Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like Anthony.  I like it when he gets air time providing commentary on Le Tour.  And I really like it that he is a passionate supporter of international cycling.  But (sorry, Anthony) I don’t buy this one.

See, Fränk Schleck, older brother of the exceptional Andy and an impressive cyclist in his own right, should be on holiday right now.  Instead he received an eleventh hour call-up to the Giro d’Italia, saying, Fränk, how about it?  And to his credit, Fränk said hey, I’m not quite in form but I like this year’s course and I’ll give it a go.

Tan says ‘I accept that Jakob Fuglsang, RadioShack-Nissan-Trek’s original leader for the Giro, is still out due to injury, but compromising a potential podium at the Tour for an unlikely podium at the Giro? It just doesn’t make sense. Couldn’t Fränk simply have told team manager Johan Bruyneel no?’

To begin with Tan’s latter point, quite apart from any politics and desire to demonstrate goodwill within the team, Fränk’s keen to be there.  He wants to ride the Giro, and why shouldn’t he?  For a cyclist to turn down an opportunity to participate in the Giro, simply because it may impact his performance in Le Tour is to imply that Le Tour is a far more important race, a view with which I’d heartily disagree.  Like Le Tour and Vuelta a España, the Giro’s one of the three Grand Tours, and it’s more than reasonable to attribute our obsession with the Tour – at least in part – to manufactured media hype.  The Giro is one of the world’s great races, a truth that is not in the least diminished by insufficient coverage, nor by slighter interest from once-a-year cycling enthusiasts.  As former race director Angelo Zomegnan says, ‘It is often very different from the Tour de France. The Giro has a life and soul of its own.’

And what of compromising a potential podium finish at Le Tour?  Consider this year’s Tour route for a moment.  Consider that the organisers have significantly added to the distance covered by the three time trials, if not the 6.1km prologue in Liège.  Consider that Fränk is a specialist climber, and that a time trial will potentially defeat him every single time.

Elsewhere, Tan waxes lyrical about O’Grady’s remarkable 2008 performance on the 16.2km individual time trial in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, essentially suggesting that Fränk – to put it more bluntly than Tan – just needs to get his shit together.  But is this fair?  For starters, this year’s Tour route incorporates brutal 41.5km and 53.5km time trials, arguably requiring a somewhat different skill set.  And further, it must be remembered that O’Grady was a part of the team who won the team trials at the 2001 Tour de France and 2006 Vuelta a España.  Certainly, team trialling is yet another different experience, but it does hint that he’s far from a time trialling disappointment.

At least in comparison to previous years, the 2012 Tour is all about the individual time trials, and Fränk ain’t going to love it.  He’s a resolute competitor and I’d be taken aback to see him give less than his best effort in Le Tour, but it isn’t looking like his year.

Interestingly, in other places Tan has made a few comments about the Giro noting that it really is a very close field this year with no stand-out favourite.   He’s said that there are around ten serious contenders for the overall win, and – somewhat inconsistently, given his criticisms – he’s included Fränk in their number.  While I agree it’s a close field, I don’t have a strong opinion on Fränk’s capability to take the race out.  However, if one is going to argue that Fränk’s in the running, it’s curious to suggests he ought to have passed up Giro to improve his chances in a Tour that is really not looking too good.

So, could ‘Fränk simply have told team manager Johan Bruyneel no?’ Perhaps. Should a passionate cyclist pass up a race he truly wants to ride, simply to boost his chances in a more media saturated race which is less than likely to showcase his talent?’

Ride your Giro, Fränk Schleck.  If it makes you happy, you’ve already won.

The underlying gripe driving this post has been bubbling away for a long time.  Far too long a time because I’ve been up to my perfectionist tricks again and had myself convinced that I needed to re-watch every single Amy Pond episode of Doctor Who whilst taking immaculate notes before I could possibly write it.  That, however, is not the only way to do this, and in fact my gripe can be stripped back to the bare bones without losing the point.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the way Amy, Rory and the Doctor have been portrayed.  I’ve seen it on credible feminist blogs, I’ve heard it said in conversation and I’ve seen it posted on fan forums.  (I won’t play name and shame here since I recognise the problem is often societal and structural, even if I do anticipate something of a higher standard from generally privilege-aware people.)  The common thread running through many of these discussions is a disdain for the way Amy has been written, and more specifically her portrayal as a poor damsel torn between two men in a love triangle.  Which, approached from a vanilla feminist point of view, is dreadful, demeaning, patriarchal bullshit.

But I need to call this one out.   None of the highly critical feminist readings I’ve encountered are anything other than blind to monogamous privilege.  Not one.  Maybe I need to up my Google-fu but I can’t find an Amy Pond hating blogger out there who takes a breath to so much as mention the fact that the ‘love triangle’ reading is thoroughly reliant on the assumption that the only real relationships are monogamous ones.  Relationships where a woman loving two people has agency only to choose between them.

