Rape Culture and Consent

Yesterday, Libby Anne posted a piece about sex as marital duty. Go read it. Libby Anne is usually worth reading, and there’s a lot of food for thought and some really shocking quotes from a fundamentalist marriage guidance book (the worst being without doubt: “Don’t talk to me about how uncomfortable or painful it is for you. Do you think your body is special and has special needs? Do you know who created you, and do you know he is the same God who expects you to freely give sex to your husband? Stop the excuses!”).

Anyway, the main body of the post is about how Libby consented to and had sex with her husband when she didn’t really want to because she felt it was her duty, and in the comment section someone implied that this could be described as rape. I objected, other people chimed in, it went back and forth a little, and then I wrote this: “Rape is a word for when one party deliberately ignored their partners non-consent (given in words, screams, physical fighting, or whatever) [...]“

Take a good look at that. This, ladies and gentlemen, is rape culture. Right there out of my own fingertips.
Non-consent doesn’t start when you’re screaming. Non-consent is simply the absence of consent. When you’ve said “yes” (in words or deeds), you have consented. If you haven’t, you have not consented. Consent isn’t the default position. Assuming otherwise is rape culture, and frankly, I can’t believe it’s still so firmly rooted in my brain that I don’t even recognize it until it’s pointed out to me. (Which other commenters fortunately did.) It’s not as obvious as when this Arizona judge told a victim of sexual abuse that if she hadn’t been there that night, none of that would have happened to her, and that she had “learned a lesson about vulnerability”, but it’s still rape culture.

The difference between non-consent and consent isn’t the difference between silence and a no, it’s the difference between silence and a yes. (Not necessarily in verbal form.)

And this is important. Knowing it, remembering it, emphasizing it is important. I wasn’t sure I was going to write this post until I went to a news site and found this (article in German, quoted parts my own translation):

Controversial acquittal for rape in Germany

[...] A 31-year-old accused of rape was acquitted because his 15-year-old victim supposedly did not fight back enough.

The incident occurred in July of 2009 in the 31-year-old’s apartment [...]. After sending his life partner and a friend out of the flat, he allegedly forced the girl to have sex with him. The man reportedly was inebriated and addicted to alcohol and drugs at the time of the event. “No, I don’t want that”, the student allegedly said, but the man, who is considered to be extremely inclined to use violence, carried on. He is currently serving a three-year prison sentence for brutally beating a life partner, among other things. [...]

According to the judge, the girl could have run away or called for help. “If one doesn’t want something, one has to make it clearer. He didn’t know that she didn’t even want it”, she was quoted in the “Recklinghäuser Zeitung”. The prosecutor also pleaded not guilty on Monday.

The girl’s lawyer, Dirk Brockpähler, gave the following advice to all women according to the paper: “When in doubt, you have to scratch.”

(Wow do I ever suck at this translation thing.)
You know what sucks even more? The shit I translated. But it’s shit like this that needs to be seen and heard so we can recognize the importance of talking and thinking about rape culture and how its views influence our lives.

In case you’d like to know more about the topic, allow me to point you to this excellent website and leave you with this video of people portraying consent and non-consent (which for some reason always left me in a better mood when I watched it):

Human Life International

Beware, the anti-abortion crowd is coming – right here, to Vienna. An article in my favorite online newspaper drew my attention to the fact that a month from now, the so-called “World Prayer Congress for Life” will take place, hosted by Human Life International. I decided to follow up on that with a little research. Are you ready?

Their English Wikipedia entry (as always my first go-to place) doesn’t offer a whole lot of information, basically just saying the organization is “American-based”, Roman Catholic, and was founded in 1981 by a certain Father Paul Marx. Wiki then describes HLI as describing itself as “the largest international pro-life organization in the world”, noting that it has affiliates and associates in over 100 nations worldwide. HLI’s own website is cited as a source.

I switched to the entry in German, where HLI is described as originating in the USA and having 59 action centers in 51 countries, no source given. Also, Father Paul Marx is somehow turned into a monk instead of a priest. Their mission goals are quoted in this lovely sentence: “We exist not only to fight the evils of abortion, contraception, sex education and family breakdown, but also to bring the good news of the Gospel of Life to the nations.”
Oh, so they’re not only fighting sex education and contraception, they’re also bringing us the Gospel of Life. Rejoice, future AIDS victims!

The entry then elaborates on HLI’s activities, using the term “unconventional methods” for redirecting an abortion clinic’s incoming phone calls to an HLI counselor. Simultaneously, activists protested in front of the clinic and harassed patients. The clinic sued, and although they won, they went bankrupt soon afterwards. HLI bought the building and turned it into a “baby holocaust museum” (quote from Wiki).

I checked: they actually did, though they alternate between calling it “baby holocaust memorial” and “life protection museum”. (Here’s their page – it’s in German, and also the layout and coloring will burn your eyes.)

