Gender mainstreaming

So this is what men think femininity means:

Thanks for nothing. It took us centuries to throw off the shackles that you are reimposing.

For women's rights and good design

It's International Women's Day.

So here's to women, internationally!

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Blackmail

I think I've been tired of the Anglican Church - this strategically manufactured sanctuary of silly crypto-Catholics with their Church-fatherly fear of all things femininine - since 1534.

A short note from Jackobury Nation: Fighting patriarchy on all fronts

It's the end of a rather full couple weeks travel, conferencing and research in various bits of this fair isle and I'm not up for much serious thought on a hot and far-too-humid evening in London.

Which, as The Wife has noted, leaves me in a perfect state of mind to match the silly state of the media mind (i.e., wall-to-wall, 24-hour obsession with all things Jackobury) that has blossomed all around me.

And I suppose that while my brain seems to have temporarily shut down (encouraged, perhaps, by drinking too much red wine in the sun at a retirement party for my boss this afternoon) I'm still left ahead of Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones, who seems to suffer from this condition on a more permanent basis.

That's just a surmise based on the evidence of her commentary in today's Waily Snail entitled 'What's really oppressing women isn't the burka, it's their breasts'.

It's really quite...appalling.

But educational: I wasn't aware that Victoria Beckham was 'oppressed'. I'm appalled that some worthy charity has not intervened and helped the poor woman.

And then there's this useful tit-bit that our Liz offers:

Believe it or not, I once had very big breasts.

I did not know that. But without a reason to think otherwise, reader, I believe her. And I urge you to do likewise.

And the learning (and tragedy) doesn't stop there:

I’d been anorexic for years and when force-feeding and threats of hospitalisation hadn’t worked, in my early 20s my endocrinologist started feeding me drugs and hormones to make me eat and to make me fat. My breasts grew rapidly. Clothes no longer hung properly.

Fascinating.

Also:

My drug-induced breasts were nothing like the ones you see these days on the covers of men’s magazines: natural big breasts hang, honeydew melon-shaped, towards your waist.

Thanks Liz. Truly, this is information we can use.

It's especially gratifying -- I think we will all agree -- to see the Fail standing up for feminism and against the the objectification of celebrity women via their breasts.

Also via the Vomity Pail (which is distributed free by my hotel), I encountered 'Miss Ellie', who has been voted 'ugliest dog' at some kind of fair in California that concerns itself with such things.

The pure-bred, pint-sized pageant participant -- who has as far as I know not yet expressed any opinion about mammarial oppression -- has a strangely endearing charm, I must say. And she also called forth an immediate (though cross-species) association:

I always was more of a cat person.

Looking forward to being home.

Thank you Thea

This is the last thing I will say about Charlotte Roche's drippy drivel. Granted, I haven't read the book, and am aware that it is a trifle dishonest to discount someone's work without even having considered it, but after all the media hype surrounding the publication of Wetlands I know enough already to embrace my dishonesty unflinchingly and proudly.

I know what Roche's protagonist does with her labia in public toilets, what loving nick-name she uses for her piles and why she hoards avocado stones like a latter-day Scrooge (great dissertation topic here: The Avocado Stone Writes Back: A Postcapitalist, Postmarxist, Postcolonial, Post-anything Study of Charlotte Roche's Subversive Anality").

I don't need to know more to have an opinion.

Above all, I simply refuse to fund this thinly veiled publicity stunt with my hard-earned money. Why is the whole world going "ooh-aah, rebellion" about this silly little book? Don't you people get it? Don't you get it that this is one big hoax in which you are instrumentalised as cash cows?

The question is: who's the boring bourgeois prude now? I can already hear some people out there tut-tutting at my un-fun un-subversiveness. Well, intercourse subversion! I'm past the age of having to prove how cool I am. And I have better things to do with my spare time.

Thea Dorn at Die Zeit has an answer to the above question that pretty much voices my own impressions (formed on the basis of the above-mentioned enforced hearsay): Roche's whole taboo-breaking spiel is a mere facade behind which slumbers her truly bourgeois primness and propriety. Her pseudo-rebellion (for that's what it is) is bound to founder, as the taboos that she sets out to break are second-rate taboos in the first place. Harmless, as it were.

Wetlands is about as radical as bloody Sex in the City.

The best article I have read on this matter so far.