To pause and be absolutely clear here, I’m not saying that there aren’t some major problems with Amy’s characterisation from a feminist point of view.  I’m not saying the Amy Pond episodes were written with an explicit commitment to portraying a poly family.  I’m not even saying that a monogamous reading is invalid.  But I am saying that the relationship between the members of the little family on the TARDIS has, over the past couple of seasons, often looked a hell of a lot like a poly family to me.  A real, stumbling-along, first-time poly family with wibbles and insecurities and doubts and a fear that it may just be too hard, but also the structure and core of a deeply loving intimacy between more than two people.  (And before anyone comments to point out that the Doctor and Amy aren’t – at least on screen – having a good, heteronormative shag…just don’t.  Don’t tell me that sex is the defining factor that magically creates a ‘relationship’.  Don’t assume it works that way for anyone other than you.)

So there it is, my dear ones and random-stranger ones.  By all means, write loud and intelligent posts picking apart our popular entertainment.  It’s a worthy use of anyone’s time to do so.  But if you’re going to go to lay into the portrayals of  relationships in that entertainment, take a good, hard look at your own privilege first and think about throwing in a few words pointing out that you’ve made that assumption of monogamy.

I exist.  My lovers, my family, my friends exist.  Oh my how they exist.  But some days in spite of that, it feels like – just maybe – we don’t.

As per last year’s post, a warning.  While many of the articles on this list are work-friendly and generally inoffensive, do be aware that my interests sometimes stray into the gory, morbid and pornographic, and click accordingly.  (This batch contains an article on the war photographer who helped break the My Lai Massacre news, cruel and unusual experimentation, sport, and a giant spider sculpture.)  If you come across any broken links or other errors, leave me a comment and I’ll fix them up.

