown.

The astute viewer might on occasion notice that this authenticity is sometimes betrayed by a bystander looking straight into camera. These shots are usually edited out but every now and then one slips through. While this may, for a split second, betray the dramatic illusion, it at the same time reinforces the feeling that the furtive world of Spooks (fictitious or otherwise) inhabits the same world we do.

Only the most reticent of London based Spooks fans will not admit to being on hyper-alert during the months when Spooks is filmed, quietly hoping to stumble upon Ros Myers or Lucas North in the course of their daily commute. Given the keen interest in the show, one of the consequences of filming among the general populous is that the general populous sometimes films back! Throughout the filming of Season 8, Spooks spotters conducted impromptu clandestine operations, surreptitiously acquiring and uploading a range of photographic, video and eye witness intelligence to Flickr, Youtube and Twitter.

Below I’ve assembled some of the Season 8 intel posted on the internet throughout April to July of this year. One imagines that Kudos would prefer these Spooks snippets would not make their way onto the internets, and as a fan who likes to remain ignorant of even the most incidental aspects of plot before they go to air, I can appreciate this view. But at the same time, one can’t deny the obvious appeal of fans spying on Spooks and giving the show a taste of its own medicine.

Spooks Spotting – Season 8

Spooks filming sighting on 5:12 AM Apr 3rd
From Twitter “They’re filming Spooks on the street where i work. keep trying to linger on the street to be an extra! no one biting sadly!”

Spooks filming at Royal Festival Hall
Uploaded to YouTube on May 17, 2009

Spooks Season 8 Shoot featuring Ros Myers (Hermione Norris)
Shot on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 June 2009, uploaded to YouTube June 13, 2009

Plus stills from the same shoot uploaded to Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26eight/sets/72157619595533697/

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) at South Bank
Uploaded to Flickr on June 26, 2009
The Scoop! Image One | Image Two

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) meeting a contact at London Eye
Uploaded to YouTube on July 06, 2009

Video of Stills taken at Royal Festival Hall Shoot
Uploaded to YouTube on July 11, 2009

Spooks fans, please let me know if anything should be added to this list.

One of the reasons I came to ponder this question is due to the comments I’ve received from some of my friends regarding my appearance. I am a rock/punk chick at heart, but I am not tattooed, pierced, made up, or have a hot hair cut and color. People I know have told me – “you should get pierced”, “you should get some tattoos, you’d look hot!”. So far I have resisted the desire of others to turn me into some kind of carbon copy Suicide Girl.

Why do they suggest I make these kinds of changes to my appearance? I think it’s because there is a perceived discordance between the type of person I am and how I look. And an underlying belief that if you’re into certain things you should look a certain way. These friends know what music I’m into and what beliefs I hold. So as a consequence it is expected, and encouraged, that I present myself in a manner that reflects these things. I’m supposed to adorn myself and my body with the signs and symbols of the culture(s) that I identify with. But with my unstyled hair and nerd grrl glasses I look more like a daggy sci-fi geek than a music geek, and therefore, incidentally, I don’t communicate through my appearance “what I’m about”.

Like most people there have been times when I’ve thought about having my hair dyed and getting a tattoo, but I can’t escape the feeling of falseness these things invoke in me. What others might see as a “natural extension and expression of identity”, in my case I see these things as a calculated manipulation of how I can make others see me. If I exchange my glasses for contact lenses I’ll look hotter. If I get my hair colored and styled I’ll look more rock. If I get a tattoo I’ll look more hardcore, and thus BE more hardcore. The truth is I’m hot, rock and hardcore without those things, but as people tend to use shallow criteria based on how people decorate themselves to figure out what kind of person someone is, I am not considered to be any of the above. And that’s fine with me. I could dress and present myself in way that would communicate to the world my internal identity, but with the money I have, I’d prefer to spend it on records, rather than on fashions and decorations that would communicate to others what records I might have.

It seems to me that we use appearance to judge and attract others, and consequently, instead of taking the time to talk to people to get to know and understand them, we take a glance. From this glance we derive information from which we make a judgment about them. We don’t admit to, or perhaps are not conscious of this, but we know it. And the fact we know it is illustrated by the care we take in our presentation, so when people take a glance at us, they will derive the “right” information and make the judgment about us that we want them to. All this apparent manipulation makes me wonder when we really connect on a human to human level, rather than with the illusions of identity.

In alternative/punk/hardcore circles we tend to mock mainstream people for being fashion victims and blindly following the trends. I don’t know why we laugh at them, because from my point of view there is a fashion that people emulate in so-called alternative scenes as well. For a community which immortalizes individuality, I am continually surprised and disappointed with the uniformity and conformity with which these ‘individuals’ present themselves. Yes, we look different from mainstream types, but among ourselves, we share “a look”. So in that sense I don’t think that makes us that different from “them” at all.

Spikes and studs anyone?

