Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 - 23:52

Work not so bad this last couple of days, thankfully. Things are still stressful but I had a meeting with my boss on Wednesday and she said I had to do a lot more paperwork, but to make time for this I need to 'do' less of the actions I assign, and stick to managing other people doing them. Learning the art of delegation is a tough one :-)

I saw a documentary this evening about a woman who was attacked by a spurned lover, and had acid thrown in her face, disfiguring her. It was an interesting and moving programme, but it did raise quite a few thoughts. She seemed a nice girl, but I feel that the programme, and one must assume her as well, took some odd stances.

I did find the focus on her disfiguration to be somewhat.. um.. 'incorrect'. Though obviously we live in a society that puts quite a lot of weight on appearance, I'd like to think that myself and other intelligent people see further than that. By focusing more on her facial injury as opposed to the fact she was also brutally raped by the bloke, it raised questions.

I had a lot of sympathy with her, and in many ways thought she was very brave and a decent person in many ways. That said, I had more sympathy with her as a rape victim than her as victim of an acid attack. It seemed that it'd be more understandable (to me) for her neuroses and psychological scars to be due to being a rape victim. Rightly or wrongly, I could accept that more.

Though people do stare and people are affected by appearance, because she was an attractive woman before the attack, her assumptions about what every 'normal' 25yr old woman is 'entitled to' (w.r.t. going out and looking really nice and partying with friends and having the chance to be a model and presenter) did somewhat annoyed me - as they were wrong. I'm not saying she deserved to be attacked, and I am not giving her less sympathy because she was attractive before, but I know plenty of people who are less attractive than her scarred face, and get on with it.

She wasn't an unpleasant person, and did say that her views on superficial attraction had changed (she could see herself marrying another disfigured person) but partly this was due to her having had the fortunateness be be attractive, and then having lost a lot of it. Compared to the more serious ways some other people have been disabled, and some of the big problems that other people have, she came over a little overconcerned with appearance. Her implying her life was over because she couldn't get a job based only on looking nice and smiling.. well that didn't make me sympathetic either.

Afterwards was a show about racism where some American woman conducted an experiment where she tried to show racism by comparison with splitting people according to eye colour. Alas I think her original experiment showed a lot more than this exercise 'with British people'. It was a very crude way of attempting to show inherrant racism in the UK (which we all admit is often more subtle than in other countries) and relied on bullying and deliberately ignoring reason from both sides of the debate, in favour of her just shouting that it proves her point.

There is racism in the UK. I admit that I do have some prejudices against different people, but that's true about my attitudes to non-whites, women and gays. It's where you decide that something constitutes racism and where it doesn't... which is difficult.

I find the macho posturing and materialism of some aspects of black culture to be abhorrant and offensive. I find some of the views of many women on fashion and celebrity culture to be ignorant and trivial and indicative of small-mindedness. I find over the top campness and bitchiness 'because I am gay' to be annoying.

Because I am a white, middle class, educated male, I probably have more in common with other people in this ilk, thus find some people who are very much not in this group to be less easy to see eye to eye with. That makes me a bit of a racist sexist homophobe by definition, because unless you're absolutely equal with everyone and hold no views about any group based on prior exposure to them.. well then you're a bigot :-)

No-where was it touched on that racism does occur fron Asians to whites, blacks to Asians, Jews to Gentiles, blah blah. Yes the easiest example in a country like the UK is to point out that white power systems drive white/black racism, but.. things are changing.