In the Telegraph, Peter Whittle bemoans the failure to challenge anti-social behaviour:

Indeed. The suspicion of not being able to count on backup from others no less inconvenienced will tend to inhibit efforts to assert basic civility. I recall one particularly miserable train journey during which a group of four teenagers amused themselves by throwing trainers to each other, narrowly missing the heads of other passengers. When, inevitably, one of the shoes hit a woman in the face, no-one intervened. One of the teenagers laughed and mumbled “sorry,” and the trainer-throwing continued for another minute or so, albeit half-heartedly.

Nearby passengers made sure to direct their attention either downwards to their own shoes or to the woman who’d been struck, with sounds of muted and impotent sympathy, thus excusing themselves from a more direct confrontation. The four teenagers got off the train a minute or two later, by which time an air of self-loathing had spread among the two dozen remaining passengers like an embarrassing smell. It occurred to me that the number of people who could have intervened but didn’t actually worked against any single urge to do so. If two dozen people do nothing, conspicuously, there’s an awareness of a collective decision not to intervene, and a kind of moral inertia.

A more recent experience involved a much smaller number of onlookers, a much larger number of aggressors, and had very different results. I was standing at a bus stop during a mass exodus of secondary school kids late one afternoon. Two elderly women were huddled anxiously at the front of the queue, with me behind – the three of us surrounded by a disordered mass of teenagers that had spread in all directions. As the bus approached, the mass of teenagers surged forward, indifferent to the three people supposedly at the front of the queue. The intimidation was utterly casual. This, presumably, was how they behaved every day of the week.

In a rare moment of alpha male theatre, I blocked their path, faced down the nearest youth and bellowed a demand for order. A moment of total stillness followed. Caught unprepared, the mass of teenagers quickly backed off, silent and non-plussed. Evidently this was something for which no clever riposte had been rehearsed. The unexpected interlude allowed the elderly ladies to make appreciative noises and climb onboard without further harassment.

This is not the easiest thing to do successfully. The stare, body language and bellowing have to be calibrated just so. Too little force and mockery may ensue – from which there’s no recovery. This is, after all, a game of humiliation. You have to look as though you mean it absolutely. Those being bellowed at have to at least entertain the possibility that you may do them serious harm if they fail to comply. The risk of embarrassment has to be theirs and theirs alone. This requires a certain willingness to look like an escaped mental patient, at least temporarily. But looking utterly bonkers and socially incongruous is much easier to do if you’re not inhibited by a large group of other people conspicuously doing nothing.

A reader, Vaclav Lochmann, points us to an announcement for the Meet Animal Meat international conference, organised by the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University. Here’s a taste, as it were:

Informed by feminist investigations of embodiment and bodiliness, we ask: How do we understand our bodily relationship to other animals? How do we embody animals, and how do animals embody us? How are carnal modes of incorporation, intimacy, and inhabitation kinds of contacts forged between “HumAnimals”?

How indeed.

If, as Donna Haraway writes, “animals are everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with,” then how do embodied encounters with animal matter necessarily constitute categories of “human” and “animal”?

Wait for the clever bit.

What is the meaning of meat, and the meat of meaning?

Oh, there’s more.

Sadly, the opportunity to participate in the conference has come and gone. Readers are left to imagine the dizzying insights offered by the keynote speakers. Among them, Carol J. Adams, a “feminist-vegetarian theorist” and author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, in which she “explores a relationship between patriarchal values and meat eating by interweaving the insights of feminism, vegetarianism and literary theory.” The book has been described by the New York Times as “a bible of the vegan community,” and in it Ms Adams advances her belief that,

What, or more precisely, who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture. Patriarchy is a gender system that is implicit in human/animal relationships… Manhood is constructed in our culture by access to meat eating and control of other bodies.

Also sharing wisdom was Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and Gender Studies at USC and author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, in which she “proposes a conception of time and space independent of the influence of normative heterosexual/familial lifestyle.” Halberstam’s areas of, um, expertise include “examining queer temporality – queer uses of time and space that are developed in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” And one can only tremble with regret at missing Richard Twine’s pithy contribution: Embodying Posthumanist Intersectionality and Resisting Transhumanist ‘Enhancement’ Through Feminist Veganism?

Hush now, dry your tears.

I don’t generally think that women are too feeble and befuddled to know what they want. I tend to assume that the women I meet are autonomous and know their own minds, much as I know mine. Others, however, disagree. Radical feminist Margaret Jamison, for instance:

I know I’ve said before – here and elsewhere – that female “heterosexuality” is not a meaningful concept to me. That is, politically, and with regard specifically to radical feminism, I don’t believe that whatever a woman feels in her head (influenced so mandatorily as it is by male supremacy) about her own sexual inclinations really matters in the grand scheme.

Hear that, straight ladies? Your heterosexuality – sorry, your “heterosexuality” – isn’t meaningful. The male supremacy has you duped. Whatever it is you feel – and by extension whatever it is you think – is of no consequence in the “grand scheme” of Margaret Jamison:

An internal self-assessment just really doesn’t matter in comparison with the external interactions, and the way those interactions reflect and perpetuate male supremacy.

Ah. Compared to “external interactions,” your feelings are irrelevant – indeed they most likely aren’t your own. Cynics may already be amending the object of Ms Jamison’s assertions and pondering the likely reaction: “Female ‘homosexuality’ – so-called ‘lesbianism’ – is not a meaningful concept to me. I don’t believe that whatever a woman feels in her head about her own sexual inclinations really matters in the grand scheme.”

Readers may recall similar sentiments being expressed by the Guardian’s Julie Bindel, who insists desire should be reconfigured to comply with ideology. And it’s no use protesting to the contrary. Whatever you might say, you’re collaborating with the oppressor:

Women wanting what men want – the subjugation of women – doesn’t mean that women’s subjugation is now a female desire. It simply means that some women want what men want. They are men’s women. 

If your desires should coincide with those of a man – who, like all men, desires your subjugation – you become his property. I do hope you’re following this.