I do recall one time mentioning to a friend that I was thinking of trying cloth pads (such as lunapads). When I explained to her what they were after her repeated requests for clarification, she screwed up her face in utter revulsion and declared THAT’S DISGUSTING! I found her response somewhat contradictory considering that she was quite prepared to wash the most vile smelling shit out of her baby’s cloth nappies, but the idea of washing menstrual blood out of cloth pads was to her completely repugnant. I know which one I’d prefer.

Having amused my doctor about the lack of discourse on menstrual blood among my circle of bleeders, he prescribed a three month course of progestin (synthetic progesterone) to help induce a more regular cycle. This was several months before I was diagnosed with PCOS (because I was not overweight it did not occur to him to consider the possibility of PCOS at this time). Within one cycle the progestins kicked in and I was shocked to discover what a normal level of bleeding looked like – I was a bleeding (and scoffing) mother fucker no more.

Every bleeding lady I know likes to joke about how our hormones are like a roller coaster, but this is in fact how the hormones associated with the reproductive cycle ride; they’re meant to ebb and flow. Although I should point out these fluctuations ought not to be any more dramatic than a kiddie roller coaster – so if you feel like you’re on the the big dipper, lady, you’re on the wrong ride.

Progesterone needs to reach a certain level in order to trigger menstruation. My progesterone levels were taking too long to hit their peak, which not only adversely effects bleeding but also produces a prolonged pre-menstrual phase. This discovery was significant for me because it explained why years earlier when I had PMDD, the duration of the PMDD symptoms were sometimes a full 14 days and then some.

With PMDD, depression and other symptoms only occur during the pre-menstrual phase, which should be no longer than 14 days. The fact I was sometimes experiencing symptoms longer than 14 days lead me to question whether I had PMDD and not some other kind of depressive illness. In fact it delayed my seeking professional help because I was unable to determine whether my mental health decline was restricted to the premenstrual period or was more permanent. In the end, after several months of monitoring my mood, I knew I wasn’t in a constant state of depression and figured near enough was good enough.

If I had known about this issue with progesterone back then, I would have sought help for PMDD earlier. It’s amazing to me that even years after recovery, the mysteries of my experience with PMDD are still being revealed.

I did not have this blog at that time. And I stopped seeing the shrink after three sessions because my financial situation simply could not support it. No doubt my failure to make another appointment due to finances was interpreted as resistance on my part; to prevent the shrink delving any deeper into my psyche. Resistance is a normal part of therapy with a psychiatrist, and although I was no different in that respect, I literally did not have any money to continue. Financially speaking, I couldn’t afford to. Mental health wise, I couldn’t afford not to… but at $150 a pop every fortnight, it was beyond my reach.

For therapy with a psychiatrist to be genuinely effective, there ought not be any secrets, any holding back. And that means, he or she ought not to be shielded from knowing about your blog. Although on the one hand you might want to blog honestly about your experience of seeing a psychiatrist without the psychiatrist’s prying eyes…. but on the other hand… part of the process of therapy with a psychiatrist is that you are open with him or her about the therapy itself, in addition to whatever personal issues you are dealing with.

If you want an effective, honest and productive relationship with your therapist, I would not suggest writing a secret blog about your experience of receiving therapy, as it can only create a situation where you are being selective about what you talk about on your blog, and what you talk about with your therapist. Unless of course you are prepared to talk as honestly and openly with your therapist as you do on your blog, in which case if they did read your blog, there wouldn’t be anything you wouldn’t want them to read.

It is important to be aware that writing a secret blog about your therapy might be an unconscious strategy of resistance on your part. It is normal for someone receiving therapy to resist and block the path to vulnerability and transparency that the journey of therapy involves. Writing or creating a secret blog about your therapy, and your therapist, is a way of maintaining a space the therapist can not access and therefore enable you to retain some power in a situation in which you may perceive your power being threatened as the layers that surround you are stripped bare by the therapeutic process. In other words, it’s a way of trying to keep your clothes on when it’s time to get naked. This is not a healthy strategy if you are serious about getting the most out of your therapy.

If you are an avid blogger, writer or documenter, you may be bridled with an overwhelming need to write about your experience with therapy. If this is the case, it would be wise to reflect on the purpose of publicly writing about this on your blog. If you frame it as a means to sort through the issues you encounter in therapy, in manner where this reflection is complimentary to your therapy, this might be a better strategy. Writing, be it in a journal or a blog, is one of the best ways to process our thoughts and gain insight. Use it well, but use it wisely.

The central tenant of patriarchy is the dominate position of men within a society; to lead, to control and make decisions for that society. Patriarchy is maintained by men fulfilling a patriarchal masculinist role, and women fulfilling a submissive, feminine role. Each role contains a range of expectations for the behaviours, interests, occupations each sex “should” perform. It is well understood that women’s potential is denied under this system, it is not well acknowledged that men can suffer under this system as well.

