Tropic of Calculus

I've been told, although by whom I can't quite remember, maybe it was myself, that an acceptable calculation for the minimum age of whom you date is half your age plus seven. This is flawed on so many different levels it's almost impossible to begin consdering it, but let's assume that, for a theory with absolutely no basis, it works. Not being a mathematician, I am enlisting the help of Windows Calculator.

I'm assuming this theory comes from teenagers and men in their early twenties, so let's assume you are 20. Easy enough - minimum age is 17. That seems to work - it's over the age of consent and sensible enough to know that if they are dating a 20-year-old, he/she is three years older and possibly involved in different day-to-day activities, like higher education or even the hideous "work" that people keep talking about. (Unlike the couple I knew who were 14 and 21 - that was just a bit creepy.)
This also works if you're 25 (19 and a half) or even, at a push, 30 (22... although that's a real push). But any older than that and this theory falls to pieces.

Okay, they say all's fair in love and war and, I suppose (although I don't agree - war is not fair, and love sure as hell isn't), as you get older the age difference isn't exactly the same as it makes a difference when you're younger. But seriously - say you are 70. 42 is the age calculated, and that's not young enough to be a toyboy/girl (do toy-girls exist? Or are they called something different?), but old enough to know better, surely? 42 (28) provides more of the result I was thinking of. But, as I say, it's flawed.

And what if you are a child? I mean, I was romantically (although not sexually, that'd also be weird) interested in a young lady when we were at the age of six - and that brings up ten. 6 and 10 kinda doesn't work, when you're young a couple of years makes all the difference.

I'm not really going anywhere with this. It was just something I was thinking about on a train late last night, and wanted to use it to demonstrate two universal truths: people are stupid, and doing maths sucks.

What's in a name?

My mother adores my sister, and dislikes me for the reason that every time she says something adoring about my sister I inadvertently make a snide comment, just to balance everything out a little. The rest of the time she thinks I'm OK. Mostly because I stay the fuck out of her way.

I hear through the grapevine - well, via both parents and various sources - that my sister has become vice-president of her university's Feminist Society. This was surprising, as I didn't even know she was a feminist. When my mother repeated this fact with the air of God announcing Christmas would be extended by a few days over the dinner table last night, I put the point to her that I didn't know my sister was a feminist.

"Of course she's a feminist," my mother said. This was, of course, a perfectly valid and totally flawless one-liner to avert any argument that may have resulted. What an intelligent and witty person my mother is.

I have a problem with the concept of feminism when it's applied to the word "feminism". I don't have a problem with the general concept, insofar as it should be taken to imply that women should have the same rights as men. I mean, that's what feminist writers tend to be hinting at (with a few exceptions, notably Rosemary Radford Ruether, who wrote a whole book called Sexism and God-Talk about how God is actually a woman and therefore all men are actually wrong in every way), and it's what modern feminists - in general, anyway, the ones I have studied - say. Even the Spice Girls said in a magazine once that Girl Power is "about being friends with the boys and having fun with them." Exactly, Girls.

The problem, in my view, is that the word has the Latin "femina" in it. There's no masculine aspect of the word and in a theory which promotes equalisation between the sexes, that's remarkably - well - sexist. And because the word is thrown about everywhere these days, it gets applied to things which aren't actually feminist. You get people thinking about butch lesbians who want to kill as many men as possible, like that woman in The Naked Gun 33⅓. I don't think that sort of person actually exists. You also get positive discrimination, which I absolutely hate - robbed me of a perfectly good job in the library when I was 16, and scars run deep. (Incidentally, my sister went on to work in said library, and she didn't do the job properly, but I'm not bitter about that... well, not very).

Feminism shouldn't be called feminism. You go too far one way, and you get oppression; you go too far the other way, and you get oppression by the other side - normally the once-oppressed. The olives call the grass green and we start all over again.

So, I'm not a feminist. I stand for gender-equality-theory. It's not as snappy a name, but it's much more accurate. In fact, if you just discard all these theories and see people as individual people, we wouldn't need to debate about it... because there would be true gender equality.

And you know what? There is! It's just not been put into practice yet...