Sexism in tennis

Monday 20 January 2013

When it comes to sport, it seems that, rather than inheriting the athleticism of my father, a personal trainer, in playing it, I have acquired (along with bad skin and bad knees) his signature brand of cynicism and his propensity for abrupt moments of abstraction while watching it.

'Son, I was always proud … that you weren't a short man.'

Dad enjoys spectatorship as much as the next bloke, but he appears simultaneously to hold the whole enterprise in contempt: teams and clubs branding themselves with the names of cities while buying and selling players from all over the world who don't have any real connection to those communities. It's too much like supporting a corporation. I find this sentiment echoed in myself.

How does one pick a team, anyway? If it's not the team of the region where you live, and not a team you grew up supporting, what determines your choice? Is it who's winning the most? Who has the prettiest colours? The best mascot? Your favourite player? My girlfriend's dad supported the Cronulla Sharks for years until he converted to the North Queensland 'Toyota' (!) Cowboys, and then to the 'iSelect' (!) Gold Coast Titans, and now has no problem using the pronouns 'we' and 'us' to refer to 'his' team, despite residing in the Illawarra. Isn't it all rather arbitrary?

'The Isotopes are winning? To the bandwagon!'

This is less applicable, I suppose, in international sports, where teams actually comprise nationals of the countries they represent, but even here Dad and I have a shared tendency to experience moments of almost Brechtian alienation, wherein the viewing experience is transcended by a sudden and profound awareness of the insignificance and absurdity of investing ourselves in such a pointless activity, a kind of 'opiate of the masses–style' reluctance to be diverted by an exercise in corporatised nationalism, the outcome of which will ultimately have no impact on our lives.

One such moment occurred for Dad last Friday night as we watched the match between Sam Stosur and Ana Ivanovic in Rod Laver Arena. 'What are we doing here?' he asked at one point, nudging me and laughing, a common effect of the incongruous jerk out of the immediacy of the experience and into comprehension of its ludicrousness. 'Why do we care? Does it pay my mortgage if Stosur wins tonight?'

Although I generally disapprove of any form of slavish utilitarianism ('I AM A CAPITALIST DRONE; EVERY ACTIVITY IN WHICH I ENGAGE MUST PROVIDE ME WITH SOME DIRECT, CONCRETE, PREFERABLY MONETARY BENEFIT'), and I harbour a vague inclination that sport fulfills some subtle but important purpose* in our society, I still find these to be compelling questions. Why do we care so much whether one entity beats another entity in an otherwise entirely useless endeavour?

'Oh my God, Marge. A penalty shot with only four seconds left. It's your child versus mine! The winner will be showered with praise; the loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore!'

*I know, I know, it's about an outlet for primal aggression, social rituals and cohesion, blah blah.

In this instance, however, I couldn't fully share in Dad's characteristic momentary bewilderment. For reasons not entirely clear to me, tennis exempts itself from my usual spectatorial reticence, especially once a year for the term of the Australian Open when, time permitting, I become a rabid tennis fan. A were-fan, if you will. I look up rankings, download apps, text friends about matches, and follow every game I can.

I'm aware that, if anything, the 'pointlessness' of sport is exaggerated in tennis, where the match is confined to 260 square metres and the task can essentially be decocted to 'get the ball over the net and within the lines', but perhaps it's that there's something more honest about it as an individual pursuit that allows it to evade my cynicism. These aren't footballers professing some kind of loyalty to their team before scarpering off to the highest bidder the moment their contract is up, particular personalities subsumed into the larger team identity. They're individuals playing for themselves whose characters are on display to earn your support or opposition.

When I examine my list of favourite players and try to determine why I like them, however, it's still decidedly arbitrary, just slightly less so. With hundreds of individuals to choose from, you end up being quite superficial – one bad impression can be enough to turn you off someone. For me it seems to come down to a complex subconscious calibration of a player's skill, grace, manner, sense of humour, eloquence, nationality and, as I'm becoming increasingly aware when it comes to women (to my dismay), appearance. Which is my tortuous, Simpsons-like way of getting to the point that I've been thinking about how we pick which players to support in tennis, and who gets attention for what, and particularly how the criteria differ for men and women. 

