What’s normal now (3)…The men question

Torrey Orton

Jan 5, 2014

What’s wrong with men?

“We’re redundant” is what I thought in the night as this question rolled around for the nth time. And on seeing the morning papers I had my sense confirmed by Camille Paglia’s reported fear that the West has lost manliness in its engagement with late modernity (THE AUSTRALIAN 01012014). Undoubtedly I’m overreacting to my sense of the state of men, but the depth pushes some warning buttons.

If you’ve ever been unexpectedly made redundant you know the experience makes the word have a terrorising power, diminished only by overuse. Its cognates ‘in excess of needs’, ‘position deleted in restructure’ and ‘superfluous’ often mask a “constructive dismissal” more sharply capture the intent – to designate a thing which has lost its meaningfulness in its context, a disposable, a discardable, refuse, trash. This is violence, by the way. The experience is only not experienced as an assault on the self if you discovered in the moment that you really always wanted to get out of the place and they’ll pay you to go!

Violence

When I first started working on this article a month ago I took to my shelves and found 23 books with ‘violence’ in their titles, not including William T. Vollman’s eight volume suite Rising Up and Rising Down (2003). The word feels male, though not only men violate. We just do physical violence in undeniably larger proportions compared to women. And we all respond to death threats with more alarm than to the multi-faceted violations of social, financial, and stereotyped soul murders which proceed often in deniable bite by bite, day in and day out.

 

A violence footnote. Human violence is a continuous dimension within which physical violences are but one class and only about 20% of the reported violations the rest of which are normally grouped under headings like social, financial, etc. The latter are tools of manipulation mastered by bullies and supported by the fearful around them. The soul murder effect is that all violences are attacks on the self which shrink the self, making it feel the author of its own ills. Not surprisingly we feel the imminence of death with greater apprehension than the slow burn of disrespect, so our virtual experience (mediated by news systems) is surrounded with reminders of that end of the violence spectrum. It sells to our already cued apprehensions.

Offending without intent

So there arises, over and over again, the wonder: What’s wrong with us men? I should have had a viewer warning classification before that sentence, knowing that it will offend some part of the population which identifies as male, as if 90 to 10 (even though only percentiles) were not a winning score in anyone’s games. Following on, all men are men and different, as are members of all classes of organic, sexually reproduced beings, and all classes of anything (not sure about all electrons, though!)…including the word ‘all’ of course.

Here’s another such warning. My aim is to create enough of a picture of the male place within the human world one to provide some perspective on the question ‘What’s wrong with men?’ I claim no special knowledge about us (men) and my perspective is undoubtedly shaped by its origin. Not my choice; just my fate. I always wonder about being human, and am limited by my masculinity. I manage to do alright with both male and female patients about being human, so that limitation is not incapacitating so far.

 

And a final limit: I’m mainly talking about the industrial or ‘advanced’ or first world states in what follows. Shortage of material culture may increase the rate of violence by nature, but not by inclination or spiritual deprivation. In fact there’s some evidence that people with little or less material can be quite “happy” as long as their material state is not seen as a personal failing (as it is in our culture) and the gap between them and enough is not stratospheric (as it also is in ours).

The biopsychosocio(economic)spiritual(cultural) health model

Let’s start with a relatively accepted version of what it means to be human – the five categories of well-being common to the health fraternity (not that we don’t squabble usefully about the contents and configuration of well-being). These five categories are not mutually exclusive, nor are they intrinsically male, though I’ll focus on their predictive impact for men.

Bio…

Men and women differ in lots that has to do with the child making and upbringing systems in all cultures, but neither can suffice alone to sustain the systems (unless we move to a totally artificially inseminated system in which case we can reduce men to the proportions held artificially by bulls and stallions in domestic herds; apprehensions about early adopters hit the local newspapers recently. (THEAGE   mother-of-all-questions-do-we-need-men-at-all 20131211).

We do not differ in intrinsic brain capacities, though neuroscientists of various hues persist in trying to make a difference by promoting gender differences as science of the brain. This has a long history of great profitability in the Men are from…Women are from… genre. We’re all from earth and all trying to be whole, but evolution (or God if you prefer) fitted us up for conflict by dividing reproduction in two. After classifying us for biological purposes as featherless bi-peds, Plato suggested 2300 years ago that humans were endlessly in search of their other halves.

