A Change in the Wind

Love as a force of nature: Jeanette Winterson

From an untitled post at Soaked in Soul:

"I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is live-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies. My little orbit of life circles love. I dare not get any closer. I’m not a mystic seeking final communion. I don’t go out without SPF 15. I protect myself. But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do." -Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Haven't read this book. Review in the Guardian makes it sound far stranger than the quote. Pic references the lighthouse keeper in the book, and comes from Jeffrey Sullivan. It's of the Walton lighthouse in Santa Cruz, lit for Christmas.

Whispering in the ear of nature's secrets: Harriet Monroe

In Nature's Altars, Susan Schrepfer looks at how much it meant to women of the turn of (the 20th) century to go to the mountains. She writes:

"High altitudes...released [women], they said, from the requirement of being a consumer, from "clothes and vanities," from the corsseted, perfumed, and coiffured dictates of polite society. Of a trip into the Sierra's Kern Canyon in l908, Harriet Monroe confided:"

"We learned...to wear our short skirts and high hob-nailed boots...as though we had been born to the joy of them...to be a barbarian and a communist, a homeless and roofless vagabond, liited to one gown or one suit of clothes, to lose one's last hat-pin...to make one's toilet on a slippery bnak, after a brave plunge into an icy river -- all these breaches of convention became commonplaces...part of the adventure, a whispering in the ear of nature's secrets. We knew literally the emancipation of having "one one dress" to put on." 

After her adventures in the mountains, Monroe went on to launch Poetry, which is still this nation's best journal for lyrical thought.  

Fascinating to see how women saw mountain life as freedom, whereas so often men saw it as a competition -- between man and mountain, man and rival man, man and beast. 

The Sierra Club High Trips and why women liked them

In the High Trips, for about thirty years at the start of the 20th century, the Sierra Club as a mountaineering club peaked, surely. On those brilliantly organized journeys, as many as 200 people at time went into the High Sierras, having committed to a walk of a minimum of two hundred miles, over several weeks of hiking. Though the club's founder John Muir was too old and too busy battling the Hetch-Hetch Dam to go, he greatly encouraged these trips, and they were led by the likes of Norman Clyde and David Brower, with great campfire talks and performances as well as great mountains. 

This was a highly evolved society, divided (roughly) into "mountaineers." of the likes of Muir and Brower and Clyde, and "meadoweers" who didn't care for the heights. (Likely I would have been one of the latter number, had I been so fortunate to have been present on the trip.) 

When I talked to Brower on this and other topics, a few years ago, he bemoaned the fact that the National Park Service will no longer approve long trips for Sierra Club backpacking groups. The limit (in the Sierra, at least) today is about eight days.

In his gentle but insistent way, Brower argued that the transformative power of the wilderness is lost if it is restricted to a handful of days. 

True, and perhaps the time has come to remember those extraordinary trips, before everyone alive who remembers them has passed away...for one, the camp photographers included Cedric Wright and Ansel Adams! Here's my fav pic from their 1929 efforts, by Wright, showing a High Trips expedition summiting at Mount Resplendent:

[Sorry about the angle: comes directly from the hand set Bulletin (pdf).]

These High Trips were for the elite of the Sierra Club, and set out to attract intrepid women, and succeeded (although the trips were predominantly male, the women who did go were as adventurous as any man).  

In her gender study of women in the wilderness, "Nature's Altars," Susan Schrepfer finds some interesting examples of women who were drawn to the wilderness because it gave both them and their mates a chance to shed their gender roles. That was part of the idea of the High Trips, that women weren't the domestic slaves. Wasn't easy on these trips, but after a day of mountaineering, a woman didn't have to do the dishes too. 

The club secretary, William Colby, made this clear in a letter to applicants to the High Trips: 

The irksome duties of cooking, dishwashing, and provisioning will be turned over entirely to a commissary department. All transportation of outfits, etc., will be attended to by a committee, such relieving the party of all drudgery and leaving their time entirely free for the enjoyment of scenery and mountain life. The trip will be particularly attractive for women, and every effort made to secure comfort usually lacking in excursions to the high mountains.

Isn't that a dream? "To relieve the party of all drudgery."

Only in California...