According to Wiki, HLI was criticized for preaching against contraception in AIDS-riddled African countries as well as their methods regarding women planning to abort. A critic once used the words “psychological terror” to describe HLI’s methods. HLI sued and lost, so it’s official now.

Among Wiki’s sources, an online newspaper article from 2004 (in German) is listed. Because I follow breadcrumb trails with as much enthusiasm as anybody, I click. Paul Marx is a priest again in this article, HLI has 84 centers in 56 countries and over 25.000 members. “The fundamentalist group believes contraception to be the world’s most dangerous ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and opposes sex education in schools” – not much new stuff there.

The next paragraph is more interesting, however. Apparently the abortion clinic later turned into the “museum” wasn’t just harassed – HLI actually bought the building while the clinic was still running, and while they couldn’t just throw them out, they held prayer and singing sessions 24 hours a day right above the operating room, made bomb threats and even attacked with poisonous gas. And some of the redirected callers could schedule appointments – but for days when the clinic was closed, and when the patients turned up, they were lead into an HLI center nearby by an activist and held there for hours.

Quick preliminary verdict: anti-abortionist activists aren’t the kind of people I’d like to be friends with anywhere in the world.

HLI’s international website claims they are active in 105 countries throughout the world. It has a nice little graphic of Europe showing the countries providing “Abortion on Demand” in bright, dangerous red, the ones with “Exceptions” in yellow, and the ones with “Pro-Life Laws” in soothing, healthy green. I’m not an expert, but this looks like a lot of simplification: “Abortion on Demand” apparently includes Austria, where abortion is only legal within the first twelve weeks (and later for medical reasons or when the pregnant woman was underage at the time of conception), available in only a few clinics, and not covered by standard health insurance.

In the “About” section, I find their mission statement (nothing new) and this disturbing list of achievements:

• In El Salvador, HLI’s affiliate persuaded lawmakers to amend the constitution so as to secure and protect “the life of the unborn from conception.”
• In Tanzania, HLI’s teen chastity outreach programs brought to national attention the United Nation’s designs to force young people to use defective condoms; HLI’s detective work resulted in the destruction of over 10 million condoms.
• HLI’s office in Ireland prevented Dutch abortion ship Aurora from circumventing Ireland’s pro-life laws.

We’ve also helped many of our satellite offices:

•     Found crisis pregnancy centers
•     Teach young couples Natural Family Planning

They also have a section titled “Research”, with entries as helpful as this one on “The Case Against Condoms”: In The Case Against Condoms, you will learn the full truth about condoms and the beauty of the Catholic Church’s unchanging response to an escalating culture of death.  Inside you will read about:

• the scientific case proving the ineffectiveness of condoms or so-called “safe sex” to fight the AIDS pandemic;
• the lies of the condom-mania propaganda;
• the unchanging Catholic teaching on the immorality of condoms and “safe sex”; and
• the marvelous plan of God for human sexuality, as the answer to the AIDS/STD pandemic.

The Case Against Condoms: Death By Latex:
The response of most `developed’ world governments at every level, and the reaction of various social service agencies to this explosion of STDs, was as predictable as it was pitiful:  They took the inherently Humanistic position that Americans (not just teenagers) are mere animals.  Since they can’t be trusted to control their sexual urges, we might as well make it as safe for them as possible to have sex with whomever they please.

Oh no, they took the inherently Humanistic position! And they think homo sapiens belong to the animal kingdom when everybody knows they’re plants! And they dared acknowledge the fact that “monogamy and chastity” (from the next paragraph) don’t fucking work in reality.

I skim the rest of the article. They elaborate on what can go wrong when using a condom and how condoms can break (“they’re unreliable because if you take them out of the package and leave them unused for a long period of time, they can be damaged by ozone!”), and though there’s a lot of manipulative exaggeration and half-truths (“condoms work in 85% of real-world cases, so a woman has a 15% chance of getting pregnant if she uses condoms every time over a year and an 80% chance of getting pregnant if she uses them every time for ten years!”), I find no outright lies.

I’m distracted by the list of “Research Topics” to the left and check out their section on homosexuality.
Abstract: Due to clergy sex abuse scandals centered primarily in the Northern hemisphere, the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church has been subjected to an opportunistic siege by prominent individuals and organizations who see the chance to advance their goals, including the ordination of women and the suspension of the requirement for priestly celibacy. [...] Opponents of the Church know that there is a well-documented and strong correlation between male homosexuality and child sexual abuse, but claim that there is no evidence supporting this connection. And, of course, those who are currently attacking the Church hope that they can undermine its moral authority to preach on the sinfulness of homosexual behavior and its opposition to ersatz homosexual “marriage.” This paper demonstrates that there is indeed a very strong link between male homosexuality and child sexual abuse. It also shows that there is a similar rate of child sexual abuse among other very large groups of adult males (e.g., Protestant clergy, who are usually married), thus proving that celibacy is not the root of the problem — homosexuality is.