Even as perhaps one of the women's sports deemed most 'watchable' by men, the tennis court is a fraught field for gender issues, dominated for years by 'pin-ups' like Kournikova, Sharapova and Ivanovic and throwing up perennial debates over prize money, air time and the comparative quality and entertainment value of the men's and women's games. What brought the issue of player popularity to mind for me, however, was watching the match between Australian Casey Dellacqua and rising Canadian star Eugenie Bouchard last night. 

Whether it's the men's or women's game, one truth universally acknowledged in tennis is the vapidity of the commentary. Tennis commentators seem to struggle to find anything much of value to add. One example from last night's match was Sam Smith's observation that Dellacqua had been eating a bread roll before the match, from which she extrapolated two things: one, that Casey hadn't had much dinner, and two, that she was nervous. Compelling stuff.

Is it any surprise then that we find traces of sexism in the inanities spouted by commentators in their furious verbal attempts to justify their relevance? Not conscious sexism, but the more insidious kind that infects the way even decent people think on a basic level. It's like what I was discussing in my last post (a thousand years ago) regarding Tony Abbott and his 'sex appeal' blunder: when the mind casts around for something to latch onto, something to say, the things it finds can be revealing, a window into a person's way of seeing the world and, therefore, the otherwise invisible ideology that shapes their worldview. It's problematic as it is that female commentators are never assigned a men's match while at least one man is always present in the commentary box for a women's match, but watching last night I became aware that the idle chatter of the commentators differs greatly depending on the gender of the players and the way they look.

As I type I'm watching Smith interview Dominika Cibulkova. Despite having just achieved the considerable feat of vanquishing world number three Maria Sharapova, the Slovak is being quizzed about her relationship status, how long she's been engaged, and her engagement ring. WHAT IS THIS?

It's astounding how much time is spent discussing looks in the women's game, even if it's obliquely, euphemistically. At one point, as I pointed out on Twitter, it was stated that Dellacqua was 'more girl-next-door than the girl next door', which can be translated to mean she is homely and unglamourous. This was underscored by Smith's statement only moments later that Dellacqua's opponent Bouchard is 'the heir to Sharapova in marketing terms', a euphemism for 'she's the hottest, blondest, whitest young player on the circuit.'

Bouchard (left) and Dellacqua (right).

Later Smith's obligatory male 'supervisor' (whose name I'm unsure of) joked that most of Bouchard's supporters, referred to by her as the 'Eugenie Army', seemed to be young men. After Bouchard had won, Renae Stubbs momentarily puzzled her in her post-match interview by saying she was sure her supporters were all about ready to propose to her.

And discussing the match Bouchard's win had set up for her with Ivanovic, the male commentator referred to Ivanovic as one of the 'all time great poster girls', as if she were a model rather than a tennis player, notable for her beauty rather than her skill. In response Smith asked 'How are you going to market it? The beauty of Belgrade versus the princess of Quebec?' and remarked that the pair were two very 'marketable' young girls.

Contrast this with the commentary on a comparable male player, Vasek Pospisil, who defeated Australia's Matt Ebden last Wednesday night. Pospisil and Bouchard are both attractive, white, blonde, young (23 and 19 respectively) Canadians with similar singles rankings (30 and 28) who triumphed over Australians. Yet not once did the appearance of Bouchard's countryman attract any commentary: no mention even of his adoring female fans, no talk of the impending match up between the 'Canadian catch' Pospisil and 'Swiss stud' Wawrinka.

Canadian heartthrob Vasek Pospisil.

Again, it's not that these commentators are bad people, it's that they've been conditioned by the prevailing ideology of the day to automatically view and assess women in terms of their appearance more than they do with men. The only way to wake people out of this ideology is to call it out when we see it, and we see it everywhere.

When the vacuous woman sitting next to me at the Stosur–Ivanovic match breezed into the arena four games into the first set, her first question to her companion was 'Who's that'?