I don't like (Melanie Phillips on) Mondays. Or any other day, for that matter

Aaahhh, Melanie Phillips, you of the dangly earrings, the naff granny glasses and the seriously disturbed ideas .... So who is to blame for Britain's various social crises, ranging from the rise in crime committed by girls to the sluttish attire of Mick Jagger's great-great granddaughters and the emergent drinking problem of female royalty in waiting?

Ah, of course: feminism.

So the spoilt, bored and not very intelligent sprogs of the filthy rich are bumming around semi-naked and in a constant state of inebriation out of the mistaken feminist notion of what you call "identicality" - a dangerous conflation of social equality with sexual sameness - propagated by their bra-burning mothers and grandmothers? Essentially, Peaches Geldof's problem is that she wants to be a man - and a manly man at that.

Deep, Melanie, deep.

And your solution is just as profound:

We must restore the idea that women bring unique gifts and values to the national party. Reviving the traditional family would be a start. This would make men, women and children happier - and cut crime.

Gifts and values, eh? Like: macramé? And which "national party" are you speaking about? If it's partying that you are referring to, then, clearly, the kids are alright. Any other "national party" I don't really want to think about.

Is this a bit of Pentecostal speaking in tongues, Mel P.?

Another article you needn't read ('cos I have done it for you)

Die Zeit has an utterly negligible article on Charlotte Roche, whom most of you probably haven't heard of until now. Here in Germany, though, Charlotte Roche is quite the media darling. Born in Britain not so very long ago, she moved to Germany as a child, which was probably a good thing, too -- who knows, had she stayed in binge country she might have gone the way that all photogenic it-girls with sleek shiny hair seem to go there and ended up spending her days staggering from pub to club in a state of inebriation with her skirt hitched up and her long tresses in tatters (with apologies to Francis S., who is in for another shock).

In a relatively civilised country like ours, she had do something with her life -- such as pretend to be a musician and an artist, work for VIVA (Germany's answer to MTV) and other TV-stations, become a cameo actress on TV and in pop videos, give readings of other peoples' books and mildly obscene doctoral dissertations and pocket not only neat sums of money but also prestigious media awards for her manifold achievements.

Liberal intellectuals loooove Charlotte, finding her sassy, street-wise and subtly feminist. Roche herself claims a certain affinity with old-school feminists like Alice Schwarzer -- Germany's own Germaine Greer -- though she also thinks that feminism has moved on in the past years. To make this point, she takes every opportunity she gets to tell the world that she is into S&M.

Now, this exhibitionist desire has made it into a full-length book with a weighty title: Feuchtgebiete ("Wetlands") .

Oooo -- naughty, naughty. Yes, the book is porn, and apparently so hot that the first publisher decided to drop it like the proverbial potato. In no time at all a new one was found so that Roche could blurt her liberationist message. For pornography, according to Roche, is one way of stepping out of the alleged speechlessness afflicting women when it comes to their sexuality:

Women have no language for their desire .... When it comes to their bodies, women are uptight. Women don't even have sexual fantasies of their own.

So, feminism has moved on, has it? How come it seems to be repeating itself?

I'm seriously tired of having to go through the same kind of subversion-through-pornography rigmarole every ten years or so. Not only have I had enough of hearing about the famous feminine speechlessness (Have you ever shared a train compartment with an all-female bowling-club drenched in prosecco? No bloody speechlessness there, I can tell you), I'm also tired of the truly daft suggestion that pornography of all things should be the means through which women can gab themselves to freedom (NB: Not all speech is good or relevant!).

Now, I'm not suggesting à la MacKinnon, that porn is merely the instrument of patriarchy's plot against women. It's just that I don't believe that "chick porn" can really change matters. If right thinking, feminist pornography hinges on post-structuralism's neo-Kantian claim that we can transcend the physical shackles that tie us down by engaging in kinky fantasies, it is just as silly as ordinary pornography, be it of the common or the artsy style. If it has anything more relevant to say, then it might suggest, with de Sade, that there is no way that we will escape the physical realities of life.

As Angela Carter wrote in 1979 about de Sade's The Hundred and Twenty Days at Sodom:

The Chateau of Silling, the imitation Sodom, is utterly impregnable and the paths that brought the victims there have been destroyed behind them. The victims have been erased from the world and now live, their own ghosts although they are not yet dead, only awaiting death, in a world where the function of their own flesh is to reveal to them the gratuitous inevitablity of pain, to demonstrate the shocking tragedy of mortality itself, that all flesh may be transformed, at any moment, to meat.

