Saturday 23 March 2013

Long Bows


Long Bows


The importance of the yew tree in British history is often overlooked in favour of the oak which for several hundred years provided the wood for the nation’s battle ships. “In 1812 is was stated in a parliamentary report that no less than two thousand well-grown oak trees were used in the building of one 47-gun ship.” [1]  
As the English long bow was the weapon of choice for much of the 14th 15th and 16th century yew trees for bowstaves were in great demand. Successive British Kings implemented laws to ensure enough yew was grown or imported for the protection of the realm; in so doing it made the yew tree a precious commodity  - and almost extinct in Europe.
Long bows took years to make, the wood being dried for up to two years while the bow itself could take as much as another four years. The real genius is that at some point a bow maker realised that by using a section of the tree where the hard outer wood and soft inner wood met a more flexible and resilient bow could be made.
In the Tudor period it was law that every man and boy should practice archery regularly from an early age - longbow men were a professional elite. They were men of stature in every sense – socially highly respected and physically big enough to pull 200 lbs (90 kgs) of a 6 ft (1.83 m) bow. The average arrow was 30 ins (75 cm) long and the highly trained and skilled archer was thought to be able to fire 12 a minute.
The magazine Current Archeology is again reporting research of longbows and longbow men.[2] Interest was first stirred in this area when skeletons were recovered from King Henry VIII's warship the Mary Rose when the wreck was raised from the Solent in 1982.  Many of the archers on board were from Wales and the south west of England so it was fitting that staff from Swansea University examined the skeletons to see if they could identify them and discover what impact the life of an archer had upon the body.




[1] Wilkinson, Gerald. Trees in the Wild  Stephen Hope Books 1973  P55
[2] Current Archeology March 2013 Issue 276 p 11    http://www.archaeology.co.uk/

Tuesday 12 March 2013

Sex on Twitter

Sex and Twitter


In the months that I have had a Twitter account I have been fascinated by what I have found on it. But what has really intrigued and shocked me is the variety of pornography freely available. Much of the material that I have seen is what thirty years ago would have been called ‘top-shelf’ or ‘hard core’.  Every conceivable fetish has followers that tweet pictures of their particular ‘pastime’.
Years ago in a newsagents an unusually long and quite prominent ‘top shelf’ caught my eye, it had 36 ‘sex’ magazines of different kinds. Who, I wondered, bought them? The obvious ‘untruth’ trotted out by most ‘blokes’ is ‘I don’t buy them - I read me mates!’ But the blunt economic fact is that they would not have been on the shelf in the first place if there was not a market for them. It puzzles me how people on Twitter make money from their porn. For years economists have used sales of pornography as an indicator of an economies disposable income, both in legitimate and black market trading terms. Despite the terrible pun, it is not earth shattering news, that sex has undergone commodity fetishisation and is a product that is bought and sold – like any other commodity.
There is some interesting and intelligent blogging by sex workers on Twitter who find that many ‘clients’ (read ‘customers’) think that because of the nature of the commodity, the normal rules of transaction do not apply. The culturally accepted myth is that couples, male and female, should be, or are, happily engaged in a loving, fulfilling and sexual relationship. But as Freud and many psychoanalysts since have testified, this is far from the truth. Wilhelm Reich in particular wrote about deep seated personal and social sexual frustrations and proposed state brothels for both men and women. Many countries accept that the world’s oldest profession will exist despite laws and have come to some sort of compromise with it. This compromise is, again, often to the detriment of the sex worker.
Fortunately, Twitter is a good platform for individual sex workers or organisations like
The English Collective of Prostitutes, US PROStitutes Collective, International Prostitutes Collective, End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children @ECPATUK to lobby for and end to some practices and better and safer working conditions.
50 Shades of Grey has sparked off a quiet bedroom revolution for what might be called ‘bondage lite’ while ‘bondage heavy’ or at least some of what is posted on Twitter is unpleasant and demeaning – for everyone involved – even the voyeur. Most ‘poses’, across a wide range of themes, are the same for male, female and transgender and all slightly absurd when looking at them from the point of view of meaning. It is interesting to apply Roland Barthes theory of semiotics to these images, to ask what is the ‘signifier’ and what is being ‘signified’?  In writing about Anne Desclos’ The Story of O, Barthes said that the most erotic ‘signifier’ was the ear, because it was were the commands/desires of the master/lover were received ‘signified’.
It seems that there are rules for staging pictures if not facial expressions - which range from deep longing/satisfaction to pain/distaste or are just plain vacuous absurdity. It is difficult if not impossible in most cases to discern what is being ‘signified’. The complexity and contradictory nature of what an individual finds erotic frustrates the simple sex photo. There are no blurred images, as there are no hairy or overweight participants. In short, the pictures are created to a well worn formula and far from ‘real’. There are, what used to be known as ‘readers wives’, ‘swingers’ and now  M.I.L.F.’s (Mums I’d like to f***) the so called amateurs. There seem to be thousands of people who are happy to take intimate pictures of themselves and put them on Twitter.
The press is full of stories of adolescent girls who are forced by boys to post pictures of themselves naked on the internet, so they must be confused when they find one of the many mum Twitter accounts, where ‘loving mum of two – likes sex’ has posted pictures of herself naked. There might be a number of mixed messages here, but socially acceptable behaviour moves on. Like tattoos -once worn by men to signal a dangerous and aggressive air - are now common and indicate not much more than a life style choice or a free spirited individual. It seems that Twitter has more than just a few exhibitionists.
The big question then is why? Why do people post intimate pictures of themselves on Twitter, Facebook or other social media websites? Why do people go on prime time national TV and expose their ‘embarrassing bodies’ or display quite awful and intimate illnesses? Is this a new form of social autonomy? Do people feel that autonomy is found only in some sort of social media presence?  It would seem that the nature of - intimacy – has changed or is changing. What will it mean for people trying to read Sartre’s ‘Intimacy’ in the future will they understand it? What will ‘erotic’ or ‘sensual’ come to mean?