'Ana Ivanovic', he answered.

'Ooh, she's really pretty', she cooed.

Moments later when Stosur appeared on the screen she laughed that the world number 17 looked 'like a man'. Former world number one Amélie Mauresmo was the target of similar criticism. In a habit that I'm sure would chasten her if I brought it up now, my best friend in high school would periodically proclaim with some vehemence her 'hatred' for Mauresmo. The reason? 'She looks like a man!' 

Stosur (left) and Mauresmo (right)

As well as being too muscular or masculine, female tennis players can be too fat. When Dellacqua made her return to the Australian Open in 2009, she drew criticism from, among others, Roger Rasheed for being out of shape, a claim she and her trainers strongly repudiated. But that incident pales in comparison to the disgusting public reaction to Marion Bartoli's 2013 Wimbledon win, best summarised by the tweets collected in an article by Amanda Chatel.

Bartoli (left) and Dellacqua (right)

It's not enough, it seems, for a woman to be among the best tennis players in the world. She must also be born buxom and beautiful and maintain a slim, feminine figure.

It's not even safe in the sidelines. Lleyton Hewitt's wife Bec (nee Cartwright) was recently the target of an article by the ever-atrocious Daily Mail and others asking whether she'd 'overdone it on the tan'.

I'd say she looks completely fine …

On the other hand, 'Aussie Ana' Ivanovic (a Serb) has been claimed for Australia by Todd Woodbridge, and every commentator to have taken up the moniker since 2008 when she won the Australian Open, due to her overwhelming popularity in Australia. In a poll yesterday asking who was expected to win the tournament after Williams' departure that Sam Smith joked could've been rephrased as 'Who is your favourite female player?', popular Chinese player Li Na, number three seed Sharapova and the defending champion Azarenka each received circa 20% of the vote, while Ivanovic was assigned double that at approximately 40%. But what can Ivanovic possibly have done to earn this popularity, other than being young and beautiful? Can anyone honestly contend she has twice the personality of Li Na, twice the skill of Azarenka?

I myself am not immune to Ivanovic's charms, nor to subtle sexism. There's no doubt she's attractive; she's actually pretty much exactly my type. But that's separate to her skill as a tennis player. It doesn't have to be her defining attribute. It shouldn't be mentioned by commentators every time she's on court. And players who don't have her looks shouldn't suffer in popularity, or worse, be lambasted for it. A cursory consideration of the list of my other favourite female players doesn't seem to reveal that I favoured them especially for their looks: Elena Dementieva, Justine Henin, Li Na, Ai Sugiyama. In fact, if anything, I hold a strange contempt for the bevy of attractive young interchangeable, quadrisyllabically named female players who've come to my attention over the last couple years: Caroline Wozniacki, Danielá Hantuchova, Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka.

Female favourites (left to right): Dementieva, Henin, Li, Sugiyama.

Un-favourites (left to right): Wozniacki, Hantuchova, Zvonareva, Azarenka.

But then, on closer consideration, I think sexism might come into it at some level. Is my dismissal of this second group just another form of sexism? Do I think they're too pretty to be good players, to be memorable, to have personality? And even though my favourites aren't women I find especially attractive, they are all undoubtedly beautiful women, slender and graceful. There's no women among my favourites who are unattractive. Why is that?

And what about who's missing from my list? Notably absent is Serena Williams, though I can safely assign her exclusion to other factors than her looks. I do admire her skill in the game, but her ineloquence, her obnoxious, particularly American fervent Christianity, forever thanking God for her wins in her stumbling, graceless acceptance speeches, as though he has specifically chosen her, puts me off. But why not Clijsters? Why not Bartoli? If their slightly rounder features and thicker bodies were swapped for the slight frames of Dementieva and Henin, can I really pretend my preferences would be the same? 

Lately I'm becoming increasingly alarmed about our society's attitudes towards physical appearances. We may try to hide it by using terms like 'marketable', but that only puts the problem at one further remove; what is marketable is determined by what people want, and what people want is to see attractive people and to judge ugly people, people they can safely designate 'uglier than me'. Ugliness now is treated like a fault, like something we have any power over. And deviating from the standard body form long ago became a crime worthy of opprobrium. 