In summary, then, de Sade's message is bleak: "The primal condition of man cannot be modified in any way; it is, eat or be eaten." This insight is the price of the libertine's self-assertive debauchery, which rests on the assumption that others are, and can at all times be reduced to, mere meat.

This is a dire insight indeed -- though I don't think (I don't hope!) that this is what pleasure-seeking Ms Roche had in the damp nether regions of her mind. Let's hope her pornography is of the silly variety -- and not bother to buy the book!

Women beware women (too)

A few years ago, I read Jon Krakauer's excellent book Under the Banner of Heaven, about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), more easily referred to as Mormon Fundamentalists.

Amongst other things, this breakaway sect asserts that mainstream Mormons were wrong to abandon the 'plural marriage' that its founder, Joseph Smith, had advocated. Krakauer's book is full of accounts of what that innocuous-sounding term conceals: in short, systematised oppression and child abuse spiced with healthy doses of religious insanity.

More recently, a woman who escaped from both her 'plural marriage' and the FLDS has published her insider's account of the cult. An excerpt from Escape by Carolyn Jessop appeared a few days ago in the Guardian, and it makes for enlightening -- and chilling -- reading.

It also contains a few elements of near-comical absurdity, particularly when Jessop explains the circumstances of how the sect's 'Prophet' had arranged her marriage at age 18 to a man more than 30 years her senior:

I later discovered that Merril had married into my family only to stop my father suing him over a business deal that had gone sour. More humiliating still, he hadn't meant to marry me, but my younger and prettier sister, Annette. When he asked the Prophet to arrange the marriage, Merril got our names mixed up.

So much for divine omniscience.

There is much that is worrisome in Jessop's narrative -- such as, for instance, the apparent fact that the local police are cult members themselves. But I think the most disturbing element in the story -- and this was something I felt about Krakauer's book too -- was the key role played by women in maintaining the cult's twisted ideology. Jessop describes being indoctrinated by her grandmother:

I had been blessed, Grandma taught me, to come into a family where generations of women had sacrificed their feelings to preserve the work of God. My sole purpose on earth, she explained, was to have as many children as possible. I would not fall in love and choose my husband like gentile women did; instead, God would reveal him through the leader of our community, the man we called the Prophet. [...]

Because I loved her so much and this was presented to me as absolute truth, it would be years before I would flee my so-called destiny.

And the reality of relationships among the 'sister-wives' is, unsurprisingly, a ruthless one:

Men were supposed to treat their wives equally, but everyone knew that a woman who was in sexual favour with her husband had a higher value than the others. Because she had his ear, she would be treated with respect by his other wives and her stepchildren. She might be exempted from physical labour or other family responsibilities. She could make sure that the wives she disliked were assigned the worst jobs. A woman who no longer satisfied her husband, meanwhile, was on dangerous ground. No wonder that when a new wife entered a family, her priority was usually to establish power with her husband sexually.

Merril tried to keep all of his wives pregnant because it suggested he had an equal relationship with each of us. But he was a polygamist in body, a monogamist in soul. Barbara was the only woman he ever loved. She took full advantage of it to dictate every detail of her sister wives' lives, right down to our diet.

Barbara and many other of the women in Jessop's and Krakauer's books seem to have little doubt that their severely restricted lives are divinely ordained. This belief not only ennobles their very apparent suffering but it also ensures that their energy is channelled primarily into struggles with (and attempts to dominate) other women.

This aspect of the story reminded me of something Catherine Bennett wrote at the beginning of November, on the occasion of the Saudi king's official visit to Britain.

With the advance of young British veil wearers, proudly declaring their right to be invisible and their love of extreme modesty, this and many other forms of faith-related female subjugation have become complicated areas for liberal protest. If, as we're often told, many British Muslim women love their jilbabs, how can we be sure Saudi women do not also rejoice in their coverings, accepting, in the same dutiful spirit, total exclusion from civic life and physical chastisement by their devout partners? How can we be sure their would-be liberators are not - like women who adorn themselves and women who cut their hair short - just a few more Women Who Will Go to Hell?