Psycho…

Forming an identity is an early life demand and sustaining it over time among the ebb and flow of life a persistent challenge. Identity pollution affects as all differentially through the excess of options, denigrations and/or degenerations postmodernity subjects us to. Uncertainty is the shared theme of our times. There are a number of sources of identity: gender/sex, race, ethnicity, and religion are given and permanently so. Others are given, but changeable – skills, competences, interests, temperament, age, etc. And there are the settings for realising ourselves – various attachments and affiliations with varying degrees of choice in their composition.

Persistent stress of a high order tends to regress individuals, groups and cultures. The violent men who are the notional topic of this discussion will be shown to be regressed by a variety of systemic pressures. For examples of groups, have a look at sport and religious groups which do battle with competing groups at levels of violence they would deny they are doing. For cultures which are regressed try those with democratic processes where the systems are binding up – here, the US, UK - and undemocratic ones (China, Russia…) which are becoming visibly and consciously nationalist and social phobic.

Socio(economic)…

There are reasons to think our socio-economic universe is seriously compromised in ways which stress pretty much everyone including the incredibly, piggishly wealthy who seem afraid someone’s going to take their excesses away. More stressed of course are the bottom 20% of our societies who are getting somewhere close to survival income or none at all but variations on the dole (a combination of the unemployed, the under-employed and the quit looking and so not reported in the  government unemployment stats used to demonstrate comparative rates of progress with the issue).

 

Then there’s three systemic defects among our systems: the most outstanding of which at the moment is the unwillingness of companies to share with the employed the profits they are creating while the economy stays flat for them; and nearby is the persistent stress on productivity which seems to mean reducing worker input to outputs and reducing expenditure on worker conditions; and finally there’s the persistent expectation that a redundancy cannot be far away. In fact we should keep our portfolios packed. These effects are felt across all strata in the employ of others. Small business is its own burden.

Cultural …

The patterns and meanings of hierarchy are usually male, with female sideline participation (except notably, Germany, Denmark, Brazil and Oz briefly, of late). Within social/biological groupings there are the have mores and have lesses, mediated by the placement of other groups outside the structure determined by privileged attributes (gender, race, etc.). These provide someone else to disrespect with certainty. The Others give the low power dominant group members an out for their weakness within the group…often expressed with rage not expressible at their own group’s dominant members (note Oz mateship’s decline). See the US for the loudest demonstrations of this process in open view. Note Putin’s retro cultural moves of adding homophobia to Russia’s chronic xenophobia, for a non-democratic example.

The incidence of bullying at all levels across all kinds of enterprise and activity can be understood as just a side-effect of the power struggle in the traditional hierarchies. Not surprisingly, they are extremely resistant to change since every position holder in a hierarchy is a participant in the system of dominance (which maybe is also unavoidable in many circumstances).

Spiritual …

It would be hard to come away from a review of the major religions without an impression that worldly and otherworldly religious leadership is male. Some espouse this with blind certainty – the centres of the big two monotheisms and the fringes of Judaism. Fringes seem to be especially male.

What’s wronged in men?

We know from James Gilligan’s theory in Preventing Violence (1999) that anger aggressively expressed is sourced from the material, psychological and spiritual deprivations of endemic poverty with no perceived or actual hope of exit for the deprived. But this alone is not enough. For violence is not only perpetrated by men who are in the grip of poverty. “…the real cause of violence…is overwhelming and otherwise inescapable and ineradicable shame.” …. “almost any experience that can leave a man feeling ashamed does so by leaving him feeling that he is something less than a man.” Have you been dissed lately, or worse inadvertently dissed someone else?

 Dissed …

What are the effects of dissing by others, or by life? Diminution of manhood. And that’s what? Impugned ability to procreate; impugned ability to provide; impugned ability to defend / protect one’s family; and, impugned ability to work well (that’s vocation, or doing socially valued work, of course). This fate may be that of the 20%.