Recently I've had a number of windows into the world of acting and theatre, and have been disappointed to learn that even respectable institutions are primarily concerned with the 'marketability' of their auditionees, that it's 'unheard of' for people of certain looks and body shapes to be given places, regardless of acting talent. Meanwhile, inexperienced eighteen-year-olds who happen to have been born with 'the look' are raised up out of the masses clamouring for a place without any need to distinguish themselves theatrically.

And it's not just women. My sisters recently informed me that all their male friends are on steroids or growth hormones of some form or another. Normal, healthy-looking sixteen-year-olds dosing themselves with drugs to turn themselves into miniature 'Zyzz' effigies in under six months, the better to worship at the altar of the self in the temple of the gym.

I always knew we lived in a superficial world, but somehow I still believed that everyone knew that it was wrong. I thought everyone had learned in their childhood from fairy tales and cartoons that it was what was on the inside that counts, and not to judge a book by its cover and that, even if they still did so, they knew somewhere that it wasn't the right thing to do. But all I've seen lately is unabashed superficiality. It's why reality TV is still so popular – it's cheap hour after hour of unadulterated judgement, and we love to sit in judgement of one another. 'What is she wearing?' 'She's too ugly to be the next top model.' 'Why would he pick that song?' 'He looks gay in that.' 'How can they be so stupid?' 'I hope he gets voted out, he's annoying.'

If there's one cause for hope for me in the tennis world, it's Li Na. I was there for the 2013 women's final when Li faced Azarenka. From my friends who watched at home I've heard it was considered a boring match, but for those in the arena it was electric. Fresh from the controversy of the previous round where it was speculated Azarenka had taken a medical timeout purely to throw her winning opponent Sloane Stephens off rhythm, the crowd was entirely behind Li Na, to the point that Azarenka's winners were met with mere polite applause while her unforced errors, usually awkward to applaud, were met with impassioned cheers, and Li's two on-court collapses elicited immediate heart-wrenching sympathy. The fact that an Asian woman who speaks only broken English can through her charm, sense of humour and fighting spirit win over a public as racist as Australia's gives me hope where little else does.

Thanks for reading,

LPL

Garbled garbage and false equivalence

Miranda Devine has a new article addressing the more hysterical of the responses she received to her aforementioned 'piece of illogical swill', in which she neglects to engage with any of the real problems in her argument, simply pointing to abusive tweets and other hyperbolic garblings of her original garbage. Obviously the majority of these comments were made flippantly, satirising the absurdity of her stance by talking about it just as absurdly, a point she fails to comprehend. Calm down, Miranda. Nobody (worth worrying about) actually thought you were saying 'People in London are rioting because Penny Wong is having a baby'; they were just saying that may as well've been your point because you argued it so hopelessly.

Unsurprisingly, in the face of this half-assed response, my point still stands.

But let's map this out and I can pass it off as practice for the first-year Philosophy subject I'm taking this semester, Practical Reasoning. This is Devine's position:

• The London riots were undesirable
• A major contributing factor to the London riots was the largescale fatherlessness of younger generations
• Therefore, fatherlessness is undesirable
• Lesbian child-rearing also necessarily involves fatherlessness
• Therefore, lesbian child-rearing is undesirable
• Therefore, we shouldn't be celebrating it

The problem here lies in the over-generalised term 'fatherlessness'. Devine's superficial contention is that fatherlessness is always a bad thing. She maintains that the kind of fatherlessness experienced by many of the London rioters is the same as the kind of fatherlessness experienced by the child of a lesbian couple. Fallacy of false equivalence, anyone? 

What happens when hardcore Catholicism/conservatism mixes with reason.

(Image amalgamated from www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda, lauramartinexploreproccess.wordpress.com, and www.more4kids.info)

If the parents of the London rioters had been married and the fathers present in the home, the riots wouldn't have happened, or at least not to the same extent, Devine implies again and again. As if it's the absence of fathers, not the absence of good fathers that makes the difference. As if it matters that it's a father that's missing, not a parent. 