I have no doubt that many (perhaps most) of the women remaining among the FLDS view Carolyn Jessop as just such a Woman Who Will Go to Hell. Is this surprising? Not really: as in practices such as female genital cutting or 'honour killing', women appear to very often be complicit in the oppression of other women (and themselves).

I can almost see Bennett's point about how this makes protest 'complicated' for liberals.

Almost.

Because, surely, it doesn't make it all that complicated, does it?

Without the veil

As I've noted previously, there are a lot of odd and interesting things that historical research unintentionally turns up.

I've found that this is particularly the case in researching newspapers, which I've been doing rather a lot over the last couple of years as part of a project on crime in interwar Britain.

It has been a while since I've presented any of this historical by-catch; however, I thought the article below 'Turkey Without the Veil' would be of interest. (I have not bothered to transcribe the last quarter or so of the piece, as it ceased to be interesting at about that point...)

It appeared in the Daily Express on 10 July 1928 (p. 11), and was the second in a series of articles by H. J. Greenwall (Daily Express 'special correspondent') on Turkish life under the rule of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

In Greenwall's report (filed from 'Constantinople'), 'he deals', as the Express noted, 'especially with the position of women under the new regime.’

It was highlighted on the page by a bold line of type above it proclaiming 'How Turkish Women Use Their New Freedom'.

It is perhaps of interest not only for what it says about the position of women in Turkish society in the late 1920s--particularly when some appear to be re-discovering the headscarf--but also to that English outsider's perspective on 'Eastern' women.

Without further ado...

'Turkey Without the Veil'

Paris Fashions Copied By All

Divorce Equality

[...]

By H. J. Greenwall
Daily Express Special Correspondent

CONSTANTINOPLE

How is the modern woman of Turkey reacting to the liberty which became hers when Mustapha Kemal swept away the age-long customs of the East and turned the face of Turkey to the West?

In the mosques I notice there are more women praying than there used to be before Kemal came, but the women one sees praying are not the modern women. They are rather the older ones, lost and quite bewildered by the new laws, and it is certain that they do not approve of what has happened.

The blow which emptied the imperial harem also made Turkish women discard the veil, shingle their hair, shorten their skirts, drink cocktails in night clubs, in fact, do all the things—except, perhaps, drive motor-cars and play games—that women in Paris and London do. The one thing they have not yet adopted is the ‘make-up’ of the West. Old Mother Asia causes them to retain the kohl-blacked eyes.
This freedom which as come to the women of Turkey has, I think, made them happier than they were of old, when they were jewelled toys behind latticed windows. The majority of the younger women accept what Kemal has given them, and are thankful for it. They approve the new laws of marriage and divorce.

'Beauty unveiled and veiled. Typical Turkish women of the present and past.'

CIVIL MARRIAGES

Now that religion has been separated from the State, it is only the civil marriage which counts, but if the contracting parties so desire they may have a ceremony in the mosque as well. No longer may the Turk take unto himself four wives, as the Koran allowed him to do. The law to-day is: One Turk, one wife.

Divorce law in Turkey is based on the Swiss laws. No longer can a Turk divorce his wife by just making a statement before a witness. Now he must file a suit, alleging desertion or infidelity. In the eyes of the law the sexes are equal, and a Turkish wife can divorce her husband just as a woman of London can, but, in point of fact, the Turkish woman has scored heavily, because the new divorce laws have made her emancipation complete.

Turkish women, who always admired French culture above every other, have modelled themselves completely on the French women, and they try to reach as close to French chic as they can.

PARISIAN STYLES

Hats, their dresses, their stockings, and their shoes are copied from Parisian styles, and the women copy so accurately that were it not for the Oriental ‘make-up’ it would be impossible to tell a woman of Constantinople from a woman of Paris. Removal of the veil, however, and all that this gesture implies, has removed all the mystery which used to make the Turkish woman such a romantic figure. A pair of black eyes flashing through a veil as the owner of the eyes stepped rapidly across the pavement, and beneath the jealous glances of the accompanying eunuch entered her carriage, is a far different thing from seeing a face topped with a Paris hat stroll from shop to waiting motor-car, driven, most probably, by a Russian refugee who was formerly an officer of the Czar’s Guard.

If the Turkish women have achieved freedom, they have achieved it only at the price of losing the adoration of the European admirers.

...and, yes, I'm sure, Mr. Greenwall, that was very painful for them indeed.