Right.

HLI on sex education:
These programs would have as their objective furnishing enough biological information for children to avoid the heavy consequences of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancies. This kind of sexual education is necessarily incomplete because it leaves to one side the relational, affective and spiritual aspects of human love.

You can’t teach my kids about sex, because you won’t teach them everything! (I wonder why there’s no section on mathematics, then. Shouldn’t they oppose math class as well?)

It further runs the risk, depending on the program and the philosophy of the teacher, of being excessively explicit and constituting merely an introduction to the practice of contraception and “safe sex”.

Well, duh. Sex education is supposed to introduce children to contraception and safe sex, isn’t it? Why would anybody start teaching kids about sex if not to teach them useful stuff they’re probably going to need? What else would they teach them?

Finally, the programs of sex education proposed in the schools do not always take into account the immaturity of the students receiving it and can cause harm and upset them.

Why would a lesson about how to properly use condoms upset a student? Seriously – I don’t even see what could be upsetting about that. Except if the student got fed enough stuff like this from parents or others to believe that teaching children about safe sex means that you’re from the devil and want them to have lots of abortions and then die of AIDS (yes, I’m aware that AIDS itself isn’t actually fatal, but they might not be).

There is also another aspect of sex education that is not often looked at and which is of capital importance, as Dr. Polaino-Lorente explains: sex education in the family. [...] The parents are the first persons responsible for the sexual education of their children. They can help them to better acquire the virtue of self-discipline and the importance of the other, which are essential for the human exercise of sexuality.

So they’ll get a serving of sex ed from their parents and another one from school. Where’s the harm in that?
In all honesty, I don’t really get why people are against sex education. My parents weren’t – I remember my mother supplementing the sex education at school with “God wants sex to happen between a married man and a woman” or something along these lines, and that was that. And the statistics of condom failure were part of the lessons, along with the most common errors and how to avoid them.

The Austrian HLI page (in German) seems to be about abortion only, with a side of contraception. The column to the left offers me the usual “Home”, “News” and “About” sections, then “Help for pregnant women”, a FAQ, “The miracle of life”, “Abortion”, “Healing the abortion wounds”, “Contraception”, “What the church says”, “Spiritual”, and the usual tail of publications, events, links, and contact options.

I check out the contraception section first. The Austrian page is very different from the international one, obviously not just a translation, but a page of its own. The tone is light, familiar, and friendly instead of pseudo-professional. Instead of condoms, the favorite issue here is the pill. A (sloppily translated) excerpt: “In the first ten years since introduction of the pill, 45 millions of packages went over the counter. The pharma industry could rejoice. And the women? The pill consumers? [...] Women’s health was sacrificed on the altar of population control.”

They then go on to explain that a lot of contraceptives are in fact abortifacients and contraception often means abortion. I only skim the rest of the entry and go on to the FAQ instead (or “The most frequently asked questions… and the best answers!”, as it is called).

24 questions are listed, most of them not as questions, but as half-sentences, giving the asker an uncertain, helpless voice. The answers are quite lengthy and held in an encouraging, friendly, familiar and sympathetic voice. There’s a lot of manipulative half- or misinformation (“hey, young girls who aborted are more often in psychiatric hospitals, suffer more often from panic attacks, drug abuse, depression, insomnia, suicidal tendencies, uncontrolles crying fits, lack of motivation etc., and also carrying the child to term will lower your breast cancer and ovarian cancer risk!”) and emotional manipulation (“yeah, I know telling your parents will suck, but think about how much it will suck if you abort and in ten years your sister has a kid and they shower it with gifts and affection and you killed yours! Trust me, I’m a grandparent myself!”).

Surprisingly, the possibility of giving the child up for adoption is hardly mentioned at all – once for “But I’m not ready to be a mother yet…” and once for “What are my options?”, but not at all for “Am I not too young for a baby?”. While it’s only mentioned in passing for the former and keeping the child is elaborated upon and filled with all kinds of good feelings, it’s mentioned in a little more detail for the latter question (“You’re not a bad mother for giving your child away… your child will be grateful because it can live! Abortion, however, will leave you desperate and unhappy and full of guilt and regret” – and no, I’m not exaggerating with the last sentence).