50 Shades of love and sex/Valentine's Day 2013

From my cover story in this week's Ventura County Reporter: 

    Since the genetic basis of our species, Homo Sapiens, stabilized approximately 100,000 years ago, the reproductive nature of the human body has not substantially changed. But in the last few years, human sexual experience has substantially changed, especially among the adventurous.

For Valentine’s Day, and especially for “vanilla” people interested in benefiting from the experience of those on the edges of the spectrum, here’s a report from the front lines of sex in Ventura County.

At California Lutheran University (CLU), sociologist Adina Nack, who teaches courses on sexuality, confirms the widespread reports that young people today no longer date in the conventional sense — they “hook up.” But she adds a twist.

“The norm has shifted from dating and relationships to the hook-up culture,” Nack said. “But one of the things [my students] say they like about that phrase is the ambiguity of it. As a sociologist, this is something I have to work to wrap my head around. I am not of that millennial generation, and to me it’s strange for friends to prefer it to be vague. ‘Hooking up’ can mean anything from kissing to going all the way.”

Nack adds that, although both sexes will report their hook-ups on social media, she’s not sure this represents a step forward. Her students still describe a sexual double standard, in which women are judged more harshly for having sex than men.

The lessons to be learned from the BDSM community

One of the most popular of guest speakers in Nack’s sex ed class is a positive sex advocate, Emily Prior, a doctoral student researching sexual experience in the BDSM (Bondage/Discipline Sado/Masochism) community. Nack said that her students were enthralled with Prior, even though in class they laughed nervously at her presentation. 

For Prior, who has always believed in openness in sex, the necessity for safety in sex in the BDSM community has, over time, brought a new and admirable sexual etiquette into being. 

“Imagine that you are a single woman and you are going out with a man or a group of men, knowing that no one is allowed to touch you without your permission,” she said. “It seems like that should be the norm, but it really isn’t. In local [ BDSM] dungeons, no one is allowed to touch anyone without permission, not even to give a hug or hold a person’s hand. It’s a much safer space for a woman than dating.”

At CLU, Nack points out that because of the wide range of sexual possibilities in the BDSM community, communication and negotiation between parties is expected and understood, where it’s often difficult for heterosexual couples. Prior puts it more bluntly. 

“The question in the BDSM community is typically: What do you do? Which means: Do you like to be tied up? Do you like spanking? Are you a top or a bottom? You know immediately whether or not you can be compatible sexually,” she said. “Instead of waiting days or months or years or decades to find out, for example, that your partner won’t actually give you head, you talk about it up front.”

Prior also argues that the BDSM community has a lower rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) than the heterosexual population, although she admitted that hasn’t been proved.

“We only have anecdotal evidence for a lower rate of STD transmission, but it makes sense,” she said. “Most people use protection even if they know their partners, and people are very diligent about disclosure as well as protection. It’s definitely a point of pride in the culture.” 

What is misunderstood about 50 Shades of Gray

It’s not just the negotiation and communication that is underestimated, according to Roylin Downs, the owner/operator of the Kama Sutra Closet lingerie and sex shop in downtown Ventura. It’s the nature of sexual pleasure itself.

Downs points to 50 Shades of Grey, the book by E.L. James about a kinky relationship between an elegant older billionaire and a beautiful young woman, as an example. Despite being reviled by critics for its prose, 50 Shades became the fastest-selling paperback of all time, with 65 million copies in print. It’s still second on the national best-seller list, two years after being published. 

“Our society is suppressive about sexuality,” she said. “My customer is a more vanilla woman, usually, and 70 percent of American women don’t have orgasms during love-making. What 50 Shades of Grey does is show you a woman in her 20s who has an orgasm every time she makes love. Everybody assumes this book is fantasy. But a lot of women are looking at it and thinking: ‘Wait a minute, if she can write about how this woman has this experience in every encounter, why isn’t it possible for me?’ It creates an opening, an opportunity for conversation.”

Downs explained that her most popular single item is the “Kegel balls,” or silver balls that were the first item used by the young woman character in James’ book. They’re used in a playful way by the couple in the book, but have been sold to women in Asia for generations as “ben wa” balls.