The remainder is concerned with the apparently awe-inspiring collection of ‘Osman jewels’ that could be viewed and which would make ‘Hatton Garden faint collectively’.

Stuff your genes

While we're on the topic of genes (capitalist or otherwise), here for your reading pleasure is a contribution from The Wife on related issues.

***

In 1987, the French feminist Luce Irigaray had the following modest proposal for a potential exit route from the “patriarchal phallocratic order”:

In all homes and all public places, attractive images (not involving advertising) of the mother-daughter couple should be displayed. It's very damaging for girls always to be faced with representations of mother and son, especially in the religious dimension. I'd suggest to all Christian women, for example, that they place an image depicting Mary and her mother Anne in their living room, in their daughters' rooms, and in their own room. There are sculptures and easily reproducible paintings of them available.

Even though when I first read this statement, in the early 1990s (in the initial experimental stages of a doctoral degree), when I was still mildly sympathetic towards even the more abstruse forms of feminist thought, I felt somewhat ... disappointed by Irigaray's idea.

So this is all the Godmother of “feminism of difference” and then Director of Research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris could come up with as a death blow against patriarchy? A new billboard campaign? Christian devotionalia? Admittedly, Irigaray had other “practical suggestions” – her words – to make, but they were no less esoteric and, actually, far from practical. (E.g., “Between mother and daughter, interpose small handmade objects to make up for the losses of spatial identity, for intrusions into personal space.”)

Then as now my atheistic self shudders at the thought of being surrounded by big sisterish images of Mary and Anne. Granted, Irigaray suggests them as an option for Christian women who've seen a crucifix too many; nevertheless, one wonders whether a good starting point for a war against patriarchy wouldn't be a campaign against Christianity itself. And why, one might ask, would a feminist working within a staunchly secular system, where religion is an entirely private thing (unlike in Germany, where generations of schoolchildren grow up in the shadow of the cross), want to reinforce Christianity rather than undermine it?

I also was (and continue to be) more than vaguely disturbed by Irigaray's view of the human mind. Apparently, all it takes to create a feminist awareness are a few cunningly displayed mother-daughter images (which, in any case, seem to exist in abundance). But this idea – apart from revealing Irigaray's dismissive attitude towards women – smacks of brainwashing and invokes illustrations in biology textbooks, of Skinner's pigeons merrily picking away at their seeds, as well as passages from Brave New World. For a brief moment, we see the beast of behaviourism peep out from under the cosy blanket of constructionism, where it otherwise lurks unnoticed.

The end of the phallocratic patriarchal order?

In his erudite and witty attack on the “blank slate” psychology underpinning contemporary constructionism, Steven Pinker acknowledges the fascination of such an idea ... but then he tears it limb from limb. The jury is still out, of course, as to whether Pinkerian eloquence (and a whole bunch of science) can outgun the sheer utopian delights of constructionist thought.

How can you top the following quote, taken from the cover of Richard Lewontin's Biology as Ideology (though possibly not written by him): “our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit.”

“Any identity, daddy? Could I be Pol Pot then?”

Of course, even radical constructionists wouldn't go that far. After all, they tend to be right-thinking people confident that their Weltanschauung is the royal route to the best of all possible worlds – one free of psychopathic mass-murderers, megalomaniac dictators, or mean little capitalist bastards for that matter. Such is the dream of many a professional educator hell-bent on combatting social injustice through dubious measures, such as banning Legos from the grade-school classroom.

Little wonder, then, that even some of the milder claims of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology are deemed anything from unsexy to dangerous by self-proclaimed “radical” constructionists. For them, the belief that the human organism is meaningfully shaped by its evolutionary past is to adhere to a reductionist determinism that sees us all as Hobbesian robots. Selfish genes make for selfish people, they say. In a parallel universe, they might have a point. In this one, however, no serious sociobiologist or evolutionary biologist/psychologist would say such a thing. Nevertheless, the criticism arises again and again, like some horrible zombie meme that just will not die.