I skip a few questions, but click on the slightly creepy number 19: “What can I do to prevent her from having an abortion?” The answer is no less creepy. I tried to translate as accurately as possible:
“Women who consider an abortion are in an emergency situation. They think the child within them threatens their life. [...] Usually they don’t even want the abortion, but out of sheer desperation they believe they have to abort. [...] When she hears from your lips that the baby in her belly isn’t just an insignificant something but a child in an earlier stage, it will be difficult for her to deny that. Essentially she struggles so much because she herself already knows that what you’re saying is true. [...] Then ask her for permission to tell her what really happens during an abortion. Tell her you don’t want to hurt her with this information. In contrast: you want to protect her from the terrible harm she’d do to herself with an abortion. [...] Your girlfriend will (that’s our experience), if she’s really ready to listen to you too, choose life for your child.”

They do emphasize that the asker needs to listen to the woman (and even use the phrase “help does not mean pressure or manipulation”), but honestly, what good is listening when whatever the woman says is just going to be dismissed as “struggling against the truth” and what she wants is explained away as “she just believes she has to and she doesn’t know better”? What good is listening when there is only one accepted outcome of the “talk”, and that is to “choose life for your child”?
I can’t help but imagine what it must be like for a woman who has made her decision, sits down to talk to her boyfriend about it and is met with this terrible reduction of herself to a helpless, ignorant little girl who doesn’t really want what she wants, whose attempts to make herself heard and understood are met with the condescending pseudo-understanding fit for someone who just “struggles against the truth”.

If you happen to be a considerate boyfriend who actually respects his girlfriend’s wishes and decisions, however, you won’t fare well with the anti-abortionists. “Question” 22: “He says it’s my decision…”
Answer (shortened and paraphrased): “On the first glance, this answer seems to be fine. He acknowledges you can choose and cannot be forced to do something you don’t want to. [Hah hah.] But then why don’t you feel good? Why do you feel let down, left alone, miserable? You rightly wanted something else: for him to hug you and tell you he’ll be there for you and the baby, or to promise you he’ll be at your side and make sure you two get everything you need. But instead he doesn’t do anything to protect you from the abortion surgery with all its risks and terrors and emotional cruelties. He doesn’t lift a finger to save his own child from a painful and horrible death. [...] Leave him out of it for now. Concentrate on the question of how an abortion will destroy your life and the life of your child.”

That’s it, I’m out of here. Skimmed the last few questions (the ones regarding rape – want to take a guess what they say?) and decided I had enough crap for today.

That has become quite a long post. Writing about a real topic is a lot easier than writing about myself! If anyone knows how to use the “quote” function in WordPress, I’d appreciate help – whenever I try to quote, it interprets my whole post as a quote and not just the paragraph with the actual quote.

Sunday Music

Hey!

I’ve been pretty busy lately, and though there are some posts floating around in my head, I haven’t been able to sort them out and write the good ones down somewhere. So here’s a little music instead!

Scotland Diary part 8/8

Our last day in Scotland starts much like other days – with breakfast. There’s soy milk available here too, so I have Cocoa Pops again.
Our plane won’t leave until nine in the evening, so we have the whole day left. The tour guide releases us in the city, tells us to be back at the exact same point at five, and then we’re free to do whatever we want.

Yesterday when we walked around Holyrood Palace, we saw this beautiful hill, and I’d really like to go there. My mother would like to visit the HMS Britannica, but we won’t be able to do both, and she graciously gives my wish priority.

We make our way up Calton Hill first, walking on the tracks of David Hume, as signs along the way inform us. I stop to pet a cat and slip out of my jacket. The sun is out, and walking upwards, it gets pretty warm. Even my mother tentatively stops feeling cold for once, and that’s saying something.

We watch butterflies dancing above the grass, enjoy the sun on our backs and stop every now and then to take in the view. Edinburgh surrounds us, houses and houses and in the distance the sea. We reach the top of the hill and even pay to climb up the winding stairs of Nelson’s Monument, squeezing sideways through the tiny door on top.

Afterwards we continue towards Arthur’s Seat and the hill group around it. The way up is lined with rocks, a sea gull perched atop one of them. Using my legs feels good – I sit around a lot at home too, but sitting around while the most beautiful places for a walk roll by the bus window is very different from sitting around in a room scrolling down interesting blog entrys and funny picture sites.

We’re not the only ones who thought the hills made a good place for walking – the top is downright crowded with people. Still, we find a place to sit down, drink some water and take in the scenery – the green grass and brown rocks around us, the houses, cars and people far down, the clouds above, the sea and a few ships farther off. Edinburgh is a pretty beautiful city, I reflect. Even in between the houses, there are lots of trees indicating parks or gardens. I like that.

I take a picture of a raven sitting not too far from where I sit (the mountain division of the Sea Gull Secret Service, maybe?), we rest a little longer, and then we make our way down again, on a different path than the one we took going up. We find a few other Austrian tourists just a little way down and the ruins of a chapel (St. Anthony’s Chapel) a bit farther down, then we’re in the city again.