 
“In terms of health benefits, after 40, or after childbirth, women often need to tighten their pelvic floor,” Downs said. “Instead of being told by the gynecologist to do exercises, such as sitting forward in your car and tightening, tightening, tightening, which 98 percent of women don’t do because it’s too challenging, you insert these metals balls, and the weight naturally pulls them down, and the muscles naturally tighten. So the Kegel balls have a health benefit, but they also tighten the vagina, so you can have more control during love-making.”

Downs stresses that her upstairs shop, which is open mostly by appointment, is designed to be the sort of shop where a shy woman such as herself or her mother could go without embarrassment, and that she herself doesn’t want anything to do with heavy bondage gear or vulgar sex toys.

“You always start at wherever the most uncomfortable person in the relationship is,” she said. “It’s about creating intimacy. A vibrator might not be the right tool. Maybe it’s about a tickler, or a book, or a massage oil. It’s about creating that sense of touch.”

Sex for older women — and couples

When Downs opened her business four years ago, she set out to distinguish her store from other stores offering adult products, partly by stressing the female-friendly aspects of the store, with no products that looked like body parts, and partly by bringing in experts. Her first speaker was Joan Price, from Northern California, who became an expert in “senior sex,” more or less by accident.

After publishing an exercise manual in 2003, the mature Price had a chance to publicize the book with an appearance on a television talk show in New York. Her agent asked her for a hook — something to make her sound interesting. Price offered that some of her exercises were good for sex, and mentioned, by the way, that she was having “the best sex of her life.” The agent passed this on. Price was booked on to the show.

“I discovered that no one cared about my exercise book,” she wrote about the appearance. “The major question of the evening was: So, Joan, is it true that you’re having the best sex of your life at age 59?”

She explained that, yes, she was, in part because she was in a new relationship with an older man, whom she later married, though he passed away in 2008. And the sex was good. Price argues that, in fact, senior sex can be better than youthful sex for everyone.

“At our age, we’re not so goal-driven,” she said. “The men have slowed down and like the extra touching, and the women have slowed down, too. If you have a good connection, the sex can be better than ever, because we can bring a wealth of wisdom and experience to it. We can communicate in a way we never could before.”

As a young woman, she said, she was never taught anything about the nature of a woman’s sexual pleasure, and she thinks that’s still all too true.

“Too often, young women are still sort of left to the mercy of their partner,” she said. “Sex is whatever the boy thinks it should be.” The good news, she said, is that good information is more available than ever, in forums such as scarletteen.com, and that solutions to most sexual issues are readily available. Her first sex book — Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty — featured her own story, but had many chapters, written by a wide variety of experts, on psychological and sexual topics. 

“I was in an extremely satisfying and exhilarating relationship when I wrote that book,” she said. “I was 61 and my lover was 68. People were telling me that it’s great that you’re having great sex, but they were asking me questions about their own issues. Is vaginal pain normal? No, it’s not. Is there anything that can be done about erectile dysfunction? Yes, there is — e.d. is not a diagnosis, it’s a symptom of something else that’s going on. The problem so often, with my generation, is that we don’t know where to go for good information.”

Price adds that just because she found satisfaction in a committed relationship doesn’t mean that’s best for all older people. In her new book, Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex, she said many reviewers were startled to read about the range of unconventional relationships she found among older people, including polyamorous couples, as well as older women who liked phone sex, casual sex and/or rough sex.

“We see a friendly gray-haired smiling grandmother and we think we know all about her,” she said. “Actually, we have no idea what she’s doing in bed.”

Valentine’s Day: A gay perspective

For John Wilner, the chairman of Ventura County’s [LGBT] Pride committee, Valentine’s Day is less about sex and more about love and acceptance. Although currently single, he longs for the day when he can celebrate Valentine’s Day like any other couple.

“At the end of the day, love is love and a couple is a couple,” he said. “Whether it’s two men, two women, or a man and a woman. There’s even a joke in Portlandia, about a couple made of a transgendered man and a transgendered woman. Whatever the case, the celebration is the same. I’m really heartened when I’m able to see that I can be open and honest with my affection. If you can hold your wife’s hand in public, why can’t I hold my boyfriend’s hand?”

In recent years, the Pride coalition has staged a Valentine’s Day protest at the county government center, with same-sex couples filing petitions to marry, even though they knew that would be rejected. This year — with the issue hanging in the balance at the Supreme Court — Wilner said they called it off. 

