SNAAATCH! SNAAAAAAAAATCHHHHH!
Okay, okay, that might be a bit of an overstatement. But check out this Guardian I mean Independent op-ed by Howard Jacobson and try to determine who he hates more: men or women?
Jacobson is weighing in on terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (AKA the Crotch Bomber), and theorizing that the problem is not Islamist ideology itself (“religion is just a smokescreen”), but the sexual frustration of men in their prime (?), who are utterly at the mercy of their dangly bits. Jacobson even implicates himself:
What I remember about being a young man was how little choice I had. The impulses that drove me were not mine, I was simply the host body. I didn’t know it at the time but I see clearly now that my genes were urgently seeking replication at the behest of the human race itself. If mankind were to continue, I had to continue it. Not only me, of course. All of us that age. But you feel it as an injunction laid on you alone. This thing I must do, else I have no function and humanity no future.
We get it, chief. You’re horny.
Deprived of the opportunity for adequate wick-dipping, by, say, sex-hating mullahs (or uppity bitches), dudes develop what can only be regarded as testeria, a severe weakening of the brain leading to radical, desperate acts of destruction, like sticking plastic explosives in their underpants.
Understood in this way…Umar is merely acting out what evolution tells him.
In other words, biologically speaking, all young men are possible terrorists, provided they don’t get enough of that sweet, sweet pussy. It’s Science!
The author’s solution?
If you’re a man you don’t fly before you’re 30, is my proposal. And you don’t go to university. You go out, get pissed, and have a lot of sex. That way we’ll all sleep more safely in our beds.
I’m sure Jacobson thinks he’s made a funny–oh, we men! we’re incorrigible!–but what he’s doing, in addition to insulting men as no more than zombies in search of muff, is treating women (or rather, their holes) as things to be distributed as a) inoculation against male violence and/or b) a reward for not killing people.
So, to recap: young men are rampaging maniacs whose aggression must be channeled, and young women are appropriate targets. This is what Jacobson calls “the bright side.”
I just want to say: i lol’d.
I love when men like Jacobson explain the issues of the world as deriving from an unsaited sexual desire (not necessarily MALE desire- a lot of suspicion of women came from the idea that they could never be satisfied sexually). But in this case, Jacobson is saying, “c’mon, ladies! Do your job. Give your body over to men!”
Though, the sobering thought is that someone out there thinks this way, and that others would agree.
Standing O for the graphic.
And boo hiss for yet another bullshit attempt at the “my dumbstick made me do it!” defense.
Oh, I hate it when the Guardian runs this shit. It’s normally quite good, but it leans toward “liberal” dudehood a bit too often.
But here is a secret that we men are not supposed to share: our penises do not control us like some terrifying phallic puppet-master. We’ve just got a free pass from society to let hormones dictate our behaviour, and a gentle mandate from society to be Manly Man Men. It doesn’t take a fucking genius to work out it’s all bullshit, and keeping it in your pants does not mean that you must blow something up to prove your Dudely nature.
Magpie, I think you might have to surrender your DudeCard for your treasonous ways.
What’s odd, and a little frightening to me, is that he’s not telling women to fuck for the good of the country; he’s telling men to have a lot of sex. Um, aren’t they already trying and failing? Sounds like he doesn’t necessarily mean consensual.
I still don’t think this is Womanity’s responsibility.
I think the answer is for these poor, poor frustrated boys to get together for a summer of hot jihadi man-love.
I can only hope this whole thing was satire a la Jonathan Swift.
@bluebears: If it is satire, it is an epic fail.
Honestly, can there be a greater oversimplification of any problem by saying “My dick made me do it!”? If he were right, there’d be wholesale slaughter all over the world, given the numbers of frustrated “dudes” in the world.
@bluebears: It might be time to re-run the “A Lesson on Satire” post. Because it does not mean what these dumbfucks think it means.
Re: Magpie’s observation of liberal doodliness–has anyone noticed that the most LIBERAL of DUDES are about a patriarchal as you can get when it comes to the ownership of women’s bodies?