We stop at a Turkish/Mediterranean restaurant for a quick lunch (falafel with hummus and grilled aubergines) and then walk up the Royal Mile again. We still have some time, so we decide to do what we didn’t do yesterday and check out the Camera Obscura. It has the usual optical illusions (colorful swirls that seem to be moving, ducks that become rabbits and old people who become young if you look at them another way, stairways and houses built in impossible ways), but also a lot of new and/or exciting things.

One corner has old-fashioned sepia pictures of unsmiling people. I step closer, and suddenly the pictures change: eyes start glowing, razor-sharp teeth dripping with blood appear where there were closed lips just a second ago. There are three rows of pictures, and only the one at eye-level changes, so when I squat to look at the ones farther down, the upper ones become all innocent and normal again and the little girl in front of me suddenly grins, her eyes full of malice and her mouth smeared with dark blood. I’m well aware they’re just pictures and usually not squeamish at all, but when I turn away again, I have goosebumps. Who knows what they will change into behind my back right now, a voice inside me whispers, and I have to remind myself quite firmly that they’re just pictures.

The next room has more pictures of the same kind: a man changing more and more into a werewolf with every step you take, a mummy coming to life, a vampire waking up. In front of me is a picture of a man’s face, his eyes closed, looking quite normal. I take a step past him, and suddenly there are glass shards around him as if the picture’s glass frame has shattered, and his eyes are hidden by dark glasses.
“Careful about the shards”, my mother jokes and grabs my arm, and through this little motion the picture changes again: he is screaming, his mouth filled with more shards, coming towards me like spears, his glasses shattered to reveal crazed eyes.
I enter the next room, my heart beating faster than it did climbing the hill.

Funnier things await me. There’s a room where you can see yourself in infrared, a bottle filled with ice lying in a corner. I press it against my cheeks and watch them going from red to green on the life-sized screen before me.
Then there’s a table with a severed head on it, the head being quite alive and amused – there are mirrors between the table’s legs reflecting the tapestries around it, hiding the fact that the person the head belongs to is safe beneath it. I take my own turn, propping my head up looking as dead as possible for a picture.

There’s also a “morph machine”, a picture booth where you can alter yourself to look like an African, an Asian, a baby, an old person, or a chimpanzee. I try all of it and take pictures. When I’m old, I’ll compare my “old” morph to myself – let’s see if I can do better than the wrinkled, tired-looking face the machine offers me.

We leave the museum and get back to the bus on time. The timing isn’t perfect: we reach the airport way too early, so we sit down in a cafe and have drinks (and cake for the non-vegans among us). I got lazy writing my travel diary the last two days, so I catch up on that now. When I ask my mother what the thing we went to yesterday was called (Christian Heritage something… museum? Exposition?), we end up talking a little about its contents. As expected, our impressions differ considerably.

“You’re so militant”, she says disapprovingly at one point. I feel a sudden surge of pride. I’ve never been called militant before – always too quiet, too soft, too little offensive -, and yet she just raised me to the cool kids’ platform with Dawkins and Hitchens and PZ Meyers and all the rest. (Not that I’m anywhere close to their level in fervor, persuasiveness, eloquence, fame, or penis length.) She didn’t intend it as a compliment, though, so I just let it slide instead of thanking her.

From there, we somehow get to evolution.
“Golden plover!”, she says.
“What?”, I reply eloquently.
“Well, how does he do that?”
“How does he do what?”
After some prompting, she explains that golden plovers migrate from Alaska to Hawaii to winter and that they can’t do that because in order to store enough energy for the journey, they need to eat so much that they’re too heavy to fly.
“Well, then how do they do it?”
“They fly in V-formation. How does evolution do that? They can’t find out by themselves – if they try to fly there without the formation, they drown! The whole species would go extinct immediately!”

I don’t know anything about the evolution of the golden plover, but I suggest that they might have evolved from birds with a different weight-to-flight ratio, birds who could fly heavier or something, and only then evolved to be smaller. (Later, it crosses my mind that the V-formation might be older than the golden plover. I don’t know which is correct – I Googled golden plovers, but only got tons of creationist sites, so I’ll leave it to you to find the actual answer.)

Anyway, I try to explain to her what I know about natural selection and evolution.
“I just can’t imagine it”, she says, shaking her head.
“I have a book I could give you”, I offer. She doesn’t say no, but she doesn’t say yes either. The book I’m talking about explains evolution in very comprehensible terms and is without doubt very valuable for laypeople like her and me, but it’s also “The Greatest Show on Earth” by Richard Dawkins and therefore contains a lot of contemptuous, acidic stabs at creationists. If she really wanted to learn, that wouldn’t bother her (much), but I don’t think she does, and if I gave it to her she’d just close her eyes to everything that didn’t fit her creationist beliefs and complain about everything else.

