Why Tell Stories? Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots and some of his mistakes

Over the end of April and beginning of May I read Christopher Booker’s huge analysis of stories and why we tell them, The Seven Basic Plots. I remember seeing it on bookshop tables when it was new, and being intrigued but also daunted. It came out during my undergraduate degree, when I’d ‘given up’ studying English literature in favour of philosophy and theology and keeping creative writing strictly as a hobby, and I chose not to read it then. Having finally decided that I did actually want to read it and borrowed a library copy, I was determined, but there are many ways in which it didn’t live up to the promise it gave or what I’d imagined for it.

The seven basic plots are covered in the first half, maybe even the first third of the book, and there’s an argument that he should have stopped writing there (or I should have stopped reading) – I knew before I started that I didn’t agree with him about some political questions and by the time I was two-thirds of the way through I was clear that I don’t agree with him about gender roles, war, or history. He uses Jungian ideas about the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, mapping genders onto human virtues like courage and care, and matching those to characters in stories. He’s incredibly ready to judge stories which don’t fit his seven plots, without considering that they could be evidence for, err, there being more than seven plots. (He does concede that creation and detective stories don’t fit his structure anyway.) He’s much more interested in men’s writing than women’s, and isn’t impressed when female characters in stories have ‘masculine’ roles. I should probably be glad, considering what I guess he would have said about it, that the romance genre is never mentioned.

I kept reading partly because it’s good sometimes to engage fully with someone you disagree with. At least now I can give details about how and why! I also kept reading because even though I disagreed with his conclusions, it was an interesting prompt to think about some questions which are key for an author. Why do we tell stories? More specifically, why do I want to tell these stories? Booker died in 2019 and I’m sure he wouldn’t have had any time for modern ideas of ‘representation’, although seeing the diversity of real people represented in fiction is important to me.

For Booker, the purpose of stories is to provide a psychological road map in which the lead character goes through various stages of development in order to become a whole, well-rounded person. (By the way, he claims he couldn’t find alternatives to the words ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’, but ‘lead character’, ‘main character’, and ‘protagonist’ all seem useful to me.) If we sit very lightly to the gendered Jungian stuff he adds to that, it’s similar to what Gwen Hayes calls “the journey from hole-hearted to whole-hearted” (in her book Romancing the Beat). The emotional journey of a story is often to explore how someone can move from incomplete (whether that’s immature, lonely, or in some other form) to complete (mature, loved, or in traditional fairy tales, often monarch). Tragedy is a key exception, although I think Booker doesn’t give enough credit to stories where the final ‘complete’ stage is a happy ending but is also shown to be incomplete in some ways – he tends to assume this is a failure on the part of the author, while I would tend to see it as a deliberate choice to echo life’s real complexities and reject plot devices like miracle healings and overengineered coincidences which can move an otherwise realistic story into the realm of the implausible. 

In terms of his seven basic plots, I think my novels Between Boat & Shore and Carving a New Shape (forthcoming) both have two main characters – pretty standard for romance genre books – and each of them has a ‘Rags to Riches’ story, specifically one in which they move from unloved or disconnected to being loved and fully connected. This looks slightly different for each one, and they tend to start with at least some connections but not the ones they really want. Trebbi, for example, has a strong connection to her friend Dru, but her community are struggling after the murder of their leader and her character arc includes growing into a leadership role as well as falling in love with Aleuks. I think it does make sense in some ways to see these narratives as metaphors for psychological integration or becoming a whole self. I’d differ from Booker on the details, but that core part of his argument does fit for some kinds of art and stories. 

He misses out, however, a whole other set of motivations for reading and telling stories which are to do with empathy and imagination. At the very beginning he reports that lots of people told him that stories were about ‘escape’, and he rejects that as too simple, which is fair in some ways. But he never returns to this theme. I think more recent research on the effects of reading fiction, which show that it increases empathy and improves social cognition might hold some of the answers. In Booker’s model, when we imagine a character we are creating a reflection of our own inner world. In the research, it seems that when we engage with a fictional character we are developing our theory of mind – that is, working to understand other people’s minds, rather than our own. That gives fiction a powerful educational role. We are escaping our limitations and able to visit places we can never go in reality – sometimes the ancient past or outer space or a private palace, but above all other people’s perspectives.

And perhaps he also misses out the fact that it’s fun. Booker has a whole analysis of a plot structure he calls ‘comedy’ which, it turns out, doesn’t even have to be funny. For all the plot structures, though, and for all stories, enjoyment is a element of the appeal. Sometimes it’s enough that a story makes us laugh, or surprises us, even if it doesn’t draw us in to a traditional plot – a Monty Python sketch still turns on a very short story even if it finishes with a surprise visit from Flying Fox of the Yard rather than a true punchline. Reading or hearing a story can be a pleasure in itself even if it doesn’t follow the full arc of a traditional plot – things which we consume in episodes, whether that’s a book chapter at a time or a TV show, can be enjoyable as they are even if they leave us wanting to know what happens next. 