How, then, can those in objective power (our politicians and their social/intellectual acolytes) also not feel powerful? Rather, they may feel dissed by the world they’ve aspired to rule and been granted the opportunity to have a go. Try this: they cannot control a bunch of peoples who they do not understand and never had to before – Chinese, Indians, and Indonesian; they cannot be saved from these peoples by The USA, which is having its own taste of dissing by low power others; and our Economy is in disarray as mining falters and farming flourishes into the hands of others…and on it goes. 

Dissing others

So they give themselves vigorously to dissing the powerless or low powerful – legal asylum seekers, LGBT couples, the unemployed - and label any question of misdistribution of social product as “envy politics” and “class warfare” even where the distribution gap is egregious by anyone’s count of the published numbers. Again, why the anger if they have the power? The rich certainly have the numbers, so one can only imagine they are ashamed, too. (For an articulate and privileged view of our emerging diss culture see Tim Winton’s “The C Word” in The Monthly Dec. 2013).

Maybe that’s why there are so many angry men on the front bench – Scott Morrison, Corey Bernardi, Eric Abetz, Tony Abbott, George Brandis, Christopher Pyne (a longhaired Chihuahua – large bark, little bite and aware of it, who’s in danger of becoming a throw rug due to uncontrollable mouthing the ankles of his master’s clients), Andrew Robb …all in power and wielding it angrily, as if their power is in doubt and they are offended by the fact. They, too, seem to feel diminished, to actually be powerless when they are at their most powerful.

Or, for another example, what do you make of Scott Morrison’s resistance, smirking mixed with teeth showing, to questioning by Leigh Sales on 7:30 Report, as if to be questioned puts him in the face of an unveiling – his own. The theme of information restriction which has dominated government approaches to the public stems perhaps from the same fear - that of being revealed.

Let’s be clear, as the record of exclusions from federal parliament make it, that the other guys are no better. Albanese is second fiddle to Pyne’s first for being tossed out for outrageousness…all in the name of holding on to their turf. So you can do the same dog tagging exercise for them to be fair. And both parties have, with for all purposes equal intensity, vilified the weak (asylum seekers) to deprive them of their legal legitimacy and denied the different (LGBT). 

Redundancy’s revenge?

In between the criminal end of violence (the males who make up the newsfeeds of daily publications) and the public darlings above are the middling mass of men who sport the embellishments of anger and aggression, most obviously the prematurely bald head and, in a lower but not scarce number, the buff body which exceeds the needs of the normal office suit. Add on the prevalence of permanent body painting and a message of deep superficial confusion about the self emerges, now both his and hers.

These are often carried in vehicles of military mien ranging from the Subaru XV and a host of rough lookalikes both 2 and 4WD with a “T” on the power pack signage over the dual to quad exhausts to the Hummers which need no description – the ultimate sign of power is a standalone name. This design – a scrunched down butt sticking up at vehicles following pulled by a bared teeth grill – seems pretty international and price independent.

Bauman’s liquid fear

In Liquid Fear (2006) Bauman talks about “derivative fear” as “a steady frame of mind that is best described as the sentiment of being susceptible to danger; a feeling of insecurity…and vulnerability…” It is created and sustained by experience threatening our core functionalities in environments like:

 (1) free ranging consumerism, (2) invasive technologies, (3) mutually contradictory “evidence-based” discoveries, (4) productivity-driven organisational reconfigurations and (5) spontaneously intruding natural disasters (volcanic, seismological, hydrological, meteorological and so on) visit upon us from near (try headlines in papers and news programs for excitability quotient levels) and far (if there’s no disasters near then they’re imported from afar, especially those similar enough to us to be considered almost seamlessly us – to incite sympathetic feelings, comforting us with the manageability yet pathetic nature of our afflictions compared to the inconceivable ones of other places where the scales of disasters are often inhumanly large for us as in Indonesia, Philippines, Japan: ah, those uncontrollably different others, again, too).

At this point fear embraces most of us, gathering us up in the folds of the neoliberal mantra – profit is primary and all to the shareholders and damn the world. Maybe the various rages (road, shopping, neighbourly….) are lead indicators of this underlying despair?? They’ve actually been around for a decade or two. And the binges – eating, drugging – are ways of covering hurts, too.