She does surprise us though, in her rebuttal, providing some actual evidence! A+ for effort, Miranda. Keep up the good work! She cites someone else citing UK think tank Civitas's finding that: 'Fatherless children are “more likely to engage in behaviour associated with social exclusion, such as offending, teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse or worklessness.”' 

Yes, they probably are. As I was saying in my previous post, that's because scumbag guys tend to have children with scumbag girls and then fuck off, leaving the child to be raised by the scumbag girl. Can't Devine see the world of difference between this situation and the situation of two lesbians going to extraordinary effort and expense to conceive a child? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

This hole in Devine's logic, although she doesn't realise it, is what forces her to admit 'that Wong and her partner will no doubt be “fine mothers” providing their baby with “a stable, loving upbringing, despite not having a father in the home. Individually, these things work themselves out. Allowances are made, extra effort applied. Love conquers all.”'

Which is funny. Evidently she is perfectly aware of the weakness of her own argument, but continues to make it anyway. She knows it is shallow to simply say 'Fatherlessness of any kind is bad', so she is careful to add that 'many ... [single mothers] ... do a heroic job', and the concession that Wong's baby will be fine quoted above. In realising that concessions such as these have to be made, she should have realised that the issue of 'fatherlessness' is not as black and white as presents it to be. I think it's just that she wants so badly for it to be a good argument. She's found herself pissed off at the fuss over Wong's impending baby, looked at the riots and gone, 'Yeah, see? None of those rioters have strong male role models to keep them in line. Neither will the baby of a lesbian pregnancy!' without examining the issue any further.

And I'm sure no one down at The Daily Telegraph would've prompted her to, either. What's their motto again? 'Superficial is good enough'?

'... So open-minded that our brains drop out'

– Richard Dawkins, The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: 'Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder' 1996

Wednesday 27 July 2011

The other night I was discussing religion and politics with someone whose opinion I really respect when, as conversations of that nature are wont to do, it got heated and devolved into a more personal argument.

‘I can’t believe how closed-minded you’re being,’ she said at one stage. I didn’t really respond to this accusation at the time, but it’s stayed with me more than anything else since the argument, I suppose because I don’t think of myself as closed-minded.

And yet I understand how, from her perspective, it would’ve seemed completely closed-minded. If closed-mindedness is being non-receptive to new ideas, and every time she asked, ‘But what about this?’, ‘What about that?’ I still wasn’t being swayed, then it would be reasonable for her to conclude that my mind was made up and there was no way anything was going to change it.

That’s the problem I’m interested in. But let me first explain a little about my spiritual history. As a child I was sent to a private Catholic school because, although not religious, my parents wanted me to be ‘a good person’ and to not be negatively influenced by the types of kids attending the local public schools in our low socioeconomic area. I wholeheartedly embraced Catholic doctrine, and I was distressed by my parents’ apathy towards the topic. I was taught it was true. Religion was a subject right alongside English and Maths; it was my favourite subject, infact, and I took it very seriously. Paradoxically, it was the fervour of my belief that lead to my rejection of it.

For me, since it all came from the same place, it either had to be entirely true or entirely false. As I grew up it became increasingly evident that elements of the faith were absolutely absurd, and as I began to question those elements, I reluctantly had to question it in entirety. Why would some things the Bible says be true and others not? This is an eleven-year-old’s logic. I can still never understand how people can pick and choose which parts of the Bible they want to believe.

From Catholicism I turned to a rigid atheism that lasted about until I was fifteen. Around then I began entertaining vaguely spiritual ideas. I was open to the possibility that there was ‘something else’, and I also formulated my own semi-karmic and Secret-like theory of the universe which included the principles that ‘everything happens for a reason’ and ‘everything works out for the best’, and was based on empirical, personal experience–based evidence long before I had any contact with ‘The Secret’ or any of those similar quasi-religions that have become so popular in the last couple of years because Oprah likes them.