001 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak
002 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack
003 555 (telephone number)
004 A moron in a hurry
005 Aerogel
006 AFL siren controversy
007 Alder Hey organs scandal
008 Ali Dia (footballer)
009 American Mustache Institute
010 Andreas Grassl
011 Anglo-Zanzibar War
012 Ant mill
013 Barbados v Grenada (1994)
014 Barometer question
015 Bear JJ1
016 Bed burial
017 Bedford Level experiment
018 Benford’s Law
019 Betteridge’s Law of Headlines
020 Bicycle infantry
021 Black fax
022 Blood in the Water match
023 Blood-vomiting game
024 Body snatching
025 Bootstrap paradox
026 Boston Corbett
027 Breaker boy
028 Bugchasing
029 Bummer and Lazarus
030 Burke and Hare
031 Burst of Joy
032 Bus bunching
033 Business speak
034 Bystander effect
035 Camping (game)
036 Canadian Parliamentary Cats
037 Candy desk
038 Cargo cult
039 Casper (cat)
040 Cat piano
041 Cecil Jacobson
042 Cecil Kelley criticality accident
043 Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’s Taxonomy
044 Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler story
045 Cher Ami
046 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus
047 Chess boxing
048 Chicago Tunnel Company
049 Chicken eyeglasses
050 Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office
051 Christian side hug
052 Cliff Young (athlete)
053 Coal hoal
054 Cocktail party effect
055 Coffin birth
056 ComBat
057 Conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia
058 Contaminated currency
059 Copycat suicide
060 Coral Castle
061 Corpse road
062 Cow magnet
063 Crypt of Civilization
064 Cryptomnesia
065 Cultural cringe
066 Curse of the Colonel
067 Cute cat theory of digital activism
068 Dabbawala
069 Darius McCollum
070 Dead mall
071 Deep-sea gigantism
072 Descent from antiquity
073 Digital dark age
074 Dinner by Heston Blumenthal
075 Disappearance of Rebecca Coriam
076 Dog whipper
077 Domino Day 2005 sparrow
078 Doomsday argument
079 Drunkard’s cloak
080 Dunwich
081 Early flying machines
082 Early world maps
083 Eddie’s House
084 Elem Farm Ollie
085 Elevator paradox
086 Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy
087 Ellen A. Martin
088 English As She Is Spoke
089 Euthanasia Coaster
090 Exquisite corpse
091 Falling on a grenade
092 Flirty fishing
093 Floater
094 Florence Y’All Water Tower
095 Four-dimensional space
096 Fox tossing
097 Fred the Undercover Kitty
098 Gaëtan Dugas
099 General Butt Naked
100 George P. Burdell
101 Ghost army
102 Goose pulling
103 Gravity Research Foundation
104 Great Stink
105 Greg Packer
106 Greyfriars Bobby
107 Guess 2/3 of the average
108 H. H. Holmes
109 H. Rochester Sneath
110 Hairy Frog
111 Handlebar Club
112 Hansa Carrier
113 Hard problem of consciousness
114 Harold Hering
115 Hart Island (New York)
116 Hashima Island
117 Helike
118 Helikopter Streichquartett
119 Henry Box Brown
120 Here be dragons
121 Hiroo Onoda
122 History of longitude
123 Hobo
124 Hockney-Falco thesis
125 Hollywood Freeway chickens
126 Hotel toilet paper folding
127 Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
128 Hugh Thompson Jr.
129 Human experimentation in the United States
130 Human flesh search engine
131 Ice-hotel
132 Illusory superiority
133 Imber
134 Impossible colours
135 Inattentional blindness
136 Incident pit
137 Inherited accessory nail of the fifth toe
138 Internet vigilantism
139 James Joseph Dresnok
140 Jedi census phenomenon
141 JetBlue flight attendant incident
142 Joseph Jagger
143 Karl Bushby
144 Kattenstoet
145 Kepler 22b
146 Ketchup as a vegetable
147 Kjærlighetskarusellen
148 Klerksdorp sphere
149 Kowloon Walled City
150 Kuleshov Effect
151 La Princesse
152 Laika
153 Lal Bihari
154 Language of flowers
155 Larry Walters
156 Laser harp
157 Letters of the last resort
158 Lion’s Mane Jellyfish
159 List of company name etymologies
160 List of confidence tricks
161 List of inventors killed by their own inventions
162 Littlewood’s law
163 London matchgirls strike of 1888
164 London Post Office Railway
165 London Underground mosquito
166 Lost in the mall technique
167 Lunokhod 1
168 Magic Roundabout (Swindon)
169 Marvin Heemeyer
170 Mary Ellis Grave
171 Mary Mallon
172 Matthew Robinson, 2nd Baron Rokeby
173 Mayerling Incident
174 Mercy Brown vampire incident
175 Method of loci
176 Miasma theory
177 Mike the Headless Chicken
178 Mill Ends Park
179 Miraculin
180 MissingNo.
181 Missionary Church of Kopimism
182 Moberly-Jourdain incident
183 Mobile Bay Jubilee
184 Montpelier Hill
185 Montreal-Philippines cutlery controversy
186 Moon treaty
187 Motorized recliner incident
188 Mummy brown
189 Murder of Tim McLean
190 My Way killings
191 Myrtle Corbin
192 Nail house
193 Net cafe refugee
194 New York City Subway chaining
195 Nix v. Hedden
196 Nixon’s Enemies List
197 Non-apology
198 Norwegian butter crisis
199 Octopus wrestling
200 On Bullshit
201 Operation Cornflakes
202 Orphan Train
203 Oxford Electric Bell
204 Panelák
205 Parahawking
206 Parking chair
207 Paternoster
208 Paul Erdos
209 Paul is dead
210 Peel P50
211 Pencil test (South Africa)
212 Pepper’s ghost
213 Perpetual traveler
214 Phantom ringing
215 Pink slime
216 Pit of despair
217 Pollen basket
218 Polybius (video game)
219 Portsmouth Sinfonia
220 Powers and abilities of Superman
221 Pranknet
222 Prediction market
223 Premature burial
224 Preview of the War We Do Not Want
225 Principle of least astonishment
226 Project Steve
227 Pruit-Igoe
228 Pulgarsi
229 Quine (computing)
230 Radium Girls
231 Raising of Chicago
232 Realistic conflict theory
233 Roadkill cuisine
234 Ronald L. Haeberle
235 Room 39
236 Rotten and pocket boroughs
237 RP FLIP
238 Russian Woodpecker
239 Sankebetsu brown bear incident
240 Sarajevo Rose
241 Scold’s bridle
242 Season 6B
243 Seasteading
244 Sehnsucht
245 Semaphore line
246 Sexuality of Abraham Lincoln
247 Shaun Greenhaigh
248 Ship of Theseus
249 Shoe-banging incident
250 Shower-curtain effect
251 Silk Road (anonymous marketplace)
252 Sledging (cricket)
253 Smart mob
254 Sockpuppet (Internet)
255 Solving chess
256 Song-plugger
257 Sonjourner Truth
258 St Scholastica Day Riot
259 Stack Interchange
260 Stanislav Petrov
261 Strange loop
262 Sudanese goat marriage incident
263 Sugar glass
264 Svalbard Global Seed Vault
265 Tank man
266 Telegony (pregnancy)
267 Ten Pound Poms
268 The Boy in the Box (Philadelphia)
269 The Day the Music Died
270 The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever
271 Tim Tam Slam
272 Time discipline
273 Timeline of the Future
274 Tip of the tongue
275 Tired and emotional
276 Toilet paper orientation
277 Tower of Wooden Pallets
278 Tri-State Crematory
279 Triboluminescence
280 Troy Hurtubise
281 Tube Challenge
282 Two envelopes problem
283 Unauthorized Apple Stores in China
284 Underground restaurant
285 United States Capitol subway system
286 Unsinkable Sam
287 Venus effect
288 Villejuif leaflet
289 Vinland map
290 Wanda Tinasky
291 War pigeon
292 Waterspout
293 We Can Do It!
294 Weasel program
295 Weather Station Kurt
296 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
297 Witzelsucht
298 Wookey Hole Caves
299 Wreck of the RMS Titanic
300 Zero stroke
301 Zorbing

So, I made a toy.  As a data modeller it shames me – hard-coded numbers in formulae and arbitrary assumptions abound. And because humans are stupidly complex, it ignores about eleventy-million critical variables. However, it amuses and appears to generate not-unreasonable results for most inputs.  (Not-unreasonable results at least, for my brain, which is clearly not your brain.  Unless it is, which would be creepy, so back off zombie and/or clone.)