Several years ago, I went to a party with my friend; party happened at my partner’s then-apartment, thrown by his roommate who was about to leave the country for a year. Roommate had made his crush on my Friend known well, and she had made it well known that she was involved with someone else and was emphatically Not Interested. Yet as we said goodbye and left the party, Roommate grabbed my friend and kissed her. She was like “[hands flailing!]” and pushed him off of her. We left. The next day I went over to the apartment and Roommate was all, “Heyy so I made out with Your Friend yesterday!” and I was all “No you accosted her” and then his brother, who fancies himself a hippy, was like “oh come on why do we have to have these boundaries like she’s dating so and so and so she can’t just like BE like EXIST without BOUNDARIES I mean it’s just a BODY like why can’t she just be like properly like OPEN to like EXPERIENCES and like stuff? I mean why say no and like close yourself like OFF from like these EXPERIENCES with like these BOUNDARIES?” (I KNOW!) And I was like, sitting there, mouth hanging open at how he basically just told me that women just need to exist in a constant state of being open to getting accosted by men, that we need to just let men do what they want to our bodies.
I just sat there in silence. Then Original Accosting Roommate was like, “Yeah, [Friend] is just the kind of girl who says no when she means yes.”
I know!
That was when I punched him. Then we left the apartment, me sputtering incoherently the whole time. Then the next day my partner started looking for a new apartment. But I was like, DUDE. Even my rape-apologist brother wouldn’t say shit like this. He might laugh at Tucker Max and think that if a girl gets drunk she deserves to be raped. But he’d never say some shit like this. I think maybe that was the moment that I realized that I cannot trust men. I will trust women, in a way, until they give me reason not to. But I will not trust a man until he gives me reason to do so. Because from the socialist-hippy-dippy-anarchists to the tie-wearing-Republican-Bill-O’Reilly-loving-douches, we just can’t fucking win with these people.
PS. For the record, after my partner moved out of the apartment, Former Roommate returned from his sojourn in France and had nowhere to live. He would occasionally come by my partner’s apartment to use his internet, and one day I was looking for something on my partner’s computer and in the history–like, recent history–of the browser there was all kinds of creepy “Barely Legal XXX” porn sites. I was like, “Um, Partner? Do we need to talk about this?” and he was like, “WTF? You know how I feel about porn. …oh my god I’ma fucking kill that motherfucker.” because Former Roommate had been using his computer to watch porn. And thus ended my partner’s even polite, teeth-gritting allowance of his shenanigans.
“I mean it’s just a BODY like why can’t she just be like properly like OPEN to like EXPERIENCES and like stuff? I mean why say no and like close yourself like OFF from like these EXPERIENCES with like these BOUNDARIES?”
Cimorene, one wonders if he would have said the same if some leather daddy had cornered him at a party and gotten all grope-y. I’m gonna go with…no. The “problem” is always when women say no.
And I will not ding you for throwing that punch. I don’t like to encourage/condone/perpetuate violence, but I am increasingly convinced that there are times when it is the only form of expression some dudes understand. I would like to live in a world where no one smacked anyone and where arguments and disagreements and saying no to unwanted advances could be settled only with words but…we’re not there yet.
What Magpie_seven said.
Sometimes I think this whole “young men cannot think and aren’t responsible for their actions because they’re horny” trope is a cultural one. As a teenager and in my early 20s in India, I was surrounded by other young men (esp. since I went to an all-male school, as was quite common), and while sex, horniness, women, etc, did get discussed quite often, they were hardly the most popular of subjects (that was cricket, BTW). And essentially nobody had this idea that their penii controlled their lives or that women somehow owed them sex (which is the scariest and worst part of these assumptions, for me). And that includes people whom I would define as very dumb and misogynist in other areas. You were young and you had hormones and you dealt with it. Not that complicated.
So…this guy seems to not realize that there are female suicide bombers somehow? In fact, as far as I know, the increasing recruitment of women by the jihadists is one of the major signs that the movement is growing in certain areas despite our best efforts. Also, doesn’t his proposal for men in their 20s sound like a bizarre dystopian semen factory farm?
@Cimorene – EW! Way to be living in the worst part of the 60s, Jackass McDoucheface.
“oh come on why do we have to have these boundaries like she’s dating so and so and so she can’t just like BE like EXIST without BOUNDARIES I mean it’s just a BODY like why can’t she just be like properly like OPEN to like EXPERIENCES and like stuff?”
omg. rage. I have heard some version of this from WOMEN who considers themselves to be all hippie and/or sex positive and it never fails to completely infuriate me.