This, in a nutshell (or nucleus), is the tragedy of genes: their cuddle-factor is terribly low. They seem so hard, so edgy, so cold. It is difficult to integrate them into myths of benevolent symbiosis characteristic of some strands of evolutionary biology, especially those with an ecological slant. In an inspiring paper (PDF) on evolutionary biology and the pastoral imagination, Louise Westling of the University of Oregon has eloquently defended a Darwinian view of humans as part of nature rather than outside (and above it). Human beings not only exist in the world, sharing the environment with insects, birds and numerous smaller and larger mammals, they function themselves as host environments for countless forms of bacteria:

Six hundred species in our mouths neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies. Four hundred species colonize our intestines; without them we could not digest and absorb the food we eat .... Tiny creatures live all over our bodies, eating dead skin and performing many other kinds of housekeeping functions, as for example the microscopic lobster-like insects that infest our eyelashes and continually clean away the lubricants that would otherwise glue our eyes shut. As we move and breathe, we actively exchange nutrients and waste, energy and even atoms, with the air and things around us and the millions of creatures within us. Each person is a bipedal, mobile, and self-conscious community of living agents sharing an inner sea bound by the semipermeable extended surface organ of skin and given firm shape by bones. Armies of friendly microbes swim through our inner seas, scouting for and devouring invaders, cleaning the pipes, carrying freight. The “human” DNA that shapes and marks each of our unique selves is far less a proportion of the DNA in our body mass than that of our microbe friends. Even within our individual cells, the mitochondria that make our energy have their own, different DNA than that in our “human” chromosomes.

Oh brave new world that has such wonderful microbes in it!

Westling's facts are of course immaculate, yet what bothers me slightly is the style in which they are put. In her depiction, the bacteria living in and on every human body as restless busybodies enabling the upkeep of our complex organism. Housekeeping and cleaning, guarding and defending, they are fundamentally friendly, working for our benefit – a little like Cinderella's winged helpmeets in the Disney movie, holding up the clothes line so Cinderella can hang up the laundry, maybe whistling while working. Our friends, not our enemies, doing stuff us humans would do, bacteria even may be in the range of human communication.

From this perspective I could even envision feeling all warm and fuzzy about my mitochondria.

But note how the pastoral vision tips over into biocentrism towards the end, reinstating the distinction between humans and nature but reversing the hierarchy: nature good, humans bad – but not quite so bad as that nasty Mr Dawkins has been saying. Although for some ecocritics humankind comes pretty close to being the big bad wolf in an otherwise rather benign environment, they would never accept that suggestion if it came from the sociobiology faction.

Maybe it is impossible to think of the incessantly vibrant microdimension of the human organism in any other way than by anthropomorphising it. There is a deep level of existence scurrying about well beneath our conscious radar. And a good thing to, because were we to spend too much time thinking about it we would be too preoccupied with the fear and terror of it all: just getting through Westling's short paragraph above has its disconcerting moments. Mites and mitochondria represent human existence stripped of its sociocultural fictions, and this is a frightening fact.

The anthropomorphic fantasy also characterises the range of cuddly toys launched a few years back representing different more-or-less nasty microbes, from those that cause the common cold to the ones that bring us bubonic plague. The toys are advertised as "great learning tools for parents and educators." Educators? How ever would you use those in the classroom?

“If you see one of those one-eyed pink rabies viruses, run away as fast as you can.”

Or: "If you see a flesh eating virus, be nice to it – it can't help being lethal”?

But however useless these toys may be from an educational perspective, they do give me an idea for how to pimp the image of our old friend the gene. Here's my modest proposal in the spirit of Irigaray:

In all homes and all public places (and I mean all: really these things should be everywhere), attractive images (not involving advertising) of the gene should be displayed. It's very damaging for human being always to be denied representations of their friend, the double helix (especially in the religious dimension)....

And so on.

Sadly there are not all that many “sculptures and easily reproducible paintings” of the gene available (incidentally, images of Anne and Mary are not that easy to come by either: usually the two women come with baby Jesus attached -- art historians call this type of image "Anna selbdritt").

But this gap could be filled, ideally in the form of cuddly toys like the aforementioned microbes. We need genes in hot pink and peppermint green. Rather than cold hearted letter combinations let's give them comforting names, like Knut (“FOXP2” and “Hox” are good starts, and “D4DR” has a certain nostalgic Star Wars sort of ring to it, but we can do better!) I admit that there is a colourful stuffed double helix already (which can be accompanied by a bobble-headed Watson), but I have the sneaking feeling that children would not really want to snuggle up with that at night (certainly the child in the picture looks distraught).



Now that Mattel is going through a major crisis, the gene might in fact provide a nice opening for inventive and enterprising toy manufacturers. Any volunteers?