I haven’t ported it to Google Docs yet, so you’ll need Excel 2007 or later to play:  First Date Resolvatron

Now the computer tells me that I must go and ask someone out to dinner. How awkward.

I’m a researcher. I am passionate about research. And yet I hated every moment spent researching this article.

Search for any combination of words including ‘feminist’ and ‘statistics’ and you’ll see what I mean. There’s no body of work around the importance and use of statistics and data in feminist writing; no discussion around sourcing and interrogating data, and effectively communicating the information derived. Similarly, it seems that feminist posts taking oft-cited statistics and subjecting them to robust analysis don’t exist, or are so overwhelmed by a torrent of vitriol that they are near impossible to find.

Vitriol, you say? The posts I came across while searching for material were dominated by comments like these:

“Feminists never tire from promoting their lies”
“Why Feminism’s Vital Statistics Are Always Wrong”
“You are better off ignoring feminist stats”
“Feminism is the main cause of divorce in America”
“Feminists falsify facts for effect”

There are traps here. To say ‘we should have tried harder’ and so to accept the vitriol and the shaming, and – abhorrently – to blame ourselves. To rage against the often raised (and often valid) point that women must unfailingly conform to a higher standard than men to prove themselves. I’m probably going to fall into a few of those traps, in spite of trying my best.  But regardless, I wanted to write this and release it into the wild, because poor data, lazy research are problems wherever they arise, and it genuinely matters to me that we give these things our best effort – particularly when they pertain to very issues that we care about the most.

So, the researching of this post was a falling into the void in popular feminist writing that lurks in the place of well-referenced, well-researched, statistically sound numbers. A void where I would hope to see women with a passion for statistics vigorously promoting and debating the use of quantitative data. Encountering instead, unreferenced statistics, unsourced numbers, sweeping conclusions based only on anecdotal evidence. I’ve worked as a financial analyst, and now as an economist. I aspire to be the best rationalist I can be, however imperfect my achievement. And it grieves me to see such a deficiency, a great disconnect between two things I hold dear.

It’s not that the figures, the assertions, the conclusions are necessarily incorrect. But even if a number pulled from the ether without verification happens to be correct, this does not validate the process used to derive it. Erroneous – or perhaps worse – fundamentally unverifiable numbers propogate without scrutiny. Consider a number of specific cases. (I apologise in advance for cherry-picking and do note that these too are, ironically, anecdotal. However, given the shortage of self-critique and self-correction in feminist analysis, today we will settle for cautionary tales.)

1. Joan Brumberg, historian and former director of women’s studies at Cornell University wrote in Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease that there were 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities from anorexia nervosa in any given year. Brumberg was misquoting the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association which had stated that there were 150,000 to 200,000 sufferers of of anorexia nervosa in the United States in any given year.

This error might have easily been identified by checking with the National Center for Health Statistics, which gave a figure of 70 deaths from anorexia in 1990. However, widely read authors including Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth and Gloria Steinam in Revolution From Within uncritically cited Brumberg’s figure without seeking out the primary source. (Both authors issued a correction once the error was highlighted.)

Even when writer Christina Hoff Sommers pointed out the mistake, she herself made the error of uncritically taking the Centre for Heath Statistics figure, stating that the actual number of deaths from anorexia was “less than 100 deaths per year.” In not considering the sources of data used by the the National Center for Health Statistics (which happened to be death certificates) she failed to consider heart failure, suicide or other causes of death arising as a consequence of anorexia. In contrast, the [peer reviewed] study, The Course of Eating Disorders (Herzog et al, eds.) indicated that the long-term fatality rate might be closer to 15%. Recognising the mistakes of others does not make one immune to making one’s own, and as Sommers herself said, “Where were the fact checkers, the editors, the skeptical journalists?” And, to give credit where it is due, Sommers has been one of our more vocal watchdogs when it comes to accuracy and factual reporting.

2. The March of Dimes Foundation, a United States non-profit established to work for the health of mothers and babies provides another example. In November 1992, Deborah Louis (then president of the National Women’s Studies Association) posted a message to the Women’s Studies Electronic Board citing the March of Dimes Foundation, stating that, “according to [the] last March of Dimes report, domestic violence (vs. pregnant women) is now responsible for more birth defects than all other causes combined.” Peculiarly, the March of Dimes Foundation did not publish a report on this topic, and was not aware of any research supporting the statement. Indeed, Maureen Corry, director of the March’s Education and Health Promotion Program, said “We have never seen this research before.”

This did not prevent Patricia Ireland, then president of the National Organisation for Women, saying that “battery of pregnant women is the number one cause of birth defects in this country” on the Charlie Rose program in February 1993.

The misinformation then propogated though The Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News and Time magazine before the error was traced to the founder of a domestic violence advocacy project, Sarah Buel of Harvard Law School. Buel had misunderstood a statement made by Caroline Whitehead, a maternal nurse and child-care specialist in North Carolina, who cited a March of Dimes study indicating that more women are screened for birth defects than are screened for domestic battery. Whitehead had made no comment on the connection between battery and birth defects.