Worlds of Women: review of A Door Into Ocean

A Door Into Ocean is a 1986 sci-fi novel by Quaker author Joan Slonczewski. It’s interested in nonviolence and the creation of a culture focussing on sharing and equality. One of the ways it explores these themes is through the invention of a society in which there are only women. I picked this up because it was recommended in a Quaker context, but as I was reading I soon realised that it’s relevant to another discussion I’ve been reading recently – the extensive discussions about gender plague/gendercide stories. I mostly read these conversations on Twitter, but I recommend Ana Mardoll’s blog if you need to catch up on the latest round. On Twitter, and I’m sorry I can’t find this again, someone said something to the effect that perhaps authors look for ways to kill off all the men in these stories because they want to create a matriarchy but they don’t know how to do that without murder.

I think that might be true about this book. And if it is, that would be deeply ironic for a story so concerned with nonviolence and the avoidance of death-hastening. Before I get into the details, I should say that this isn’t a discussion of the mechanic presented in the book for the creation of an all-women society or how it works: the sci-fi explanation offered is that in the distant past, the life-shapers in this ocean-dwelling society discovered how to create pregnancies by fusing ova, and the group evolved to no longer have men. (Exactly how this squares with their vague belief in a creating deity who set the entire ecosystem up in balance isn’t explored.) But it has an extremely similar vibe to Nicola Griffith’s book Ammonite, in which a virus kills all men who land on a particular planet, and it’s still very much the case that the author made these decisions. 

Both books also have a kind of situational lesbianism, in which it feels like the author wanted to create lesbian relationships (which is great!) but didn’t believe women would really be attracted to other women if they had the choice of men. In particular, in A Door Into Ocean, although women in the all-women society take women as lovers, a man who goes to live in the all-women society easily finds a lover there, and the woman who crosses from another world into the all-women society retains her attachment to the men in her previous society. It imagines women loving women but always being attracted to men as well. In a somewhat similar way, A Door Into Ocean is aware of trans possibilities in a way I don’t recall in Ammonite, but it shies away from exploring them – there is just one scene in which a woman from the all-women society suggests to her lover, the man from the other world, that he could simply go to the local medic and be reshaped into what she regards as a normal female body. He immediately and emphatically rejects the idea and it is never mentioned again.

Joan Slonczewski has good reasons for wanting to create a society very different to her own. In fact, she creates two societies: one, associated with stone and metal, which seems to reflect real-world situations, with men mostly in charge (and some women in military roles), a strong military, lots of invasions, communities controlled by violence and fear, hunger and homelessness, etc. The other, represented by the world of water where everything is fluid and growing (a metaphor made literal which Slonczewski uses extremely well), is all women, nonviolent, governed by gatherings of people at which all adults can speak and a consensus is sought… in fact, funnily enough, the women of the ocean world make decisions in a very similar way to the characters in my novel Between Boat and Shore. This other Quaker author and I might be drawing on, err, Quaker discernment processes? All this is good in some ways. But what is the message given by the conclusion she apparently reached before writing, namely that such a society could not have, or would be much better off without, men?

I think it normalises the assumption that masculinity and violence go together. If it was a one-off, there wouldn’t necessarily be any harm in this creation in a sci-fi; but this book is part of a much larger pattern, in which it’s clear that the opposite – a society of all men, which is completely peaceful and loving and nonviolent – is not being imagined. (And if you are about to tell me that they couldn’t reproduce, remember that in these stories we’re talking about speculative fiction in which a wide range of currently impossible surgeries are made possible, and mpreg is already a genre, and also some trans men carry pregnancies…) It also tends to ignore trans experience, as already mentioned. And, to return to the idea from the first paragraph, it is interesting that authors trying to create societies where women lead need to do so through the nonexistence of men. 

Whether men are killed by a virus or other plague, or die off when they become unnecessary, this creation of matriarchies through death undermines the nonviolent results Slonczewski wants it to have. It can imply a bio-essentialism, because it suggests that violence is inextricably entangled with the male body rather than being a social problem. Those results are so at odds with the other values expressed in A Door Into Ocean (such as the belief that every person can learn and grow, and the possibility of social change through nonviolent pressure) that it seems unlikely to Slonczewski intended them. Now they’ve been pointed out, hopefully future authors with similar social agendas (myself included) can avoid them.

Thoughts after Britain Yearly Meeting

It’s taken me a while to get my thoughts together after Britain Yearly Meeting. That’s partly because there was a lot to think about – with dozens of events over three weeks, plus two weekends full of formal sessions, it was longer and in some ways more complex than even a week-long residential Yearly Meeting Gathering would be normally. It’s also because I’ve got a lot else on – other work, holidays with my wife, books to write, washing up to do, the usual. But I think I do have a couple of reflections it would be helpful to me to write down and perhaps helpful for others to read.