“I think people are realizing that marriage is about love and family,” he said. “Times are changing and younger voters are coming on line. I’m really hopeful that this session, we’ll see a court decision restoring our right to marry, and so this year we decided to give the clerk at the government center a break and not put her through all that.” 

 

---

Kit Stolz has been reporting on culture and climate in Ventura County for over a decade — for more, see www.achangeinthewind.com.

 Related links:

Center for Positive Sexuality

Joan Price (senior sex author/expert)

Scarletteen (sex ed for the real world) 

Pegging Paradise (Ruby Ryder)

VC Pride (John Wilner)

Kama Sutra Closet (Roylin Downs) 

Sex and dating: Women no different than men?

An op-ed in last Sunday's New York Times challenged the idea that physiology and evolutionary psychology can explain the differences between men and women.

Author Dan Slater took on three of the most prominent "differences" between the sexual behavior of men and women, beginning with promiscuity: 

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0)

For those of us who like myth-busting, it gets even better. With research, Slater goes on to challenge the idea that women are choosier than men about who they will date, and even the idea that women are less interested in men in casual sex.  

Terri D. Conley, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, set out to re-examine what she calls “one of the largest documented sexuality gender differences,” that men have a greater interest in casual sex than women.

Ms. Conley found the methodology of [an often-cited] 1989 paper [researched on college campuses] to be less than ideal. “No one really comes up to you in the middle of the quad and asks, ‘Will you have sex with me?’ ” she told me recently. “So there needs to be a context for it. If you ask people what they would do in a specific situation, that’s a far more accurate way of getting responses.” In her study, when men and women considered offers of casual sex from famous people, or offers from close friends whom they were told were good in bed, the gender differences in acceptance of casual-sex proposals evaporated nearly to zero.

Slater wants to show that our attitudes about sex today may be spilling over into our assumptions about sex and gender, just as they did for Charles Darwin, who posited that for evolutionary reasons men wanted to go out and make money, and women wanted to stay home and raise children. 

In other words, the evolutionary psychology of its founder in l9th-century Britain miraculously reflected the Victorian era of his time. We must expect the same. And from right (orthodox religion) to the left (certain notorious feminists) there's a surprising consensus that women are less sexual than men.

But as Slater points out, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that in fact women are pretty much the same as men in this arena. Despite physiology.

A radical thought for all concerned to contemplate.   

[Image from a Cranberries video labeled Evolutionary Psychology. Sexuality is complicated and dreamy-- right? That much we should be able to agree on...]

Oddest of strategies to condemn homosexuals: Wendell Berry

The culture mostly ignores the Kentucky-based writer and poet Wendell Berry, despite his vast eloquence, save on two subjects. (Or so he claims.) Undeniably he is heard regarding his distaste for computers, and his compassion for gay people who want to marry. The latter he phrases memorably in an interview with the Associated Baptist Press: 

“The oddest of the strategies to condemn and isolate homosexuals is to propose that homosexual marriage is opposed to and a threat to heterosexual marriage, as if the marriage market is about to be cornered and monopolized by homosexuals,” Berry said. “If this is not industrial capitalist paranoia, it at least follows the pattern of industrial capitalist competitiveness. We must destroy the competition. If somebody else wants what you’ve got, from money to marriage, you must not hesitate to use the government – small of course – to keep them from getting it.”

Image via Jason Gray. 
h/t: Rod Dreher 

The Fair Barbarians: The "New Woman" Climbers of 1900

In Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism,Susan Shrepfer reveals how in the early 20th century the mountains became a sanctuary for what was briefly known as "The New Woman." Unfettered from womanly duties and heavy skirts, these women found a freedom distinct from their urban sisters, the flappers, and arguably more meaningful. Writes Schrepfer:

The majority of women climbers...wrote of deliberately seeking mountains because they were places where they might escape artificial encumbrances, walk as equals of men, and dress comfortably. This implies that women who climbed saw clothes as signifying confinement, subordination, and discomfort. Mountains were places in which to act "the fair barbarian," to indulge "Bohemian tastes," to "redefine the concept of necessities, and to trim skirts." The growing acceptance of athleticism helped such women redefine their feminiity. According to historian Sarah A. Gordon,  "The novelty and marginality of clothing for sports provided a space in which women contested notions of "feminine" and "appropriate" bodies, behavior, and appearances. The "new physical culture" of sports "infused and informed the emerging concepts of the New Woman."