3. In January in 1993 at a news conference held by a coalition of women’s groups, reporters were told that Super Bowl Sunday is “the biggest day of the year for violence against women.”  The reporters were futher told that 40% more women would experience domestic battery on that day. (More, one might ask, than on what other day?) Sheila Kuehl (California Women’s Law Center) had used a study conducted at Virginia’s Old Dominion University three years before. Again, the statistic propogated through the media, with Rober Lipsyte of the New York Times referring to the “Abuse Bowl.”

The following day, psychologist and author of The Battered Woman Lenore Walker claimed on Good Morning America that she had compiled a ten-year report that showed the sharp spike in violent incidents against women on Super Bowl Sundays. And the day after that, reporter Lynda Gorov reported in the Boston Globe that women’s hotlines and shelters were “flooded with more calls from victims [on Super Bowl Sunday] than on any other day of the year,” citing “one study of women’s shelters out West” that “showed a 40 per cent climb in calls, a pattern advocates said is repeated nationwide, including Massachusetts.”

When writer Ken Ringle from the Washington Post called Janet Katz, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion and co-author of the study originally cited by Kuehl at the news conference, Katz said “That’s not what we found at all,” and stated that an increase in emergency-room admissions “was not associated with the occurrence of football games in general.”

When Lenore Walker was asked to provide details of the findings from her ‘ten-year study’ she declined to share them, saying “We don’t use them for public consumption, we used them to guide us in advocacy projects.”

4. Since the mid-1980′s statements have have proliferated to the effect that women represent one half of the world’s population and a third of its labour force, are responsible for two-thirds of all working hours, receive a tenth of world income and own less than 1% of all property.

The numbers appeared in 1984 in Robin Morgan’s introduction to a book called Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. I remember seeing them in pamphlets and on posters at university, some fifteen years later. The oldest known source for them is in an editor’s introduction to an issue of the journal Women at Work, published by the International Labour Organisation in 1978, which stated:

“A world profile on women, using selected economic and social indicators, reveals that women constitute one half of the world population and one third of the official labour force; perform nearly two-thirds of work hours; but according to some estimates receive only one-tenth of the world income and possess less than one-hundredth of world property.”

Unsourced. No explanation of the ‘selected’ indicators. No elaboration on where ‘some estimates’ might have come from, or what these might be.

In 2007, author Krishna Ahooja-Patel, the editor responsible for that statement back in 1978, published a book called Development Has A Woman’s Face: Insights from Within the U.N. where she mentions that the formula was her own, and that it was “based on some available global data and others derived by use of fragmentary indicators at the time, in the late 1970s.”

The assumptions underlying Ahooja-Patel’s numbers include a guess that women constituted 33% of the world’s formal workforce and data from ‘several countries’ (unspecified) that they earned 10% to 30% less than men. From this, she took the higher end of the range from the earnings data, rather than a midpoint, and calculated that a third of the world’s total income was earned by women.

Further, Ahooja-Patel’s only explanation of the assertion that women own less than one hundredth of the world’s property is that “if the average wage of women is so low, it can be assumed that they do not normally have any surplus to invest in reproducible or non-reproducible assets.” She cites “various UN statistics” as her source.

For more than a quarter of a century, these numbers have filtered down through publications, women’s groups, the media, the internet and more. Often, the primary source is never stated, giving a misleading impression as to the date, time and context in which they were originally provided. They have been endlessly repeated wherever the issues of women, money, work and property are raised. And yet in their unreliability and unverifiability, they do no justice to feminism’s most critical concerns.

These are tales in isolation, demonstrating the manner in which bad information can indiscriminately spread. Far worse, is how little we care; where are our wonderful, fierce women arguing in favour of excellence in research and analysis? Where are those well-known women who have played key parts in the tales above, warning and educating us by virtue of the lessons they’ve learned? Where are the feminist bloggers, clamouring for an end to apathy and lazy journalism?  They may be out there, but we do not help their voices ring loud enough for me to find them in the world.

We can do better than this. So much better. I know women who are ethicists, financiers, lawyers, economists, actuaries, librarians, curators, researchers, doctors, biologists, accountants, architects, engineers, chemists, anthropologists, writers, geologists, journalists, linguists, computer scientists, pathologists, mathematicians, political scientists and more. Intelligent women who know better than to take a number at face value, or to state a conclusion without credible support. Intelligent women who value quality and who wholeheartedly support a culture of honest analytical contribution and critique.

Sometimes, we are story-tellers. Anecdotes have a valuable role in sharing a message, in communicating a large picture to a small audience. But we are not only story-tellers. We are astoundingly well-educated, connected human beings, and that in itself is a great privilege – the children of a providential intersection of race, class, geography and more.

Do better, loudly and visibly. Because we are astoundingly clever and astoundingly well-educated, and there is no honour in doing less than the best we can.