The first reflection is about who attended our Yearly Meeting this year. It’s not a big surprise, after the findings of the surveys which Woodbrooke and Britain Yearly Meeting ran last year, to find that the profile of people attending Quaker stuff changes when it moves online. At Yearly Meeting, I heard a number of people clearly articulating a pattern we identified in the survey: there are significant groups of people who cannot attend in person but who want to be involved. Some people have disabilities, caring responsibilities, travel cost barriers, and other circumstances which make attending online possible when attending in person is impossible. Some were new to Quakers and attending their first Yearly Meeting; others have been involved in a local meeting or other Quaker community for a long time and were attending Yearly Meeting for the first time having wanted to attend but previously been prevented. That’s a huge thing and something to celebrate about meeting online.

On the other hand, there were clearly people missing. Our main sessions didn’t reach the big numbers we sometimes see in person, and although a lot of people participated in some of our Yearly Meeting Gathering, my sense – this is difficult to measure, but comparing notes across several people who tried things like ‘looking for everyone from my area meeting in this session’ I think I have a rough idea – is that a much smaller group than usual attended every formal session of Yearly Meeting. (If you have stats or better information, I would love to be corrected or have more evidence on this, so please contact me.) That stands to reason in some ways, especially because when you have travelled and are all on the same university campus, there’s not the same competition. When you’re at home and have the option to join a session online, you also have the option to… whatever else you want to do. And you may be asked to refrain. Even very supportive family members who are not Quakers may only tolerate a certain number of hours spent on Zoom over the weekend! It might also change the balance of participation, though, and the online format means that some people for whom Yearly Meeting is normally a highlight didn’t enjoy it in the same way this year.

I don’t have a neat conclusion to this point – meeting everyone’s access needs is always complex – but having done this experiment, I hope that we’ll learn from it, even if the answers aren’t simple.

My other main reflection is about the three Yearly Meeting theme sessions and how we share it. We produced three important minutes, on becoming an anti-racist community, on welcoming trans, non-binary, and other gender non-conforming people, and on climate justice. I have learned that I will also be glad these things went as far as they did, and disappointed that they didn’t go further. (I remember coming home from Canterbury in 2011 wishing we could have gone further, especially wanting us to adopt a numerical target for carbon footprint reduction, and gradually understanding why we couldn’t do that at the time. Many thanks to the Friends who talked it through with me at the time, and have done the same after several Yearly Meetings since.) I want us to go further with all of these issues. But I also know that we have to take the whole community with us, and I see Quakers sharing articles which attack trans women, and hear white Quakers using infantilising language about adult Black men, and… and I don’t even know where to start on all the ways we haven’t yet integrated a justice perspective into our work on the climate crisis. And those are only the things I notice, and I’m a white cis Quaker whose home isn’t yet experiencing damage from climate change, so I have reason to think that I’m missing a shedload of stuff which privilege hides from me.

Given what I said about attendance, about who was there and who was not, I have found myself asking: how will we share this? Obviously our epistle is an important way to share it, and this year’s is particularly full of detail about the themes Yearly Meeting worked on. My local meeting had a discussion about the epistle, which helped to balance out the fact that it was so long that elders chose not to read the whole piece out loud in meeting for worship. (Alas, I didn’t make it to the session… one can only spend so long on Zoom, as previously discussed!) But in the longer term we will need to keep developing work in these areas. What can we do to make sure that these things are considered whenever they are relevant, and not just in discussions dedicated to them? Should we ask more often? Rewrite Advices & Queries so that language we hear regularly reflects these priorities? Find experts, from within and outside our community? Try and step back and pass the microphone so those more directly affected can be heard?

I still don’t have any neat answers. But in the spirit of that last suggestion, I will finish with links to some relevant videos and posts by others:

Clare Flourish, blog post on Britain Yearly Meeting on Zoom

Lisa Cumming, blog post on Everyday Solidarity and what British Quakers are doing to put love into action

Sophie Bevan, blog post about Black Lives Matter

Chloe Schwenke in a video about her journey as transgender Quaker

Vanessa Julye in a a video about Quakers and racism

I’m sure there are lots I’ve missed – please share in the comments if you feel led to do so.

Shoes

I need new shoes.

I need them to:
* fit well (on feet which are not the shape of the last they use for ‘normal women’ feet, so to achieve this I need a wide-fit option and/or to buy from the so-called ‘men’s’ range),
* have genuine arch support (so that it passes inspection by doctors and physios),
* be hard-wearing (I walk an average of perhaps two miles a day and hate shoe shopping), and
* be waterproof, and black, and smart enough to wear to work.

Ideally, I want them to be:
* ethically produced
* climate-friendly
* not involving the death of an animal.
I eat mainly vegan and people think I’m a hypocrite when they realise my shoes are leather (although I would also feel like a hypocrite if I had plastic shoes which turned out to have a higher greenhouse gas emission).

Ideally ideally, I’d also have some choice about what kind of gender markers my shoes display, but fit and comfort and ethics all tend to come first.

Usually, in order to fulfil the first list I end up at Clarks again, but obviously this doesn’t meet the requirements of the second list. At the moment I am wearing my old pairs of Clarks shoes to death, but I can see the end coming. People who are interested in the second list mainly seem to buy shoes online, but I suspect I’d spend a lot of money on return postage before I met the first list’s requirements that way. (I don’t mind spending good money for good shoes, but I’d rather spend it on shoes than on returning pairs of shoes that don’t fit!) I have needed new shoes for some time, but I hate making this kind of decision.

