#ly pull the trigger and split up will not have any lasting impacts on myself or my relationships ice says dead serious

[sprinklersart]

they should show up to kazansky family events together occasionally over the years and do fun family things like share an air mattress in the living room with ices 19 year old cousin and take a 4 hour trip to the grocery store just for milk and chainsmoke behind the shed with ice’s sister. they deserve it ❤️

[gaiatheorist]

“Gammon.”

When it’s less 3am, I’ll go back onto Facebook, and thank the man in my peripheral circle for making an impassioned, and articulate, if somewhat sweary post about ‘gammon.’ He’s responding to the Poppy Noor article in The Guardian from earlier this week, more so, the “Don’t call names, be nice.” tone of it, and the way that every time ‘we’ are told to shut up by the powers-that-be, more of our agency is stripped away by authority. 

Yes, it’s nice-to-be-nice, and the world would be a happier place if everyone was kind to each other, I accept Ms Noor’s point, but, personally, I’ve reached a stage in my own life where “Taking it lying down”, to preserve an illusion of peace, for the benefit of other people just isn’t an option any more. (Yes, that’s a dig at the ex, no I still haven’t ‘let that go’, I probably never will fully, that particular power-imbalance was allowed to continue for far too long. I’m as angry at myself as I am at him, and his family, they were only one step above barefoot-and-pregnant ideology in terms of their women-folk.) 

Dan’s post on Facebook resonates with a couple of other articles I’ve read this week, the “I apologise on behalf of my gender” ones, that GOTN has been mentioned in. They have expanded out, that “I’m sorry that happened to you” is hollow without follow-through, that it can often, though not always spread into the defensive not-all-men, and “I would never do that!” conversation. Right, fine, I’d never kick a puppy, and I’m 100% certain that if I saw someone else kicking a puppy, I’d stop them, see where I’m going with that? We all have a duty of care to each other, wherever we cling to the privilege-ladder, to prevent harm to those ‘below’ us, that’s why I worked in Child Protection all those years. That wasn’t just to ‘rescue’ children, as knights in shining armour go, I’m probably riding a donkey, with an ice-cream wrapper stuck to my shoe, but I did manage to assist in influencing and turning some adults out of repeating harmful behaviours. “That’s not OK”, and “There are other ways”, on a loop, in the face of some incredibly angry, sometimes aggressive adults. My ‘privileged’ status there was that I was wearing a suit, so the assembled professionals tended to take more notice of my carefully worded arguments than the often incoherent blurtings of the families we were trying to stabilise. The suits were all Primark or charity shop ones, because I’d end up on my knees in the playground at least once a week, splitting up fights, or administering first aid. I came from the same streets as those fractured families, there’s no sense in throwing good money at clothes that are going to end up ruined.   

Poppy Noor equating ‘gammon’ with ‘the feckless masses’ offended me, I suppose that in her world-view I’m one of ‘them’ now, on Universal Credit, living in a postcode with Indicators of Multiple Deprivation. (Raised eyebrows from professionals on some occasions, when they’d voice their opinions on how ‘rough’ they’d heard the area was, and I’d casually drop that I’ve lived here most of my life.) If I have ‘branded’ clothes, they’re from charity shops, or have slashed labels because they’re ‘seconds’ from Everything5pounds,com, I have an iPhone, but it’s 2 or 3 models behind the current one, and I paid for it while I was working, I have a ‘fucking massive telly’, left behind by the ex when I threw him out. (It malfunctioned last week, if I hadn’t been able to fix it, I couldn’t have afforded to replace it.) Christ, I’m going not-all-benefits-claimants, aren’t I? I cook from scratch, Jamie Oliver, and I’ve managed to survive on Universal Credit, Theresa May and Iain Duncan-Smith, at great detriment to my Mental Health and credit rating. Maybe Ms Noor is looking down, and I’m looking up, I couldn’t say, because I’m not her. ‘Gammon’, from my perspective are the stock-shots from Question Time, the ‘feckless masses’ that the right-wing media likes to demonise don’t go on Question Time, I doubt most of them voted in the EU referendum, between the disenfranchisement from politics in general, and multiple house-moves meaning many won’t even be registered to vote. I could pick out the few people on my Facebook ‘friends’ list who voted leave, they’re the ones I placed on ‘hide all posts from’ at the start of this period of fragility, as a self-preservation tactic.