Useful, Random Internet Stuff

Franklin is a guy I met on LiveJournal who happens to write some good poly / consensual non-monogamy stuff; his intro page is here: http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html   The Polyamory 101, Practical Jealousy Management, and Making Relationships Suck articles linked too on the front page are all a good read, and there are a bunch of other practical entries linked to on the right hand side, He also writes about jealousy and refrigerators here! http://tacit.livejournal.com/157242.html

Gestalt is an ex-lover of a podcaster I discovered very early on when I was starting to research relationship models. He wrote this, and honestly, I just like this because it’s about burritos: http://polytripod.blogspot.com/2009/04/pgs-seven-layer-burrito-of-intimacy.html   And this guy writes polyamory and dim sum metaphors: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/dimsum.html   Clearly I’m obsessed with food and food metaphors.

The Polyamorous Misanthrope is a very good blog; lots of common sense: http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/
The archives are huge and full of interesting of posts, but three I bookmarked for myself were these ones:

Am I Ready For Polyamory – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2008/11/03/am-i-ready-for-polyamory/

The Key Factor to Polyamory Relationship Success – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2010/10/05/the-key-factor-to-polyamory-relationship-success/

Handling Jealousy: How to Fuck Up – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2010/08/18/handling-jealousy-how-to-fuck-up/

Also there’s an interesting blog called Polyamory in the News – http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com – which follows non-monogamy news from a more political and analytical point of view, which is a really nice break from interpersonal/communication/relationship stuff, which can get a bit overwhelming. (One of the things I’ve been learning in the past year is to try to back off sometimes and have a break from trying so goddamn hard. But it’s hard for perfectionists to try hard to back off from trying hard!)

Forums and Podcasts

Minx does the PolyWeekly podcasts, which are generally good value – there’s a huge archive, full of interesting stuff:  http://polyweekly.com/   I haven’t caught up with the podcasts during 2011, so not sure whether the quality of the content has remained high, but I was planning on downloading a whole bunch this month to see. It’s generally been a good resource in the past.

There are also forums on the PolyWeekly site – I don’t check in much anymore (used to a couple of years ago) – I’ve made a couple of good friends via the forum, but they tend to go through their cycles of good and snarkystupid fail (very much like any internet forum).

There are a couple of Australian forums – I have logins for most of them, but haven’t spent any significant time there, so can’t vouch for the quality. One of the main ones is PolyOz – http://polyoz.net.au/home

To be honest, after spending a little while on forums to get an idea of what people’s lives were like, I stopped looking at forums entirely. They’re so very full of people looking for support with their problems, and so lacking in people talking about enjoying the life they’ve chosen. Maybe worth a browse, but at least for me, far from being a really positive resource.

Books

There are also an increasing number of non-monogamy books out there, often from wildly differing points of view (although I’m sure you have a pretty good bullshit detector). I have these ones, which I’m always happy to lend out:

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/157344295X
(Tristan Taormino’s quite an interesting woman – she’s a pornographer, writer & sex educator, and has quite a good site full of non-monogamy resources too – http://www.openingup.net/ Because I am a big perve, I will also note that she is just gorgeous.)

The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1890159018
(This is the first major book written on the subject that I know of; it’s a bit fluffy, ‘love is awesome’ -esque for me, but it is interesting historically.)

Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/158005241X
(Nathalie’s late dog, Tessa, chewed this on up a bit, but it’s still good! It’s partly a narrative of the author’s experiences, with some more abstract discussion, if I recall.)

The Polyamory Handbook:  A User’s Guide:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1434373444
(Pretty thorough and pragmatic; haven’t looked at it for a while, but I think it ticks off most of the major areas worthy of consideration.)

New sites I’ve noticed recently but haven’t had time to look at yet; do not vouch for quality of content (let me know if they’re dreadful!):

http://www.notyourmothersplayground.com

http://www.modernpoly.com

http://polytical.org

http://www.polyday.org.uk

http://worldpolyamoryassociation.net

http:///www.polyamory.org.uk

http://www.lovemore.com

There are also a few other areas that are really worth taking some time to look into, although they’re wall-of-text topics in their own right:

Sexual-health:  Having open, specific and honest conversations, negotiating boundaries and engaging less awkwardly in a discussion of expectations and needs before entering a new relationship.

Communication:   Spending some time reading general information on human communication in interpersonal relationships is so very worthwhile – I can’t overstate the importance of this one. The thing is, we’re not innately good at this (and rarely culturally conditioned to be). My personal experience is that it’s most valuable to look at this as an ongoing process, not as an end-point – owning our fuck-ups is equally important as doing things well in the first place, and we all make mistakes.

Consent & boundaries:  As much as I wish these were easy, clear-cut issues, they’re not. It’s worth – for any human being – putting some serious thought into this area. My own experience is that these issues really come into the foreground when one can’t cruise on ‘this is how ordinary relationships work’ privilege, and that as a socially anxious person, I’ve needed to learn some skills around having conversations I find fundamentally awkward, in spite of the awkwardness.

Kink:   There’s certainly a cross-over between the kink community and the non-monogamous. I suspect it’s because non-monogamy is often a doorway to asking for what you really want, and raising new ideas that are often intimidating to raise. But the non-monogamy community is not the kink community, and it’s important to say explicitly that no-one with an interest in different relationship models should ever feel pressured to be involved in anything beyond their own wishes. I realise that this is obvious, but also that it’s sometimes challenging to see something normalised in a community and to feel some social pressure to conform.