Actually, I had written most of this post when, a few days ago, my current shoes seemed particularly worn and I happened to be passing a Clarks shop. I found a pair which looked about right, tried them on, tried them on a wide fit – and said to the person who was serving me, “They still seem a bit narrow,” expecting that I wouldn’t be buying any shoes. But this salesperson said, “We have them in a extra wide fitting.” Extra wide fitting! Wonder of wonders! Shoes which are wide enough and not too long and comfortable and black and even slightly femme! And made of leather and plastic. And from a brand which is reliable and hard-wearing. Needless to say, I bought them, which has staved off this problem for another few years while I wear them out.

I’m not sure whether this was the decision making itself for me in a positive way (shopping always seems to me to contain a fair amount of luck/intuition/space for Spirit), or me defaulting to a bad habit because I haven’t the commitment or imagination to escape, but there it is. Invective about how I hate animals and the planet (and support sexist shoe design and all sorts of other terrible things I’d know about if I subscribed to Ethical Consumer) on a postcard please.

Labels: good or bad?

I was indirectly compared to a Nazi on Facebook the other day. It made me feel a bit sad, a bit nostalgic, and a bit smug. Smug because by Godwin’s Law, that’s a win. Nostalgic because since I started mostly been spending my internet time talking about Quaker stuff, it hasn’t happened often. And sad because someone in my community thinks that friends of mine are worth comparing with Nazis.

In order to discuss this properly, I want to begin with a philosopher’s move, and lay out the strongest version I can concoct of the opposing argument (‘argument’ in the philosopher’s sense, too: the case someone is putting forward). This isn’t exactly what was said, but represents what I take to be the points involved. The arguments begin with something which everyone can agree on: people these days are, as a matter of fact, using more categories than just ‘male’ and ‘female’ to describe gender. Terms such as transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer have been invented and are in use. So far so good. We also all agree that some Quaker meetings have noted this fact and decided to take steps to make sure they are inclusive of people who identify as something other than simply ‘male’ or ‘female’. Recently, a national Quaker body noted this – which was the occasion for the discussion.

For some people, the proliferation of identity labels looks like a problem. There are, I think, two subtly different forms of the case they put from here on. In the first one, labels are a problem in relationships. For example, if I am trying to get to know someone, and I have been told that they are a woman, I might be inclined to make assumptions about them: that they are likely to be smaller and weaker, that they are likely to be interested in fashion, or whatever. Probably in a real situation the examples are more subtle than this – but they are real and pervasive. The cure for this is not to create and use more labels, but to get to know people as individuals. As the saying goes, if you know one person with autism, you know one person with autism – the label ‘autism’ may tell you very little.

In the second version of the argument, labels are a social problem. For example, if I am trying to describe society, and I pick out a group such as ‘immigrants’, I can then say certain things about them. I have, by the way, chosen this example as a case which seems to me to be a real, current case of the pattern which worries people who put this argument. However, I think it’s a group label used much more by people outside the group than people inside the group, and that might make a significant different to the ethics of using it at all. That, though, isn’t the line of argument which is pursued here – and proponents of it might well say that all labels can be used in similarly bad ways regardless of who applies them first. Anyway: having identified the group ‘immigrants’, I might say positive things, such as ‘immigrants make a huge contribution to the nation’s economy’, but I might just as easily say negative things, such as ‘we’d all be better off without immigrants’. This is where people like to mention Nazis. In particular, the Nazi practice of picking out individuals and forcing them to make their group membership visible – the imposition of yellow stars, pink triangles, and so on – makes the mere act of labelling, rather than saying horrible things about groups of people, seem like the problem.

I hope that these are fair representations of the positions involved. (If not, my comments section is open to you.) I think that both of these views catch something useful, but that ultimately both are mistaken about the value of terms such as ‘genderqueer’.

I can recall holding a view much like the first one myself. I remember expressing it in an online conversation with a non-white friend, who had posted to say that she was feeling a need to take her racial identity much more seriously. This made me uncomfortably aware of the ways in which my whiteness separated me from someone I liked to think I was close to, and I commented to say that I thought it didn’t matter much and we had lots of other things in common. Her reaction quickly let me know that in trying to bring us back together in this way, I’d actually made a much worse gap between us, by downplaying the significance of something which I had the privilege to ignore and she, in our racist society, had to acknowledge every day.

Nothing about that negates the need to get to know people as individuals – my friend is as different from others of her ethnicity as I am from other white people – but it does point to an uncomfortable truth. By focusing on individuals, we can miss two things. We can miss the effects of systems on them – while I focus on my friend as an individual, I might assume that her experiences of racism are somehow just about her and not examples of a system problem. And we can miss how different we really are by paying more attention to what we have in common. However much we have in common, we’ll always be different (another white middle-class cissexual woman from the south of England and I can be very different indeed, as a survey of my school friends will tell you). If in our personal relationships we try and ignore the labels which pick out our differences, we might fool ourselves into thinking we have more in common than we really do – especially because it’s a common human error to fill in the blanks with more of the same. If I don’t hear about (or listen to) how your experiences are different to mine, I’m liable to assume that your experiences are the same as mine, in the same way that as a child I assumed all families ate supper at 6pm because that’s what my family did.