@Cimorene, I congratulate you on stopping at one punch. I have a score of similar stories that mostly ended with me shouting profanities.
As to the “satire?” Ugh.
This piece of garbage is exactly what makes me want to hide under my bed with a bottle of pinot noir, my kitties, and a baseball bat. I frequently run into this trope that women OWE men sex/love/etc because they are MEN, and therefor deserve to have their slightest urge satiated.
One of my dear guy friends recently told me he loved me and I should be his girlfriend(after I was talking about a guy I’m seeing and how great he is.) I stared at him, got amazingly angry, and tore his shiny little illusion that I was just breathlessly waiting for him to claim me to bits. He then complained that after all these years of him being there for me, I OWED him. Yes, he got kicked out of my apartment after another chewing out. He apologized the next day. And when he later told me that his male friends thought I OWED(they called when he was hanging out with me and some friends, I heard something and foolishly asked) him sex because he CHOOSES to drive 45 minutes down to hang out with me on a weekly basis, I stared with mouth agape and then went into another ranting fit about how my body was MINE, and I didn’t owe anyone anything to do with MY BODY, no matter what they did for me. And then the two awesome women we were hanging out with chewed him out some more on the subject of entitlement and rape culture. It was amazing.
I sure wish someone would take this author of this piece of idiocy aside and school him on his idiocy and entitlement. Any English harpies want to try?
Oh, Ms Pinot, your (former?) pal is a world-class Nice Guy (R). You might consider sending him and his buddy this classic post from Shakesville.
@Miss Pinot, PHDork: I was reminded of this cartoon
http://restructure.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/friends.png
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Laurie, Evil Grin and topsy_top20k, topsy_top20k_en. topsy_top20k_en said: Women of the World: Put Out or Die in a Terrorist Attack: http://bit.ly/68yIuT via @addthis [...]
I, too, don’t like physical violence. Thinking, in the abstract, that I punched him makes me feel sad and guilty. But then I think about how rapey he is. And his stupid fucking face. And then I feel sad and guilty that I didn’t really make it a hard punch, and it didn’t really hurt him that much, and I only punched his arm.
I mean I would probably have hit him in the face, but I thought my partner was friends with him. We walked out of the house and I was like “Wha! wha?! huh! how! what! you! roommate!” and my partner was like, “I know he’s such a fucking douchebag this is why I want to move out of this fucking house. What a fucking rapey asshole.” And I was all, Oh if I had known that you didn’t like him at all I would have punched him in the nose. But it’s probably for the best. I imagine that once I allowed my frustration and hatred of rape culture and the patriarchy and fake liberal doods to turn into physical violence, it wouldn’t have stopped until one of us was dead (and I’d probably lose) or arrested.
As for Ms Pinot’s friend–it’s the worst when it was someone you trusted, isn’t it? It’s so destabilizing. Like you had thought this person was decent, and then suddenly they throw this out there and it’s whiplash misogyny. Suddenly you realize how fragile an existence we lead, with all these intentional blinders on because if we ever really realized or opened ourselves up to the massive ubiquity of the patriarchy and rape culture and misogyny and the assumption that men are entitled to women’s bodies, we’d just end up whimpering in bed, weeping at the impossibility of a truly free existence. Or at least I would be.
No! No! You’re missing the point! I’m POSITIVE he’s advocating for all those males under 30 to go out and have lots of sex WITH EACH OTHER! That’s why he doesn’t mention women specifically! HE’S AN ALLY, YOU GUUUYSSSS!!!
@Cimorene: Excellent. It always brightens my day a little bit when I hear about some mouth-breathing cretin who got schooled. Kudos.
you realize how fragile an existence we lead, with all these intentional blinders
quote of the day Cimorene
Is this a valid question: Does frustrated sexuality lead to violence in men? Not, does it justify, cuz of course not. But, does it lead there? Did anyone ever hear something about criminality in China and its possible connection to surplus men? Or is that just some nonsense I picked up somewhere?
And, as an eg. from the other side of the coin, the RC Church advocates celibacy among its religious for various reasons, but one is that those people’s sexual energies should be channeled in the service of others.
Harpies am I conflating two separate issues?
I did a little thinking about that, rodriguez, but it’s pretty much a whole nutha post. I too have heard about the coming wave of violence in China due to it’s one-child policy and preference for boys: who will all these men marry (read: bone)? Without women as outlets/civilizers, all those XYs are gonna go plumb crazy!