What Dan has pointed out, is that every time ‘we’ “know our place”, that ‘place’ is diminished, weakened, denigrated. Every time we defer to the judgement of our ‘betters’, in blind obedient obsequiousness, we allow the imbalances to continue, and what precious little control we have slips further from our grasp. Whichever ‘we’ category I take as my perspective-point, female (albeit non-binary), disabled, unemployed, unpartnered-and-ambivalently-oriented, working-class, having mental health issues, Dan has a very valid argument. Being ‘told’ that ‘gammon’ is a ‘playground insult’, and that its use invalidates any potential discussion or debate misses the point. (I’m fairly certain I’ve never actually used it, but I know I’ve thought it.)

The ‘playground insult’ element is part of the point, to borrow from Margaret Attwood, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Whichever-’we’-we-are, we’ve deliberately picked a lowest-common-denominator playground insult, the ridicule is very much a part of the impact, especially when so many people are being suspended from Twitter for using less jocular terminology. It’s not ‘nice’, and it’s not ‘kind’, I’m unpicking my reasoning for not using it, and I think it comes down to my usual aesthetic-issue, I do try not to base criticisms on characteristics of appearance, with the exception of ‘diet-mommy’, and that objectionable orange horror. 

‘We’ aren’t pointing ‘Ha-ha!’ or yelling ‘triggered!’ at the contingent offended by the use of the word gammon, we’re stepping back, logical-methodical, and hoping against all hope that some of ‘them’ reflect on what behaviours or characteristics are being called into question. What we usually get back is hate, not hope, but we keep plodding on, ‘patriots’ aren’t Pokemon, we know we can’t catch them all. What ‘we’ don’t want is a perpetuation of this perversion, where Farage, Johnson et al promised the nation a bike for Christmas, and now there’s no bike-shaped-present, or tree, and Christmas might well be postponed indefinitely, pending fruitful discussions. 

If and when we throw out the word ‘gammon’, there’s a tendency to respond in kind. ‘Snowflake’, ‘Millennial’, ‘Social Justice Warrior’, ‘Do-gooder’, and the old favourite ‘fat ugly lesbian.’, the ‘gammon’ are quickly roused to ire, and generally not particularly thorough in their prescription of pejoratives, there’s a tendency to fall back on a stock-range of ‘Your Mum’-level responses. ‘We’ are used to them, water off a duck’s back, after years in minority categories, sticks and stones may break our bones etc. The ‘gammon’ aren’t used to being ascribed a category, they’ve always assumed themselves to be high enough on the social ladder to be exempt, they don’t know what to do, how to respond, because they never had their pigtails pulled, or their bra-straps twanged. Their school-books didn’t have foot-prints on them, they were never followed home by two bigger boys spitting on the back of their blazer the whole way, knowing there’d be no way to wash and dry it properly for school the next morning. (Yes, that happened to me, the boys did it because they could, I was a scruffy poor girl, walking home alone.) What the ‘gammon’ are doing is telling-the-teacher, and what the ‘liberal elite’ are doing is telling everyone to play nicely together. We tried that. It didn’t work. The bullies still exploited their power-status, so we underdogs are turning the tables, given the evidence that there’s precious little chance of this monumental cock-up of a government taking ‘our’ side. 

We don’t throw out ‘gammon’ lightly, if we do it at all, being in a minority category teaches you to reserve your ammunition, because you have precious little of it. If or when we go for the jugular it’s a precisely intended strike, none of your “We are very clear that...” waffle, or the virtually indecipherable word-salad spewed out by the chap who didn’t want to go out in the rain. ‘We’ don’t have power-status, we do have something of a magic word, that has precisely the effect we intend it to, and we’ll use it as we see fit. The misguided mediators, telling us to play nicely with the bullies they’ve allowed to subjugate us forever, right under their noses are on a different status-strata, our lives are alien to them. They haven’t experienced the same prejudice and challenges that we have, their perspective of our ‘childish’ terminology is profoundly offensive, it isn’t that we don’t have more intelligent or articulate words at our disposal, it’s that we’re deliberately choosing the ones that we know will hit hardest, ‘laughing at the man.’ 

To Poppy Noor, and anyone else who wants to demean our demeanour and dismiss it as ‘playground insults’; They started it, you watched and did nothing, now, we’re doing something. Tell the bullies that sticks and stones will break their bones, but words will never hurt them, like you told us all of our lives.