I can also see the appeal of the second position. When people pick out groups they don’t belong to, they almost always at least simplify and generalise, and often make crass mistakes, or, as in the examples above, blame the group for whatever social problem worries them. However, I also think something must have gone wrong with this argument: despite the actions of the Nazis, I still see the six-pointed star outside synagogues, so putting up a label must have some uses for the Jewish community. (I also see security fences, so I’m not claiming that it doesn’t have drawbacks as well.) The gender-identity terms which were immediately under discussion are labels which people claim for themselves.

The uses of labels seem to me to fall into two forms. One is self-knowledge. Especially if the label you need wasn’t readily available to you, there can be a huge relief – and sometimes straightforward practical advantages – in finding the right one. Someone who discovers the word ‘asexual’, for example, when their partner has been calling them ‘frigid’, suddenly has a different perspective on their own desires. They also have a way to explain their preferences to others, and this is the second use of labels: to give others some idea. Any term will need extra clarification in a deeper relationship, but often a label that gets you into the right area helps to decide whether or not you want to develop the relationship further, and how to go about it if you do. The clearest cases are sexual relationships (woman to man: “No thank you, I’m a lesbian” – three labels in the space of nine words, and you’ve got the picture) and community formation (we’re here, we’re queer, we could have a Pride march). I think it applies in lots of other circumstances too, though, even if the decision isn’t so clear cut: having just met someone who identifies as a Christian, I might ask different questions to if I meet someone who identifies as a Pagan. Neither label tells me what the person believes, but both give me a nudge away from putting my foot in my mouth – and will help me explain Quakerism in terms they are likely to recognise.

Using a label will always carry risks. People will make assumptions – because that’s how labels work. People might try and attach negative ideas to your label. People might attack you because of your label. However, what I am hearing from many people who use labels like non-binary, trans*, or genderqueer is that the advantages outweigh the risks.

In particular, the risks of a new label which is correct are much easier to bear than the pains of an old or accidental label which is wrong. I’m a cissexual woman and I can laugh it off when someone calls me ‘sir’ when they ask for my train ticket – but it’s still an awkward moment for both of us. If I wasn’t cissexual, I imagine that would be a moment of real fear – am I being ‘found out’, will they be angry with me when they realise – and if I was non-binary, identifying neither as a woman or a man, it might take a lot longer to sort out. Indeed, in that kind of very short interaction, I suspect complex genders are often not understood at all. To me, that makes it even more important to name and accept them in communities where we have longer and hence more time to explain. Similarly, I am queer – I could easily let that slide, I’ve dated people of several genders and I could let you assume I was straight – but I don’t want to. Politically, I want to be visible, and personally, I don’t want you to be surprised when my in-depth analysis of The Night Manager includes a hotness rating for Olivia Colman as well as Tom Hiddleston.

The biggest risks of not using the label, though, are the gaps in knowledge. You can just about have a label and not use it, gaining the self-knowledge without sharing it, but humans are social and we want to connect with people. Authentic connection involves sharing that self-knowledge and recognising, not only what we have in common, but what is genuinely different. If we deny those differences in an attempt to create the illusion of unity, we actually slip back into another oppressive pattern: the desire for everyone to be like me.

We’re not alike. As humans, we’re immensely different, and hugely creative, and people bring new labels into being and repurpose old ones in order to communicate as well as they can. That process of communication absolutely has risks – but those risks are often worth taking. This blog post, for example, risks re-opening conversations which quickly turned unproductive – but I hope it helps us understand one another better.

A Past Future: chapter 29

You know how old science fiction tells you more about the time in which it was made than the future? I think Qf&p chapter 29, ‘Leadings’, is a bit like that. It was compiled for 1994, when this Book of Discipline was new.

Some of it stands, of course. Predictions about the future are about people, and people don’t change that much. 29.01 talks about walking with a smile into the dark – just as much of a challenge in any age. The situation in Northern Ireland has improved, but there are plenty of other places in the world where you can talk to the “men of violence” mentioned in 29.08.

On the other hand, a lot has also changed.

Some of the leadings which are seedlings in this chapter have grown and blossomed into flowers. 29.03 and 29.18 talk about what we now call sustainability. We have stuck with the inter-faith dialogue mentioned in 29.14, and this work has borne some fruits.

Some positions are clear and consistent but surrounding society hasn’t changed – at all, or in the direction we’d like. 29.09 talks about the arms trade – the technology has changed, but the trade is still happening and Quakers are still protesting it. 29.10 talks about not paying taxes for war purposes – but when I submitted my most recent tax return, HMRC provided me with a handy and horrifying graph to show that more of my money is spent on the military than the environment. (See Conscience for the ongoing campaign.) 29.12 and 29.13 were both written in 1987 – but the poverty they discuss is still very much part of British life in 2017.