While I think it’s fair to say that sexual urges are strong (although I will forever fight against the idea that it’s about anything other than pleasure–rare is the 17 year old who is all “must. make. baby.”), and being sexually frustrated can make one cranky, making the leap to “and then the nunchucks come out!” is problematic on about half a zillion levels.
If forced celibacy = violent, anti-social outbursts, then why aren’t there more uprisings of nerdy and ugly men and a whole giant fuckbucket of women throughout history out there destroying the universe?
I think the real problem, as Cimorene and Ms Pinot’s anecdotes have illustrated, is a culture of male entitlement (and the idea that male violence as unavoidable).
@rodriguez: I’ve been sexually frustrated PLENTY of times in my life, with no socially acceptable outlets for all that pent-up energy, but it never once occurred to me to blow up an airliner. Or rape anyone.
Then again, I don’t have a dick, so my sexual needs are completely unimportant and easily disregarded.
Then again, I don’t have a dick, so my sexual needs are completely unimportant and easily disregarded. hehehe
PhDork: re coming wave of violence in China – that’s what I wonder and am wary about. Like, is it for real, or is it the product of thinking like Howard Jacobson’s?
@Rodriguez: The same thing is starting to happen in India, where female infanticide and selective abortion has skewed the ratio of men to women. In some parts of the country–rural, mostly–it leads to the selling of girls as brides. Not good.
One would hope that the smaller number of women would give them greater bargaining power. Unfortunately, since women are seen as commodities in many societies, fewer of them won’t lead to empowerment as long as their fate is still being decided by someone else.
@ Cimorene: He’s tentatively still a friend, mainly because every single time I chew him out, he meekly apologizes and says “Thank you for explaining that. I never saw/thought it that way. I won’t say/do/think that anymore.” Is he still a best buddy-hell no. But I figure that since he’s willing to listen and learn about the errors of his (and his friends’) ways, he cannot be completely ineducable. The fact that men like him are educable keeps me from whimpering and hiding. It IS very destabilizing to my worldview to realize that he thinks that way–a nominally(formerly?) feminist, trustworthy male. How can we trust the men in our lives if this is how they think?
The rape culture and entitlement in our culture is frightening and leads to essays, actions, and thoughts like the ones above. How do we or can we combat this in our daily lives??
Ms.Pinot, I think you’re doing your bit to combat it by educating the dude. Making a difference, even in a small, one-on-one way, is still making a difference.
It seems that Jacobson is skirting around a fundamental question in an obnoxious way. If men are more violent than women, then, why? a) patriarchy permits/requires it b) biological wiring c) combination
How we answer that as a society has many repercussions. Since I like optimism (such as it is) I’ll go with a) or c) mostly, because it implies that change is possible.
But then, there was a time (now) when suffers of mental illnesses were told: Overcome your doubts and anxieties thru the strength of character and will power or Jeebus or whatever. Is there an analogy here?
Didn’t ppl make similar arguments after George Sodini?
It really bugs me when men try to explain to women what it feels like to be a horny teenager. Uh I was a teenager too. I know what it feels like.
Spark: They did. I think that was Sodini’s reasoning too. Grade A bullshit, then and now.
Rodriguez: I don’t think that violence and mental illness can be equated. Of course some people are predisposed to violence because of their brains, just as some people are predisposed to mental illness. However, cultural messages can’t give people mental illnesses. Our society teaches young men that they are 1) desperate for sex, 2) entitled to sex, and 3) irrevocably violent, and then is surprised at manifestations of the rape culture they’ve created. Saying “don’t kill or rape people” is not the same as “be healed!” Or the contemporary “pray the gay away” looniness.
From another perspective, this is another way the Western world denies that people who become radicalized and go on to blow things up do so FOR A REASON. We might not think it’s a good reason and it might not be a reason that we understand from our cultural perspective, but it takes a pretty powerful cause to convince someone to end their life.
By tying terrorist’s motivations to earthly sexual frustration or a desire for heavenly virgins, this author is taking their actions out of the realm of shit we can do anything to stop or mitigate, no matter how much we want to or try. Which is a sad way to think about human desire and a deadly way to think about politics.