When we finally board the plane, it’s both sunny and raining, and a rainbow rises gracefully just behind the tip of its wing. We push through the clouds into the sunset, leaving green Scotland behind, and fly. I’m half asleep, listening to music on my iPod and dreaming my way through the landscape of golden clouds beneath us.
At 00:35 we’ll be back in Vienna, my father, my sister and my boyfriend waiting at the gate.

Scotland Diary part 7/8

We leave Glasgow and go back to Edinburgh, where we do some sight-seeing. Our first stop is Holyrood Palace, but we’d have to pay our own entry there, and because we don’t have enough time to really enjoy it anyways, my mother and I just take a picture or two from the outside and then take a walk around the garden walls instead. Not too far off, a green hill rises between the houses, beckoning to me.

We continue to Edinburgh Castle, stopping well beneath it on the Royal Mile to avoid traffic. The way up to the castle is lined with curious characters: another bagpipe player, a man covered in little mirror pieces (even his face and hat), an invisible man wearing a hat and sunglasses above nothing (if you look closely, you can see the wires holding both), and a Scottish warrior dressed in chainmail and kilt, sword in hand and face painted blue. Behind him, there’s a sign saying “Wallace – The True Bravehearts are Leukemia Victims”.

We enter Edinburgh Castle and stand at the walls for a while, looking at the city stretching endlessly before us. We read a little about the castle’s history from signs, visit the crown jewels kept behind a massive steel door and walk through the Scottish National War Memorial. There are huge old books there filled with the names of the fallen – names and names and names, so many of them.

The oldest surviving building in Edinburgh is part of the castle, too: St Margaret’s Chapel, once popular for weddings because so few people fit into it (which meant a smaller wedding feast with less expenses). It really is tiny.

We don’t have to get back to the bus until five, so we leave to find lunch and entertainment after that. I researched vegan restaurants in Edinburgh before we came here, and one is not too far away at St Patrick Square. On our way, we pass a colorfully dressed woman claiming to be the most pierced woman in the world (she looks the part) and stop when we reach a crowd gathered around a street performer with brightly orange hair and matching boots.

He’s wearing a strait jacket, and two volunteers from the crowd wrap chains around him while he jokes about everything and nothing. Then he steps onto his suitcase and starts freeing himself, wriggling until the chains around his hips fall down and twisting one arm above his head in a motion impossible for most people to get rid of the strait jacket. It’s a pretty good show. (His website, www.toddvarious.com, is currently offline, but there’s lots of stuff on YouTube about him if you’re interested.)

It turns out that the restaurant is open from 12 to 2 pm, and we reach it at seven past two, so we find a sandwich place that offers a hummus vegetable sandwich instead. Although it doesn’t have much in common with the hummus I know (did I mention my boyfriend is Arabic?), it’s delicious.

When we were in Edinburgh first, we found two places that sounded interesting: the Museum of Childhood and the Camera Obscura, a place dedicated to optical illusions. We visit the Museum of Childhood first, where childhood items from across cultures and centuries are on display – cradles, high chairs, comforters, baby bottles, clothing, school material, dolls, model trains, tricycles and much more.

From there, we walk to the Camera Obscura, but after looking at the entrance fee and at how much time we have left, we decide to skip it. Across the street, there’s a sign saying “Christian Heritage Center”, and because that sounds interesting to both of us, we go there. I’m not sure what I expected: a history of Christianity in Scotland maybe, how it came there, what it did there (we’ve already seen some of that in form of castle ruins) and so on.

It’s divided into two sections, one of them with the promising title “Christianity and Science”. I get suspicious when some early misconceptions (flat Earth, geocentric model) are attributed to Greek philosophers, and start groaning when Bible verses talking about a flat Earth are explained as “metaphorical”. Yeah, I’m sure God stopping the sun for a whole day during Joshua’s battle against the Amorites was totally metaphorical.

The next board offers quotes by famous people about how they believe in some god (from explicitly Christian to vaguely deistic), including Blaise Pascal (known best for his wager to me and for his triangle to mathematicians). I skip that and walk to the one titled “Evidence for a Creator”. “You either have to believe that something came from nothing (atheism) or…” “Proof for an intelligent Creator: the language of DNA…”
I tried, but… now I’m out. I like my brain aneurysm-free.

I spend the rest of the time giving the history section a cursory glance (it’s propaganda), using the bathroom and hanging around. At one point I see my mother scribbling into something I assume to be a guest book, and when I later approach it (wondering if I should make a comment about how their assertions are blatantly false or already have been refuted), I discover to my shock that she included my name and wrote “Bless you for this great idea!” as a comment. I seriously consider striking my name again or linking it with an arrow to a comment of my own, but before I can make up my mind as to whether that would be too childish, it’s time to leave again.