The New Woman apparently faded away with the onslaught of World War II. Now, of course, women can do whatever they wish in the wilds. Heck, a nine year old girl completed the Pacific Crest Trail in 2012. 

"Monkey" is the older kid: she completed the Muir Trail at age seven. 

Humiliation planned for losing candidate: Romney set

The most astonishing book of the year to date around here is critic Wayne Koestenbaum's Humiliation, from 2011, a pained confessional essay about being brought low, about being crushed, about what the pain of embarrassment, shame, and mortification brings to a sufferer.    

Tomorrow the media pillory that Koestenbaum describes so well will begin (it's already started, in fact, even before the race is run). But it's not all bad, Koestenbaum argues!

Here's the critic/poet on the deeper meaning, and worth, of humiiation:

I believe, with Jean Genet, and Jesus Christ, and Oscar Wilde, and a few other martyrs and mysters and troublemakers, that humiliation is a kiln through which the human soul passes, and where it receives burnishing, glazing, and consolidating. Humiliation cooks the spirit to a fine finish. (About the experience of servitude, the great Robert Walser wrote, in his 1907 novel The Tanners, "Strange, too, that you might nonetheless experience this state of affairs as a sort of refuge, a home.") Neither Walser nor I consider humiliation pleasant. But if it didn't contain a silver lining, I wouldn't be examining this dismal category of experience. If humilitation didn't hvae the the potential (sometimes, in certain circumstances) to transfigure the person over whom it casts a noxious cloud, then I'd drop the subject and write about something genuinely redemptive, like white wine. [in the chapter called "Five O'Clock Shadow, a reference to Nixon] 

Nixon was the President most humiliated in our lifetimes until Bill Clinton came along, but Clinton,as Koestenbaum hinted, has been burnished by his trial by his passage through the kiln of media fire. 

The American public never exactly apologized to Clinton for its orgy of shaming during the ill-fated and seemingly endless impeachment debacle, but it's surely not a stretch to say that Clinton's huge popularity today is in part a recognition on the part of the public that they/we/us went too far in blaming/shaming/humiliating the man.

Koestenbaum writes:

When Bill Clinton's extramarital escapades hit the press, I quaked with vicarious shame and outrage that a mere blow job should rock the nation and that this forgivable president and his wife and daughter and Monica Lewinsky and everyone who knew and loved Monica Lewinsky hsould need to suffer in public and be seen by hypocritical viewers and pundits and senators as humiliated beasts...If this book has an ulterior aim, however disreputable, here it is: I want to stand up for those who are publicly shamed for [non-exploitative] sexual conduct. 

The pillory will be virtual, but the pain will be real for Obama or Romney. If the incumbent President loses, for the rest of his life he will be derided, mocked, and scorned for losing an election he should have won. If, more likely, the challenge Romney loses, he will be torn down, sneered at, shunned. It will be his fate, just as in Greek tragedies it was the fate of Cassandra to prophesize murder of her family, and not to be heard by them, or anyone.  

The pillory has already been erected, and Romney already has been splattered by commentators on the right such as Daniel Larison...although in a recent post Larison let up a little bit, in order to put the blame on George W. Bush: 

The Bush administration truly was one of the three or four worst presidential administrations of the last sixty years, and Bush’s party still hasn’t come to grips with what that means for how the rest of the country sees them. In the wake of such a huge failure, it would be almost inexplicable that the public could entrust the Presidency to that same party after just four years. Assuming that Romney loses next week, the puzzle won’t be why he lost, but why he was ever within striking distance in the first place.

Karl Rove and other mainstream right-wingers put the blame on Hurricane Sandy, perhaps to avoid being blamed for choosing a candidate as obviously two-faced as Romney: 

“Obama has temporarily been a bipartisan figure this week. He has been the comforter-in-chief and that helps,” Rove said.

On the other side of the coin, our national Humiliator-in-Chief, Rush Limbaugh, has put the blame on Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, for being insufficiently partisan, and calling him "fat and a fool." 