Some issues haven’t been taken up by Quakers in the way the authors of these passages hoped they might be. 29.04 talks about the anti-vivisection movement: as far as I know, Quakers in Britain don’t have any united position on this, and while many would want to reduce animal suffering, many still eat meat, and I think most would accept that some medications are best tested on animals. As far as I can tell as a white person, the problems of assumptions about race and ethnicity identified in 29.15 are just as much of an issue now as ever.

Other issues which have been areas for Quaker discussion or even decision aren’t mentioned here. Questions about sexuality and marriage aren’t in this chapter (although they were, as I understand it, on the radar at Yearly Meeting 1994). Questions about gender diversity, assisted dying and end of life care, drug legalisation, and mental health don’t appear here, but have all been raised by meetings since this was written.

Which bits of this chapter do you relate to, and what feels outdated or absent?

Why collect demographic data?

I’ve now run two large online surveys of Quakers – one about threshing and one about afterwords – and on both occasions, questions about age, gender, and education raised protests. Since this information isn’t directly related to the topic of the survey, I can understand some objections about its irrelevance, but it is important in some ways and I’d like to take a little while to explore these questions, why I ask them, and what I do with the information.

Firstly, I’d like to dispel a possible misconception. I do not use this information to judge the answers to other questions. In fact, before I analyse the data I usually detach different parts of it: when I read a detailed answer about afterwords in a particular meeting, I am not at the same time looking to see how old this respondent is or whether they have a degree. Perhaps knowing this would help the Friend who refused to tell me about their educational background because “whether academic or not you can make a spiritual decision”. I completely agree. In fact, I’d really like my data to include more responses from people with less formal education – I realise that by choosing to take written responses I’ve excluded some people who struggle with reading and writing, but even at a quick glance my respondents are much more educated than the population as a whole.

This brings me to one of the things I do do with this information: compare it with the UK population as a whole. According to our census data, even in the best educated sector of the population (as of 2011, this was women aged 25-34), only around 42.6% of people had a university degree or higher qualification. Roughly 85% of the people who answered my survey had a university degree, or equivalent or higher qualification. They aren’t in that age band, either – 40% of my respondents are aged between 61 and 70 – although 68% of them gave their gender as ‘f’, ‘female’ or ‘woman’.

You might have noticed if you did the survey that I chose to take all this information in free-text boxes, where respondents could write anything they liked, rather than restricting people to clicking a button marked ‘m’ or one marked ‘f’. Setting out the question in this way enables people to give other answers – such as ‘cis male’, ‘gender fluid’ or other, more individual responses (one respondent simply gave a personal name, perhaps to say ‘my gender is completely specific to me’). Allowing this freedom of response is an important point of principle. I did regret sticking to this principle in the case of the question about membership, though – I’d intended to people to answer the question “Are you a member or an attender of a meeting in Britain Yearly Meeting?” with something like ‘member’ or ‘attender’ or perhaps ‘member of another yearly meeting’, but a number of people answered it with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, which didn’t provide enough information for me to do anything useful with it.

This, more specifically Quaker, information leads to the other thing I do with these answers: compare with other Quaker sources to see whether I have a sample which is representative of the whole. For example, I can compare my information about gender – about 68% women – with the tabular statement for Britain Yearly Meeting for 2015, where 62% of members and attenders across England, Wales and Scotland are women, and see that I’m only a little bit out. On the other hand, I can also look at my information about membership, where of those who gave clear answers and indicated that they were within Britain Yearly Meeting, 88% are in membership, and see that they’re significantly over-represented: in the tabular statement, only about 63% of the adults reported are in membership (the other 37% being attenders).

I can think of ways to explain this. For example, people who have been involved with Quakers for longer are more likely to be in membership, more likely to be on the email lists and Facebook pages where the survey link was shared, and more likely to feel confident reporting on their experience of afterwords. However, if I hadn’t collected this information, I wouldn’t know that there was anything I needed to explain.

There are many kinds of information which I haven’t collected, too. For example, standard equal opportunities monitoring forms in the UK at the moment would also ask about sexuality and ethnicity, both questions I chose to leave out. I didn’t leave them out because I think they don’t matter – my whiteness and queerness make as much difference to my experience of Meeting for Worship as my age and gender, which is to say, they are incredibly important in some ways and irrelevant in others. I did leave them out mainly because there are not as many high-quality sources with which to compare, and because when the numbers are low (for both alternative sexualities and minority ethnicities, we are looking at around 10% in many locations in the UK, although this various considerably depending on several factors) it would be easier to have a small change look important when it was actually just chance.

By collecting four data points – age, gender, education, and membership status – I hope to have some points of comparison and get a feel for how my sample is similar or different to other Quaker and national surveys, without asking people to fill in more questions than is reasonable.