The bus takes us to our hotel – definitely the most classy one we’ve been in, with a swimming pool and spa area of its own and a big, comfortable room. In addition to the usual bible, there’s a Book of Mormon here, too. I’ve never seen one of those before, so I use the time left until dinner to read a bit. My mother questions the historical verifiability of the events the Mormon faith is based upon, and I turn the tables and question the historical verifiabilty of the bible, using the exodus from Egypt and Jesus Christ as examples.
“For example, when Jesus was supposedly resurrected, it’s said that a whole lot of other people were raised along with him and appeared to others, yet no historian finds that worth mentioning.”
“Where did you get that?”, my mother asks, frowning. “That’s not canonical.”
“I’m pretty sure it is”, I say, walk over to the bible and after a bit of searching read the passage to her.
“Well, you’d have to talk to your father about that”, she says.

At dinner (vegetable soup, pasta with tomato sauce, and fruit salad) the thing I had feared all week happens: my veganism comes up. I field the questions about proteins well enough and since I look healthy even sound credible. Then the man sitting across the table outs himself as a recreational hunter. (Why do these things always happen to meeeee…?) I carefully keep my face free of judgment and try to answer his assertion that Austria would be swamped with deer if not for the noble people going out with guns to shoot them down, but this is not my area of expertise, and I’m not sure how convincing I sound there with my constant “I’ve heard that…” and “I’m not sure, but…”.

Help comes from unexpected sides when my mother jumps in and the woman beside me turns to me with a smile and confides that her son is also a vegan, and when another man starts talking about factory farming and antibiotics use, the whole table agrees that “there’s a lot going wrong there”. Not that anybody would let this newfound wisdom keep them from digging into their burned animal pieces when the food arrives.

I thought about using the swimming pool, but after dinner I’m too full, so I watch “Gladiator” instead (my mother watches a bit and hides under the blankets for the rest) and then go to bed.

Scotland Diary part 6/8

We get up veeeery early, throw our stuff back into suitcase and backpack, have breakfast and board the bus at 8:30, where I fall asleep again almost immediately. I sleep all the way back past Loch Ness and then some more, and when I wake up again, the sun is out and we’re at Commando Memorial (mostly just to take a break, not because it’s so famous or exciting). I blink into the sunlight like an owl while I walk around the statue of the three soldiers. I forgot how bright it can be.

After a lunch break (salad), we enter Glencoe, the “valley of tears”. It’s most widely known for the Massacre of Glencoe, which the tour guide tells us about while we drive through.

During the 17th century, a certain William took the throne of England. Most Scots accepted him, but a few did not, and one of those was a man powerful enough to lead Scottish Highlanders in an attempt to give the throne to James VII instead. He tried and was defeated.

In 1691, William offered the Highland clans a pardon for their role in the uprisings if they swore an oath of allegiance to him in front of a magistrate. Still loyal to James (who was in exile at the time), they sent him a message asking for his permission to take the oath. Finally, James allowed them to, but his answer reached the clans in mid-December, only a few weeks before the deadline (they had a deadline).

Among the clan chiefs in need of a pardon was Alastair Maclain of Glencoe. He travelled to Fort William to take the oath, but the governor residing there was not authorised to receive it and sent him to Inveraray instead to take the oath in front of Sir Colin Campbell. With some delay, Maclain managed to do so, and Colin Campbell reluctantly accepted his oath.

On their way back from the uprisings, the Maclains had looted the lands of another Campbell, and the clan wasn’t especially fond of the Maclains. John Campbell saw an opportunity for revenge in Maclains being late, and together with a Lowlander who despised Highlanders he persuaded King William to sign an order to extirpate the MacDonalds of Glencoe (background: the Maclains are a branch of clan MacDonald).

In 1692, about 120 Campbell soldiers came to the MacDonalds in Glencoe, who received them as guests. Wikipedia has a lot more details about who gave what orders when and who knew what about the nature of their mission at what point, but what it comes down to is the infamous massacre.

In the dead of winter, with Glencoe covered in snow, 38 MacDonald men were murdered either in their homes or as they tried to flee and 40 women and children died of exposure after their houses were burned. Soldiers who had sat at the MacDonald table and shared their food and drink rose up against them in a grave violation of all the laws of hospitality. Two lieutenants even broke their swords rather than carry out their orders, unwilling to be part of such a crime, known as “murder under trust”.

Today, the Valley of Tears is lush and green and inviting. I try to picture women, children and men who escaped the first round of slaughter, shivering in the freezing cold as they stumble through deep snow and swirling snowflakes, their breath white clouds in the night air while their noses, cheeks and hands turn red. I imagine them dressed too lightly for the harsh temperatures outside, afraid to make fires, the sounds of clashing steel and screams still too vivid in their memory. The paths out of the valley would have been blocked by soldiers – they could only try to escape over the hills, without food or shelter or fire to warm themselves.