A patriarchal system demands a certain masculinist kind of masculinity from men, in other words, there are a narrow range of ways that men can “be”. Men are expected to live up to and embody a narrow idea of masculinity that values athleticism, aggression, sexual prowess, and a “hard” unemotional exterior, and, it’s compulsory.

Contemporary, compulsory masculinity is essentially defined in opposition to anything feminine, so in one sense masculinity means ‘not being a woman’. Consequently, anything traditionally associated with women or femininity is seen as pollution when it exists in a man, it undermines his masculinity and emasculates him. Masculinity and patriarchy is a collective enterprise, and thus all who are male are expected to embody the type of masculinity that patriarchal society demands. Any man who deviates from the desired form of masculinity undermines the masculinity of all; he lets the team down. Any man who does not conform to desired masculinity will be the subject of ridicule and rejection unless he steps back in line. Team patriarchy is go!

The kind of masculinity that society expects of men is not natural to all men, nor is it healthy to men, or society at large. Living up to the masculine ideal creates stress for men, and generates feelings of inadequacy in many. The kind of masculinity that is desired in men leads to emotional repression. Patriarchy oppresses men emotionally. It tells them that if they express emotions that make them look vulnerable then they are ‘like a woman’ or ‘effeminate’.

Under patriarchy, no man can be his authentic self without a struggle, and without a fight against an oppressive system that demands he conform to unnatural and unhealthy masculinist ideals.

Apart from the fact that SCUM does not represent mainstream feminist thinking, it was not written as a literal piece of work. Contrary to popular mythology, Solanas never formed or lead any organization called The Society for Cutting Up Men; it simply did not exist.

The following piece is the introduction I wrote to the re-published edition. In it I explain the context in which SCUM was written in an attempt to quell the hysteria and misunderstanding of the text.

Introduction to the SCUM Manifesto, Cunt-Struck Press, 2004

I previously published a few paragraphs of the SCUM Manifesto in a zine I put out many years ago. This offended some people because the Manifesto itself is viewed as blatantly sexist and anti-male. I appreciate why some people responded in this way, but from my point of view, just because a text is offensive, I do not in any way consider that to be a valid reason why it should not be read. You do not have to like or agree something in order for it to have value and be worthy of publication. Furthermore, to be offended by this text is to take it at face value not to appreciate the context within which it was written.

The reason I have decided to print and distribute Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto is not because I am a raving man-hater. In fact I have long been a vocal advocate for the involvement of men in the women’s movement. I’m distributing SCUM because I believe, in addition it’s historical value, it is a fascinating piece of work. And while not being a philosophy I advocate you adopt, the text is not totally devoid of merit as some might suggest. It’s confronting, intriguing, confusing, impressive, unsettling, and often amusing.

It goes without saying that Solanas’ depictions of men in the SCUM Manifesto do not accurately describe men as a whole, or even as a significant proportion of men (you decide). The way I like to look at it – SCUM describes a certain type of male. A type of male that while reading the Manifesto you will recognize as men you know and have come into contact with. Perhaps a more accurate way to look at the Manifesto is as a description of a particular male mentality – which some men buy into, to varying degrees, and others do not.

It also is important to note the mentality from which SCUM was written. In an interview where Solanas discussed the Manifesto she said of the Society for Cutting Up Men: “It’s hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. It’s just a literary device. There’s no organization called SCUM.” To which the interviewer suggested: “It’s just you.” Solanas replied: “It’s not even me… I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are in SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM.”

This explanation illustrates that SCUM was written from a particular point of view, a state of mind; not necessarily a state of mind Solanas inhabited. SCUM, as Solanas explained, “is just a literary device”. Many people tend to respond Solanas and the manifesto without taking this into account. I think this is a mistake.

There is a tendency for people dismiss the SCUM Manifesto based on a preconceived notion that Solanas was just an insane woman who shot Andy Warhol and hated men. Solanas was a psychology graduate, who her mother described as having a “terrific sense of humor”. She also worked periodically as a prostitute. Her background in psychology and experiences as a prostitute, I believe, makes her well placed to offer some credible insights into the male psyche. The SCUM Manifesto is not simply a wild diatribe against men. Many of her comments, as you’ll discover, do have a relevancy and familiarity to the men and women in our lives, and are therefore not without merit.

The SCUM Manifesto is also a call to action, which constitutes the most controversial element of the work. The actions called for are not something I suggest you take literally! However in reading them you may feel inspired to consider ways in which you might take action in line with your own beliefs to further the status of women and counter the scourge of capitalism.

To the men who read this I urge you to look upon this work as an attack, not on you personally, but on a certain type of man. Whether you resemble this kind of man or not, is for you to reflect on. To the women who read this, I forewarn you that you do not go unscathed in this text. There is much here for you to reflect on as well.

I publish SCUM unaware of any copyright and ownership issues associated with it. The text is readily available on the internet so I figure there’s no harm in photocopying and distributing it on a non-profit basis. I’ve also included a biography on Solanas that I found on the internet, which I think is important for people to read in order to understand more about the life of the author and its relevance to her work.