Masturbate. Frequently. You won’t propagate the species, but it’ll take the edge off enough to diffuse the urge to blow people to bits.
There. I just solved the terrorist problem. Where’s my Nobel Peace Prize?
@bella: The real problem isn’t that the dudes aren’t getting laid. It’s that they feel marginalized, cannot find work, are alienated from society, are mentally ill, etc. Any/all of those things make them ripe for radicalization–this is true whether they’re being brainwashed by Al Qaeda or the Aryan Nation (see also: Timothy McVeigh).
They might also not be able to get laid for those reasons, but lack of sex itself is never going to be the primary cause of their radicalization.
I saw that article on CiF and couldn’t bring myself to read it – knew it would just infuriate me.
Thanks for providing this handy smackdown so I know exactly what I (didn’t) miss.
This whole thing reminded me of something that happened today.
While at work I suddenly remembered that my co-worker and his wife are expecting a baby. Over Christmas break he took leave but he had mentioned that the Mrs. was getting an ultrasound and our office had ventured guesses on the gender of the little darling to be.
I asked him if he had his results and he informed me (tragically) that it was a girl. I was thrilled for him and his wife until I saw the look on his face. I asked him if he was upset (admit it you fucker, out loud) and he said no but he wasn’t happy.
When prompted why he said because, “there’s another one.” which leads me to wonder. He’s the type that I can quote on saying, “the only reason I haven’t left her is because she can take half of everything” and “I wish she would stop yelling. I would respond so much better if she used positive re-enforcement like a blow job.” What the fuckitty fuck?
He blamed her for the pregnancy immediately after he started speaking in stating that she had said “let’s try” but hadn’t told him she was going to stop taking her pill immediately. So he is a victim here of her plotting and his sexual urges and what’s more it’s a GIRL!
Why can’t we women just use the excuse: “we are over worked, sometimes unloved, house keepers and co-workers so we should be able to run up and do as we wish” since allegidly that’s how it works. Not only do most of us have to wait a while to be sexually satisfied but we must be pretty, smart, thin, witty, demure, feminine, motherly, and bread winners. Excuse me but that’s a shit ton that people expect.
BeckySharper:
That is very near what I was trying to say, I’m sorry if I was unclear.
The media tends to allow their guests to give reasons like, “Terrorists hate freedom.” or, “The Palestinians hate Israel.” for these attacks. Those reasons let us off the hook for doing anything, because they are unreasonable in their simplicity. The same can be said for, “They just need to get laid.”
It’s the same as us wanting all of our criminals to be insane, it means a) they are not like us, and b) we could not have seen the attack coming.
Um, aren’t they already trying and failing?
Probably not. Every guy I’ve ever known who’s gone years without having sex probably wasn’t trying to in any meaningful sense of the word. The next time a guy complains he can’t get laid, ask him how many women he’s asked on a date in the last … I dunno, season. The answer will probably be zero.
Or I could be diagnosing myself and applying it to all men. I dunno. It’s very easy to go from “Well, I wouldn’t want to have sex with some guy who’s roughly equivalent to me.” to “Well, I wouldn’t want to have to deal with some guy who’s roughly equivalent to me hitting on me” to “Well, nobody would want to have to deal with me hitting on them” to “Well, it’s a dickish thing to do to hit on someone” in quick train of thought, assume that since you don’t see any reason anyone’d want to sleep with you, that nobody does, and thus infer you can’t get laid, because nobody would want to have sex with you.
I dunno. It’s really unobvious to me how one can address the idea that some women might want to have sex with men without coming across as advocating that men are entitled to sex with women in a feminist context. (Or at least, it seems like other people have some way of reconciling and distingishing all this that isn’t obvious to me.)
But – uh – “if you want to have sex, go out and find someone who wants to have sex with you” is remarkably effective advice (orders of magnitude more effective than it should be.)
PhDork, that is the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day. Cheers!
@Ocean_breeze: Why do I expect that this guy is a passive agressive asshole at home, who will do stuff his wife asks, then blame her when it all goes awry–and he’s sad that HIS SPERM determined that the sex of THEIR baby would be FEMALE? Please tell me that you reacquainted him with basic middle school biology. Or just smacked him verbally upside the head.