Reading Qf&p: chapters 5 and 6

Chapters 5 and 6 look at aspects of the internal organisation of Quakers in Britain – chapter 6 deals with the meetings of our main body, Yearly Meeting, and chapter 5 covers ‘Other Quaker groupings’, of which most are regional (and one is for an age-band, Young Friends General Meeting). Reading these chapters is mostly a very different experience from looking at a chapter like 21 or 3 in which most of the passages are by individuals. There are some extracts from personal writing, but the bulk of these chapters has been written by committee or group – sometimes as minutes, sometimes specifically for this purpose.

These are not, then, chapters which most of us read for inspiration, or just dip into. If I open the book at random and it lands here, I confess I’m likely to try again or flip through for a more likely-looking section! They are, however, very important chapters, and reading them carefully turned out to make me think about a range of issues. (Many thanks to the Being Friends Together resource which offers interesting and enjoyable comprehension activities and greatly increased my engagement with this material!)

One issue which comes out of this – especially out of chapter 5 and the differences between Meeting of Friends in Wales/General Meeting for Scotland on the one hand, and other regional groups on the other – is about the relationship between our internal structures and the structures of our civil society. At the moment, Britain Yearly Meeting includes most of what is governed as the UK, except Northern Ireland (which belongs to Ireland Yearly Meeting). Because Scotland and Wales have devolved governments, the regional meetings in those areas have specific relationships with government. If the people of Yorkshire voted to have a devolved government of their own, would Quakers in Yorkshire – which already exists but is in a different position in our structures to the equivalent meetings in Scotland and Wales – need to take on this role in relation to the new parliament? A different but related question about our boundaries would arise if the people of Scotland chose, as they nearly did but actually didn’t, to leave the UK. Presumably we would have things to learn from Ireland Yearly Meeting, who have direct experience of operating across national borders.

Another issue is about the things we choose to include in the book. When explaining the book to non-Quakers, I sometimes say that Yearly Meeting decides what’s in the book, and the book tells you how to run the Yearly Meeting. This captures the sense of the mutual interdependence of the body (both the Yearly Meeting as a whole community of people and Yearly Meeting as the decision-making event). In chapter 6, it’s very close to being exactly true – there are places in chapter 6 which tell you which business to bring to which session of the meeting, for example – but it’s also not really true. If you started from scratch with only the book, I think the Yearly Meeting you would run would be quite different, in some subtle and some important ways, from what I expect from my attendance. You wouldn’t know about shuffle breaks. You might choose a very different pattern for the appointment of clerks. That in itself is probably inevitable, as no text can capture the constantly evolving expectations without describing every event in detail, but it does raise the question: which things do we need to lay down, and what can we leave open?

The other section which caught my eye was the paragraph within 6.01, a potted history of Yearly Meeting, which is about the Women’s Yearly Meeting. Women had been joining the main/men’s Yearly Meeting since the 1880s, and the separate women’s meetings were laid down in 1907. Gender balances and/or imbalances in the Society were on my mind anyway  when I discussed this with my local meeting last week, and I remembered having mixed feelings about a Young Quaker Women’s weekend I went on during my teens – many positive, some confused, only some of which would later be resolved by learning the word bisexual. If my local meeting held separate men’s and women’s business meetings this coming Sunday, the women’s meeting would be much larger than the men’s (typically our attendance at worship on Sunday is about a quarter to a third men). Some of our committees might not be represented at both meetings. Most but I think not absolutely all of our attenders would know which meeting they were expected to attend, and some might boycott both in solidarity. Our current clerking team would be able to provide one clerk for each meeting. I wonder which agenda items each meeting would discern required their attention, and whether they would reach the same conclusions.

Chapters 5 and 6 talk about how things are, and a little about how they have been. Reading them carefully has made me ask why things are as they are, and think about how they could be different under different circumstances. Overall, I’m actually very happy with how things are, but perhaps there are improvements and there will always be changing circumstances which make this kind of exercise a useful one.

Q is for Queer Theory

I was about to say that lots of people ask me questions when they hear that I have studied queer theory, but it’s not quite true. Some people do. Other people just look at me for a minute and then change the subject.

People who do ask questions often begin with something like, “do they really call it that?” Well, yes, it’s genuinely in the title of courses and indeed my degree. It is a provocative name, and I know many people are uncomfortable with the use of the term ‘queer’. The thinking behind its use here has, I think, two main strands. Firstly, using an insult to refer to yourself takes the sting out of it; this process is called ‘reclaiming’. Pagans, especially women, who call themselves witches are doing some of this; religious groups, such as Quakers or Methodists, who take on originally offensive or sarcastic nicknames are also doing this. It turns the power of the word to your advantage – with the disadvantage that a lot of people are going to raise their eyebrows and say things like, “do they [whoever they are!] really call it that?”