Is it possible to dislike a politician and not want to see him viciously attacked? Maybe not. Which maybe means that those of us who suffer must learn to love our humiliiations, if we hope to survive them. 

 

The Sessions' source material: "On seeing a sex surrogate"

The trailer for The Sessions could hardly be more charming. This looks to be in the vein of that classic kind of ironic indy flick -- a painful story told in a funny way, like Election or Heathers or Little Miss Sunshine.

Wonderfully, the source material for this lauded movie -- a riveting memoir/essay piece by a Bay Area writer, the late Mark O'Brien -- is readily available on the Web. O'Brien has a riveting story to tell, and tells it gracefully. 

O'Brien describes, for example, how he felt coming back home after his first sexual encounter. 

Dixie pushed me back to my apartment, through the quiet neighborhood of small, old houses and big, old trees. It was a warm day, which I hadn’t noticed on the way over. I asked Dixie about her first sexual experience. When she described it, I felt admitted to something from which I had always felt excluded: the world of adults.

Back home, Dixie put me into the iron lung and set up my computer so that I could write. Pounding the keys with my mouthstick, I wrote in my journal as quickly as I could about my experience, then switched off the computer and tried to nap. But I couldn’t. I was too happy. For the first time, I felt glad to be a man.

In the role of the sex surrogate, actress Helen Hunt went unabashedly nude, and explained why: 

"Anything less than the amount of nudity that's in the film would be antithetical to the spirit of the movie," Hunt said. "For me, the movie is about having a body and everybody's God-given right to get off." 

 Refreshing!

h/t: 24 Frames. 

Pussy Riot: a post-modern band imprisoned for attitude

Speaking of rebellious rockers...it's generally agreed, by both fans and skeptics, that rock and roll is all about attitude, so in these post-modern, post-truth times, it's only natural and proper that Pussy Riot, a Russian group that has never released a record, has become the biggest punk rock band in the world. More famous, with more famous friends (from Daft Punk to Paul McCartney) than any other punk band. 

Not on the basis of their music, which is unexceptional, but on the basis of their self-described "impudence." Being outrageous in an Orthodox church, for instance. Shouting at the tyrant Putin, miming playing guitars, but with no sound, for thirty seconds. The perfect post-modern performance.

For which they were sentenced to two years in prison yesterday, a sentence that rewards their "impudence" with preposterous over-punishment. 

This has occasioned much commentary, but none more telling than from Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, who on his Facebook page recounts a conversation (of his creation, we presume) at a pub, in his usual profane, sly, beguiling style: 

-Pussy Riot.
-That’s just middle-age. It’ll sort itself ou’.
-No. The Russian young ones. The group, like.
-What abou’ them?
-I can’t get me head around it. Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. What the fuck is tha’?
-It’s just the excuse.

-Wha’?
-It’s nothin’ to do with religion. They’re in jail cos Putin doesn’t like them.
-Is that all?
-Listen. Remember punk – back in the day, like?
-The Sex Pistols. God Save the Queen an’ tha’.
-Exactly.
-Brilliant.
-I wasn’t mad about it meself. But annyway. It blew the other music away.
-Glam rock.
-Putin loves it.
-Wha’?
-Glam rock.
-Fuck off.
-Serious. He’s mad into Gary Glitter.
-Tha’ makes sense. They prob’ly like the same videos.
-Ah now. Anyway. Fuckin’ Putin an’ the other cunts in the politburo all have platforms an’ silver suits, an’ he mimes along to I’m The Leader of the Gang an’ Do Yeh Wanna Touch Me.
-Ah, fuck off.
-I’m telling yeh. He’s been doin’ it for years. He fuckin’ hates punk.
-An’ that’s why those young ones are in jail?
-The Pistols made Gary Glitter look ridiculous an’ those three young ones make Putin look even more ridiculous.

Yes.

Irony alert: Important to note that Gary Glitter was once a huge star in the UK, with many hit songs, including the (nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey, good bye) anthem often heard in sports arenas. Also important to note that he was convincted of possession of child pornography in the UK, and then, after fleeing charges on his yacht, traveling the world, and being booted out of Cambodia, again allegedly for sexual abuse of children, was arrested and convicted of child molestation in Vietnam.

Though in his 60's, Glitter served time -- about two and a half years.