Slut-shaming:  There’s always going to be someone who’s going to deal out some slut-shaming. Such is our messed-up existence, and it’s not a bad idea to be aware of it and do some reading or talking on it. If it happens to you and you’re not dealing with it well (or start to worry that there’s some validity in it), the best approach can be to hand a little of your concern over to your friends or community. Hopefully you will find a kick-ass friend who can shout ‘bring it!’, hug you, and remind you that slut-shaming has roots in intolerance, bigotry and privilege.

Mental health:  Put some time into examining and caring for your own mental health. Just do the work. I cannot conceive of anything more important than this.

Social, aka You Are Not The Only One

For the locals, we have a small and friendly Perth meetup on the first Wednesday of every month (it’s usually at The Court, is purely social – drinks/coffee/food/no agenda) and can vary between around ten and twenty-something people on any given month. We get all sorts of people coming along; those in multi-person households, stable but open relationships, parents with kids, singles, non-monogamy-friendly people who aren’t currently looking for anyone new and so forth. In the last year we’ve started to do some thinking around pub meetings not being as inclusive for everyone as we’d like, and are keen to run some other things in 2012; picnics, rock-climbing and more have been suggested. You can get notifications by signing up to the super-low-volume announcement list here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/perth-poly-meetup   There’s also a closed Facebook group and a Google Calendar available on request. It’s pretty relaxed, isn’t a meat market in any way, and so far we’ve managed to keep it free of creepy people looking to pick up by only spreading it by word-of-mouth. (I’m told that this one time, a guy came and waited until the end to say ‘so…we all know what happens now…’ and incurred the wrath of all, never to return.

As if this post were not sufficient in the way of information-saturation, please do add any of your useful links and recommendations in the comments!

Cary and I have been considering for some time the theoretical problem of introverted polyamorous beings trying to find a way to invent a household that accomodates shared space, creative space, private space and seclusion, sovereignty, sharing of labour, and room for lovers and friends and family. We’re also really interested in concepts of community and family-of-choice, and how to build these things into our lives, and playing with different models of togetherness.

Somehow, after two weeks of looking at houses ‘as if’ and ‘to get an idea what’s possible’ theory tumbled unexpectedly into launching a social experiment of fabulous proportions.

Today our unconditional approval of finance came through from the bank. We have impulsively purchased a townhouse a mere 750m from Flyingblogspot Cottage as joint investors in this madness. We’re about to move into a household that happens to be split into two separate buildings. We’ve bought it as joint investors rather than as partners in a relationship, so if our crazywonderful experiment yields a result of ‘this does not work’, it will be easy and financially sensible to rent it out as an investment.

It’s a great fit for our needs – large for a townhouse in the area, with spaces for bikes and vehicles, a garage for a workshop and outdoor spaces to work in, space for a cat run, a big bright area upstairs with light that will be just perfect for art and sewing and electronics. The cottage appears to be destined to be library and gamerspace, the townhouse (yet to be named) to be artspace and makerspace.

The second time we went to view the house we took Grahame and Nathalie with us – two people who already have keys to Flyingblogspot Cottage and a standing invitation to treat it as home as required. They were excited too, and helpfully tried to balance our judgment by providing a list of pros and cons. Unfortunately, they were not successful in finding any significant cons, and so were forced to invent a claim that they’d heard that ‘this type of carpet causes Face Death’. Bravely, we decided we were willing to risk Face Death.

Then, suddenly and unrelatedly, Sky and Jason mentioned that they were considering moving into a new house near Hyde Park in the near future and we suggested that they might like to be a part of our extended enclave-based household too, should this happen. It turned out that they liked this very much. In spite of the risk of Face Death.

A few weeks later, we had breakfast with the lovely Alexa who lives around the corner, and I quietly told her about her about the plans and how dearly we would welcome her if she were interested. And then I had a moment of ‘argh, too many people!’ until I realised that there were not too many people, but just the right number of people. (Although I am not above trying to lure Nathalie and Grahame down to Highgate, should the opportunity arise. They are special and do not add to the critical mass of people.)

I’ve been trawling the web for some time to find other mad, land-owning-capitalist-pig hippie communists who’ve tried something like this and have had very little luck in finding precedents. And so, shaping the idea of a community of islands is something of a black hole where benefits and problems are not necessarily forseeable. But it’s thrilling too, in the sense that we are inventing something new that we can shape for ourselves. I keep coming up with a multitude of tiny ideas and asking ‘what if…?’

What if my chickens and garden could help feed us all? What if someone slow-cooks a big pot of food and everyone who wants dinner can wander over to eat together? What if, when there are leftovers that we may not eat ourselves, we can send the other houses a message and say to come and pick them up if they will be eaten? What if my garden becomes a our community garden? What if we order those big mixed boxes of fruit and vegetables and share them? What if we put up a pole and share our an internet connection? What if we turn Hyde Park into our weekend breakfast back yard? So many ideas; what if, what if, what if!