The second strand is the need for a clear but not too specific term. ‘Gay’, although sometimes used for all homosexuals or even everyone who experiences same-sex attraction, is more often associated with men – as ‘lesbian’ is with women. Terms like ‘homosexual’ don’t make sense when you’ve noticed the existence of people outside the gender binary – what’s ‘same-sex’ if you’re intersex or third-gendered? Abbreviations – LGBTQIA… – build up into long lists and can never include everyone. ‘Queer’ – people whose sexualities are oppressed under the use of offensive terms like ‘queer’ – can include, as someone memorably put it in questioning me about my course, “gays and stuff”, with a very wide scope on ‘stuff’. Polyamory, kink, BDSM, asexuality, heteroqueer, and a whole array of gender identities can be included under the suggestive-but-not-definitive term ‘queer’.

What does queer theory do, then? Two main things: it theorises queerness and it offers queer readings. Queerness – whatever that is – has often been medicalised and sexuality and gender treated reductively (I refer you to whatever debate about ‘gay genes’ or the existence of ‘female sexual dysfunction’ is happening at the moment). Working from a perspective which takes the experiences of queer people seriously, queer theory can open up new ways of looking at these questions.

Similarly, queer readings of texts – literary works, TV shows, archaeological evidence, whatever – offers insights from contemporary and historical queer experience. Again, this can open up new perspectives on all kinds of questions: the relationships between characters in a novel, the burial of a body with ambiguous gender markers, the ways that gay marriage is depicted in advertising.

Lots of people ask me whether queer theory is really called that, and what it’s about. Sadly, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me why I’d want to study queer theory or what makes it a useful subject – things I do get asked about theology and philosophy in particular. That’s sad because I’d have a lot to say about how enriching I found it as a discipline.

Film review: Ex Machina (2015)

I suspect that, like The Matrix, this is a film which is going to be much used in beginner-level discussions of key philosophical topics. It raises issues about other minds and artificial intelligence, mainly, but also – less explicitly – issues about human nature and gender.

The rest of this review will contain major spoilers for the plot of this film. The plot of this film isn’t very sophisticated, or its main point, so you might not mind, but I feel the need to warn you. The film should also have warnings for sexism, racism, violence, body horror (of the sci-fi, plastic-skin-peels-off variety) and self-harm. The 15 rating on the film is probably also for (female) nudity.

There are four main characters in this film, of which only three are speaking roles, of which only one is female, and she’s the robot/AI. The central mover in this film is Nathan (clearly a Stark sibling, as he much in common with Tony and the other Nathan), played by Oscar Isaac (splendidly, I might say – a really compelling and nuanced performance), who has set himself up in a cave mountain retreat and built an AI. He wants to test the AI, so he brings in a guy, Caleb.

Nathan, by the way, has really shitty attitudes towards women, which do gradually become visible and are almost-but-not-quite problematised by the narrative. Big spoiler number one: he builds sexy women robots like his brother Tony builds Iron Man suits. Lots, and he keeps them in cupboards when he’s not sleeping with them. The fact that the non-speaking AI woman, Kyoko, is explicitly presented as Japanese adds a disappointing edge of intersecting Orientialism/racism to the sexism of the whole enterprise. Funnily enough (spoiler number two), his AIs hate him.

The film contains a higher than average number of references to philosophical literature. Centrally, it focuses on the Turing Test, which is adapted for some sensible philosophical reasons and some purely dramatic ones, and it also uses the Mary-in-a-black-and-white-room thought experiment in a way which suggests real engagement with the philosophical motives for it. There’s also a throwaway reference to Wittgenstein, but no significant Wittgensteinian content. The plot turns on a version of the Turing Test – Caleb must interview the AI, Ava, and see whether, despite knowing that she’s a machine, he is still convinced that she thinks and feels. Potential irritation caused by this change to the test is substantially mitigated by the conversation Nathan and Ava have about it.

Regardless of Caleb’s thoughts – which become more and more confused as the web of intrigue grows – I came away from the film convinced that the film makers wanted the audience to think of Ava as concious. Whether she has emotion is another question; I’m inclined to think that she does, although some of her actions at the end of the film might be used to argue otherwise. In any case, big spoiler number three, we learn that Nathan should have read more sci-fi, because the Three Laws of Robotics would have saved his life. Of course, he thought he was building an AI, to mimic humanity, and not a robot, and Ava perhaps most proves her humanity when she surprises both her creator and her examiner.

In order to do so, she collaborates with Kyoko. There is no audible dialogue in this scene, so it’s impossible to tell whether it’s about a man, but communication is clearly achieved. They are two named characters who are clearly presented as female – but I’m not sure whether, even if they did speak about, say, their longing for freedom as well as about Nathan, this would be a Bechdel pass. Do they have to pass the Turing Test before qualifying for the Bechdel Test?

As you can probably see by now, every line of thought about the plot of this film circles back to the question which is at the centre of the narrative: does Ava pass the Turing Test? Can she really think for herself, or is this a clever fake? There are a lot of clever fakes in this film, and whatever the other weaknesses of the narrative, it does succeed in dramatising problems from philosophy of AI (and issues about other minds) in much the way that The Matrix dramatised problems in epistemology and metaphysics. Ex Machina might not be a big hit in the box office, but I won’t be surprised to find it discussed in A-Level and undergraduate philosophy classrooms for some time to come.