“Even today, you shouldn’t wear Campbell tartans in the pubs here”, our tour guide says and puts on the song “Massacre of Glencoe”. It sounds strangely happy. If not for the lyrics, it might as well be some sentimental drinking song. (Unfortunately I don’t know which version we heard, but it might have been this one by John McDermott.)

We stop for pictures, and a bagpiper standing at the parking lot plays some different music while I enjoy the fresh air and the view of the valley. Steep, green hills rise to both sides, dappled with sunlight and shadows from the clouds overhead. I’d love to take a day or two to hike through this valley, or better yet, ride through. See what it’s like here when the sun sets, breathe in the smells of earth and plants while I sleep, walk through the high grass and the ferns in the morning until my pants are wet with dew up to the knees.

Well, maybe another time.

We take another break in Luss, a small village at Loch Lomond (the biggest lake of Scotland), watch swans and ducks (and of course some gulls, although of a different kind than the ones we’re used to) on the water and then get back into the bus for the last stage of our journey to Glasgow.

In Glasgow we try to visit the Cathedral, but we’re too late because of the traffic, so we can only look at it from the outside. We make another stop at an art museum (where we stay for ten whole minutes, not enough to do even get through a quarter of the first room) and then check into our hotel. We eat dinner (leek-potato soup for me) and get into our room after some difficulties with the electronic key. The room seems a bit grubby and stinks, and the water tastes strongly of chlorine. There’s a rail route almost right in front of our window, and we hear every passing train along with the pipes (or maybe the ventilation system) in the walls.
I guess the fun part of our tour is over.

Scotland Diary part 5/8

After Cocoa Pops, toast, berries, peppermint tea and orange juice I board the bus – a mistake, because maybe half an hour in I need a bathroom. Urgently.
When our travel guide makes her usual tour through the bus to see if anybody needs anything, I ask for a bathroom break (even somewhere in the wilderness without a bathroom, as far as I’m concerned), and apparently I’m not the only one with this wish. We stop at a rest area in a forest, and even there the bathrooms are cleaner and better equipped than those of my university on most days. The Scottish toilet infrastructure seems extremely good overall – all the toilets I’ve been to so far have been clean and well-maintained.

I take some pictures of the nearby river – black, like most rivers here – and then we’re on our way again, greatly relieved and ready for the last hour of travel. Through hills and past lakes we drive to Corrieshalloch Gorge, a narrow, steep-sided chasm cut in the Ice Age (2.6 million to 11,500 years ago) by rivers flowing beneath a glacier. A short footpath leads us to a suspension bridge high above the Falls of Measach. We stand and watch the dark water far beneath us for a while, then we cross to the other side and continue towards the viewing platform there.

As usual we don’t have a whole lot of time, but wander along the Gorge a little anyways. “Corrieshalloch Gorge” means “ugly hollow”, but the name couldn’t be farther from the truth. The rich woodland around the gorge is a welcome change from the barren highlands we came through. To our left the ground slopes toward the chasm, to our right it rises slightly.  I let one hand trail along the moss growing there: it’s softer than any feather bed.

From Corrieshalloch Gorge, we continue through the highlands towards Inverewe Gardens, with a few stops for pictures in between. I enjoy every one of them – at the very least, they’re a chance to take a breath of fresh air – , especially the one at Loch Broom, which is actually a fjord and not a lake. Anyway, it’s beautiful.

At Inverewe Gardens (located in an area called “Wester Ross”, I kid you not), we’re released with a one-hour-limit to enjoy the gardens and have lunch. We choose a trail leading to a jetty and walk through exotic plants from all around the world: colorful flowers in full bloom, gnarled trees with red bark, plants with tall stems or beautiful shapes or leaves as big as my whole upper body.

We stop at a viewpoint at the local loch (another sea loch, not a lake) and at another higher above. There, we see a robin flitting across the ground. We lure it closer with some of my raisins, and it comes within a small step (a human step, not a robin step) from my mothers hand, cocking its head suspiciously from side to side, but edging closer and closer.

Past small ponds and more strange plants we walk on, slowly making our way back to the entrance. We see another robin, but that one isn’t as courageous and stays at a safe distance.

We have lunch (salad for me) and a look at the shop, then it’s time to return to Inverness. This time we’re early enough to check out the Christian bookshop. While my mother finds three novels for herself, I browse the theology section and leaf through a few books on apologetics. Being sort of familiar with the topic, it never takes me long to find the point the author is making and the flaw within those. Not that I’m an expert – in debates about some very specific aspects of evolutionary theory, I’m usually lost -, but concerning the philosophical approaches, I’m getting pretty good at finding errors or evasions.

Thanks to my mother’s diplomatic skills, I get a pretty nice dinner – mushrooms for starters, pasta with tomato sauce as main course, fruit salad as dessert. Afterwards, we go to bed soon. Tomorrow we’ll have to get up at six for the long drive to Glasgow.