However, in my nervous, over-stimulated excitement over this project, I have neglected to mention that there’s a practical (and by ‘practical’ read ‘begging’) side too. Settlement will take place on the 12th of February. In the meantime, Cary is currently living in a big old rental place in Bayswater and has been there for a decade, and is not an enthusiastic declutterer. (An understatement – in fact he is more of a compulsive this-will-be-useful-er.) Somehow, over the weekends and evenings between now and February, we will need to cull, pack and move a house filled with a decade of collected items and I think we will be in desparate need of help. And so, I thought I’d post the list of things we need, in the hope that anyone who is supportive of our experiment might be able to offer some time and love.

Packing, wrapping and taping

Putting together an ‘everything’s free’ garage sale

Supportive company – bring your study, marking, whatever

Clapping

Lifting things

Supportive nods when Cary is making difficult decluttering decisions

Putting things into other things (hur hur hur)

Hugging

Supportive lunch/coffee delivering to lift spirits

Thing-taking-aparting

Freecycling and finding new homes for things

Slapping whenever we get lost in details or culling angst

Planning logistics and problem solving

Cat reassuring (do not wear kitty ears; Zeus hates and fears that)

Cleaning up

Removing plants we want to keep from the garden

Eleventy million other things I’ve probably forgotten

It’s a big job that we’ll need to tackle incrementally rather than an army-for-a-day job. Beers, food, hugs, eternal devotion and the like will naturally be provided to anyone who turns up at any time; we desparately need our friends and family to help us make our experiment happen!

Music has, as ever, been my saving grace in an upsy-downsie year, and so I’m sharing a few of the songs that have been stuck in my head throughout. (If everyone could just take a moment to forget that I said I’d compile a playlist for Zoe and haven’t as yet done so, that would be lovely.)   Some of these took quite a bit of finding, being rare/old/live, and the last one I think, is surely one of my theme songs for the year almost gone.

My Friend the Chocolate Cake – More Heart Than Me

Jeff Martin – Love The One You’re With (cover) – I don’t think a good video of this exists, so you’ll just have to go buy the album.  It’s just about my favourite love song of all time.

The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wheel – rare piano version; this just breaks my heart.

The Tallest Man on Earth – The Gardener

Billy Bragg – Greetings to the New Brunette

Machine Gun Fellatio – Unsent Letter

Nick Drake – Time Has Told Me

Pendulum – Propane Nightmares

Manic Street Preachers – You Stole the Sun from My Heart

Radiohead – No Surprises

Tom Waits – The Piano Has Been Drinking

The Triffids – Tender is the Night

Tool – Wings for Marie

Lou Reed – Perfect Day

Warren Zevon – Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Karnivool – Sleeping Satellite (cover)

Kaki King – Pull Me Out Alive

Amanda Palmer – In My Mind

But maybe it isn’t all that funny,
   but I’ve been fighting all my life.
   But maybe I have to think it’s funny,
   if I want to live before I die,
   and maybe it’s funniest of all, to think I’ll die before I actually see
   that I am exactly the person that I want to be.

For some of the journey, hilarity, stories, silliness, life, the universe and everything flowed between me and the two dear friends who accompanied me on the trail. But much of the time was spent re-reading Marcus Aurelius in the long, light evenings, and contemplating, untangling, thinking, step after step.

There were birds and beetles, tiger snakes – so very many tiger snakes, venomous and shy – and many hours walking under and through the wind farms, the gentle sound of them rocking me to sleep at night.

One night at sunset, I climbed the hill and lay in the grass, photographing the wildflowers in the fading light. There, alone up the hill with nothing but the wind, for a moment holding the logos of the Stoics in my mind and knowing that this is all there is. Remember.

My first attempt to represent this is pretty light in terms of the individuals it encompasses and some of the links and visualisations have been simplified more than I would like, but it’s the genesis for constructing a family-tree-of-choice.  That said, while the number of individuals is not large, the vast majority of you spiral out from the people in the people in the drawing, or from the social hubs there.  (At some point I may have the time and ambition to construct a much bigger and more detailed version, but my relationships with others are something of a moving target since they seem to be stuck in a state of expansion.)

The blue boxes are active social hubs filled with people I care about.  The green boxes are individuals who have connected me to hubs, tending to result in me meeting a whole lot of new people at once.  And the purple boxes are my big damn hero connectors who have individually linked me to three or more other individuals in the chart.

I discovered a few interesting things from this exercise.   Firstly, all of my most active social networks and best loved people spin out from beginning architecture school in 1997.   Secondly,  Siobhan and Sky are unusual in having connected me to both individuals and social hubs.  Thirdly, my brother Dave is a unique and special snowflake (sorry Dave, you are not a unique and special snowflake; you know what you are) and is the only person here that doesn’t have links in or out, although he knows many of the people in the picture.

Most amusingly though, is that The Man With The Hashtag is sitting in equal first place when it comes to connecting me to individuals.  In the face of this evidence, I must humbly concede that he has indirectly been responsible for so much love, support and happiness in my life.  Bless.