(Image from http://brucewagner.files.wordpress.com/)

Despite my spiritualist dabblings, I was still opposed to institutional religion at this point, which meant I followed atheist discourse with interest. The more contact I had with these texts and ideas, the more I agreed with them, and the more I was torn between atheism and spiritualism. I swung wildly between the two at first, then vacillated mildly before finally stabilising my opinion. The problem was that I had come up with my theory myself, and it had been reinforced by the success of The Secret and Eckhart Tolle’s books. It seemed to work so well. It seemed to be so true. It made so much sense.

The deciding factor was when I realised something about the human mind. It is designed to make patterns, to find meaning, and no matter what happens, when you look back over your past or any event, you will always be able to find a causal sequence of events that led to it. In this sense, everything really does happen for a reason, but in the most mundane way. Not due to some greater universal plan, but because one thing can’t happen without another thing happening first (and don’t try to use that as an argument for Creationism, because as has been pointed out by many but listened to by few, saying ‘God did it’ only changes the question to, 'What made God?'). I'm now also more suspicious of things that 'just make sense', because so many things 'just make sense', but with interrogation, aren't necessarily true.

I still have a soft spot for that kind of philosophy, though. I think unlike the world’s major religions, it’s fairly harmless, and it does work. There’s a possibility that the law of attraction applies on a metaphysical level, and you can draw positive events to you by emitting positive thoughts, but even if that’s not the case, as I’m inclined to think, that’s still a good way to live, and it will still work, because thinking positively and optimistically will make you think the best of whatever happens to you anyway.

My opinion now is not certain. I believe that there is more that we don’t know about the way the universe works than what we do know, and that one of the things we don’t know about could be that elusive concept of ‘something else’ that everyone’s always talking about. But that concession is still a thousand light years away from the idea that that ‘something else’ is the Christian god (or any god). I’m uncertain about what that something else could be, but I’m almost certain it’s not a god from any of the world’s religions.

So why, you ask, do I call myself an atheist? Wouldn’t agnostic be more appropriate? Possibly. I’m probably paraphrasing Richard Dawkins here, but you can never reasonably be a hundred per cent sure of anything. That doesn’t mean I have to say I’m agnostic about the existence of a unicorn or a leprechaun or any of the other mythical figures atheists always use in these scenarios.

The fact is that, based on the information we have, I think the most reasonable position is that of atheism. Yes, there MIGHT be something else, and we can conjecture as to what that might be, but it’s unreasonable to actually believe any of those conjectures. On Dawkins’ 1–7 scale of surety of the non-existence of a god or gods, I’d put myself at 6.5, meaning I’m just close enough to seven to round up to it, although I’m still not actually a 7.* To say that you’re a 4 is to suggest that there’s an equal likelihood of the existence or non-existence of a god or Gods, which is probably not what you mean, or at least not if you thought about it properly. It’s useless to throw your hands up in the air and say, ‘I’m never going to know for sure, so I’m not going to speculate.’ Instead, you acknowledge that you’re never going to know for certain, then ask yourself what you think is probably true, and live your life as though it is. To do otherwise would be like a historian saying, upon encountering relativism for the first time, ‘Well, I guess that’s it. We’re never going to know what REALLY happened in the past, and it’s impossible for me to interpret the evidence without imparting my personal bias, so I may as well not bother.’

*It’s also worth noting that Dawkins himself doesn’t claim to be a 7, all you moderate Christians who cry, ‘Dawkins is just as bad as the fundamentalist Christians!’ or you lukewarm atheists who say ‘I’m an atheist, but I’m not like Richard Dawkins!’ without even having read his work and simply assuming that, because he is among the most vocal and famous of atheists, he must then also be among the most extreme.

But the point of that ‘short’ history was to explain that my mind is not ‘made up’. Conceivably, evidence or argument could change it, but to be honest, it probably won’t. Does this make me closed-minded? I’m not sure.

Below are the actual definitions of open- and closed-mindedness, lifted from Dictionary.com:

Openminded
1. Having or showing a mind receptive to new ideas or arguments.
2. Unprejudiced; unbigoted; impartial.