And BeckySharper clearly delineated why people are pushed towards radicalization and dangerous acts. Give them education, jobs, respect, understanding and medical aattention, and we’d have many many less terrorist bombers. Sex doesn’t really fit in there–a lack of sex doesn’t make you wish to do away with yourself and your fellow humans. It makes you cranky, not deadly.
Maybe this is a nature/nurture type debate: the nurture is our patriarchal society, and the nature is a person with disfunctional sexuality (for lack of a better term) or maybe some form of hormonal or mental problem. If you want to look for the roots of male violence, it seems you might approach the problem from anywhere on that spectrum.
From the point of view of feminist endeavors, it makes sense to focus on the patriarchy part, and effect change. From the point of view of other branches of human knowledge, like pharmacology, it might make sense to look for hormonal triggers at work in an unbalanced mind.
Again, I don’t think that approach exonerates anything. I think bellacoker is right to say that Jacobson’s thinking leads to defeatism, especially in the context of feminism. But I do think that nature/nurture arguments are rarely the binary questions they seem to be at first, and in this case there may be issues to be resolved with feminism and with other tools.
Also, for the record, for hundreds of years it was the women who were the insatiable lusty devilwhores. I mean, read some early christian literature–Tertullian or St. Jerome or any of them. They’re all, “Women are the flesh and men are the soul! The women are insatiable devils! They only want the sex! They can’t think logically because they only can think of the sex! Their hungry hungry vaginae will eat your soul mister menfolk so don’t be having the sex because once a woman starts with the sex she’ll never stop she’s so horny all the time she gets violent if she can’t make the sexytime!!!!!!11!” I mean I’m summarizing, but still. It wasn’t until the past what–200 years? or so, that women became the chaste virginal mothers that we’re all expected to be today. Men used to be the logical sex that was ruled by brains not boning.
“It’s really unobvious to me how one can address the idea that some women might want to have sex with men without coming across as advocating that men are entitled to sex with women in a feminist context.”
Brian:
I think the part that you are missing is that humans, both the male and female variety, can want to have sex. Period, full stop.
That want does not make us entitled to a partner. We don’t have the right to compel another person to meet our sexual needs.
Men are very happy when women want to have sex, even a lot of sex, as long as that desire benefits them. But, if a man wants to have sex with a woman and that woman’s desire is directed toward someone/something else, suddenly her sexual desire becomes less legitimate than his own desire. Because her desire is different from his, she is doing it wrong.
Shorter: Woman are people, just like you.
Hope that helps.
Funny to hear men use the hormone excuse when it suits them. And it suits them quite a bit, even in self-labeled “progressive” groups who actually invoke “sociobiological facts” despite the debunking by such luminaries as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Anne Fausto-Sterling:
Is It Something in the Water? Or: Me Tarzan, You Ape
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=712
I’m confused. I thought women were supposed to be the ones who are ruled by their hormones. Looks like we’re going to have to stop electing men to public office, cut their pay, and exclude them from scientific fields and upper management positions. Actually if men are unable to refrain from violent behavior maybe we should just go ahead and lock them up in cages and toss raw meat at them.
I’ve never understood guys who make these sort of arguments. Do they want men to be generally respected as intelligent, rational, capable people or do they want men to be regarded as viscious and stupid animals? You can’t have both, dudes. Pick a lane.
That first quoted paragraph really struck me, because I can turn it around on him so easily.
What I remember about being a young woman was how little choice I was given. The impulses that drove my experiences were not mine, I was simply a hole to be filled. I didn’t know it at the time but I see clearly now that the young men of my acquaintance were urgently seeking what they considered “sex” but what is and can only be considered rape: putting their dicks in me, because it would feel good, uncaring as to what I thought or wanted or what might feel good to me. Not only me, of course. All of us that age and female. But you feel it as an injunction laid on you alone. This thing you must do, else you are mean, a tease, a bitch, a prude, not really grown enough to realize this is your function and your only future.
slythwolf, that is brilliant. Sad and horrible and far too familiar. And brilliant. Might I suggest that you send Mr. Jacobson his revised paragraph, with a kind little note that he can choke on it?
I wonder who this asshat thinks will be fucking him.
Er… The link goes to the Independent, not the Guardian. The Indie used to be fairly lefty and progressive, until about a year ago when they got a new editor who seemed to think that turning it into a newsprint lads’ mag was the way to go. Kinda OT, I know, sorry.