Closed-minded
1. Having a mind firmly unreceptive to new ideas or arguments.

I think we're dealing with the opposite of the first definition of openmindedness here, because my interlocutor wasn't accusing me of being prejudiced or bigoted, just being unreceptive to the ideas and arguments she was presenting.

I would argue that the key word in both relevant definitions is 'new'. Part of the problem, I think, is that I’ve already thought about religion so much. In a world where it's considered impolite to bring up religion, and where even many of the religious seem to practice without reflecting on or questioning it, here I am almost obsessed with it. For whatever reason, it fascinates and enrages me. It’s one of the five things I’ve noticed I’m most concerned with. I’m forever thinking, writing, reading and talking about it. I’ve consumed an enormous amount of information on the subject and I’ve already processed it and come to resolutions from it. It wouldn’t make sense if there was one thing you could say that would change the way I think on the issue. It would be like hovering over a full bath tub squeezing in individual drops of dye, waiting for it to change colour. Whatever question or argument you throw at me, I’ve probably already heard it and, if I couldn’t come up with an answer or rebuttal that I find convincing, then I would’ve already changed my mind and subsumed it into my ideology. In other words, nothing I was hearing was 'new'.

Again, I ask, is that closed-mindedness? Is open-mindedness bending your opinion of what is the truth to accept anybody else’s? Is it simply the state of indecision that comes from not having thought about something enough that you are willing to change your mind every time you hear a new argument? Is it subscribing to that pseudo-intellectual belief that all arguments are equally true? I don’t think so. Relativism rightly taught us that everyone’s opinions are true for themselves and that everyone is equally entitled to their own, that there is no one way of doing things that is ‘superior’ to another just because other ways are different, that what is considered ‘good’ for one person, society or culture can be bad in another, but it’s wrong to take those lessons and extrapolatethat ‘all arguments are equal’, and don’t try to tell me it isn't. Don't try to tell me that's what you believe, because it isn't. Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but no, you wouldn’t say that one person’s belief that it’s good to set off a bomb and go around an island in Norway shooting people is as reasonable or good or true as my belief that it isn’t.

Which leads into another issue. Obviously there are people in the world who take their faith very seriously and who have devoted as much, if not more, time and energy thinking, reading, writing and talking about it as I have (as evidenced by Behring Breivik's 1500-page book), who have the complete opposite opinion to me, but are the types of people myself or the moderates of society might call closed-minded. In other words, it can’t just be that a person has devoted a lot of energy to an issue that excuses their being closed-minded about it.

Maybe these people are only ever called closed-minded in the other sense of the word, as in prejudiced and bigoted. But if we are talking about the first meaning, all I can suggest, in my consciously subjective and objectively unprovable opinion, is that these people have been indoctrinated and are working from the position of proving the point they already believe, rather than seeking the truth that evidence and reason suggest. And that’s something I’m glad no one can ever accuse me of. My spiritual journey has been self-driven. I’ve rejected indoctrination, then formulated my own belief system which, in turn, I scrutinised to the point of rejection (my two mottos to my children will be questions starting with ‘How would you feel if ...’ for empathy and ‘Think again’ for critical thinking; I want them to be able to question even beliefs that they arrived at themselves).

My beliefs are not fundamentalist, because they are not immutable, and they are not based on vague notions of instinct or feeling ‘what’s right’; they have been pushed beyond that, questioned, modified and qualified into a largely cohesive (I would be suspicious of anything entirely cohesive), rationally defensible, though not impervious, theory that I’m proud of, which is more than can be said of most beliefs.

Is that closed-mindedness? If it is, I don’t think I want to be openminded.

But that’s a lame way to end an essay, so I’ll go on: I think the meaning of closed-mindedness does extend to people who are only closed-minded to incorrect ideas. As a result of this, I can no longer regard openmindedness as an unconditionally good thing. I think it is possible to be justifiably closed-minded. After all, if someone proposes a ridiculous idea, your mind is closed to it. As you develop a more complete opinion on something, your mind can become justifiably more closed and, unfortunately, people deem that a bad thing.