I know this is not everyone’s experience, but even some of those for whom these are the most personally exciting of times can acknowledge it ain’t necessarily so for many others. And in this country the story’s about to get worse, so everyone’s telling us (suddenly it seems, but not). Perhaps the American diseases are for us, too:

“…Profit, not equal rights or freedom of religion or any of the other high-minded principles we seize to bolster our selective outrage, is the real coin of the realm. And, as if you didn’t know, it quacks like a duck.”

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post 251213 discussing the latest American culture war storm, Duck Dynasty.

 

Redundant, my tail feathers!

 

 

 

Learning to act right (22)… Threatening to threaten – making sanctions clear

Learning to act right (22)… Threatening to threaten – making sanctions clear
Torrey Orton
Oct. 31, 2011


A reader wondered how I could "threaten to threaten"* someone – in that case, threaten a protestor that I might seriously threaten him and his accomplices for their harassment of patients. That is, that I would take aggressive action to injure them in some way (not physically). The actual objective would be to shame them in the theatre of their choice for shaming others. A brief discussion about the situation with a verbally facile buddy delivered a string of punch lines, advertising hording material and such in 3 minutes, so I know it's doable.


"Threaten to threaten" goes like this:

• Decide, preferably with the other, what our mutual expectations are for a specific activity.
• Establish to myself that potentially serious shortfalls in their performance seem to be happening
• Formulate appropriate step(s) I might take to sanction them for breaking our agreement(s)
• Invite them to discuss how we are doing with our mutual undertakings
• Have this discussion in private; if necessary, out of sight and hearing of others with an interest but not a stake in your relationship
• Make clear that what I am about to say is a threat to threaten more seriously at a later time if things do not change in the specific matters of concern to me.
• Conditionally offer an actual threat I might use ( if you / then I type of formulation)
• Note their non-verbal reaction to the threat – are they shocked, etc.
• Check it is clear to the them
• Check their perception of the appropriateness, intensity, focus, etc. of the threat.
• Invite them to consider changing their performance….Consider changing my threat.
  
   

The next step would be an announcement that the threat is about to be executed, if they fail to respond appropriately. Then, do it.

 People often wonder why others don't take them seriously in everyday life interchanges, especially in pursuit or defence of their own interests. All too often this, on examination, is because they have not been clear about their expectations / needs with those others. Being clear is not easy, especially under pressure. Both sender and receiver, to use an old, simplistic but resiliently tenacious image, are likely to have their communication machinery befuddled.


There are at least four virtues of the "threaten to threaten" tactic:

One, the ethical part of this is not dropping a surprise punishment on someone which they might have escaped if they knew one was coming for certain behaviour(s). This virtue is the private version of the management principal that leaders are morally obliged to warn their staff of dangers arising for them from contextual factors they could not know or guess by themselves – an impending buyout, default, bankruptcy, catastrophic technology or market developments, etc.

 

Two, the threatened threat may elicit the other's perception of our needs, our shared circumstances, or their needs, which may change the understanding of the total context. In other words a challenging event may increase our understanding of the realities we are in, if we engage it in a challenging way, out of the heart of our needs.

 

Three, threatening to threaten shows that we can act with effective restraint in strong ways without blowing things up irreparably, that we can act with strength and focus in appropriately modulated ways. Perceived self-control may increase the potential for negotiating difficult matters. Threatening to threaten demonstrates such control, as do other tactics like self-disclosure, and self-rebuke.

 

Four, the first three above may deepen and humanise the relationship in question.

*I learned this tactic 20 years ago on the negotiation training ground of Effective Negotiation Services. The basic influencing idea is do not threaten if you do not mean it. A fake threat is worse than no threat, especially when it establishes your bottom line or walk away position so the other party knows that an end game is approaching and can better gauge their need to win at all costs. If your 'Don't tread on me' point turns out to be posturing, expect to be counter-postured into even greater losses.

Preface to a counter protest – Defence of the FCC

Preface to a counter protest – Defence of the FCC
Torrey Orton
Oct. 19, 2011


The purpose of this paper is to establish the context for design of an intervention to change the outcomes for participants in the processes which occur here. It arises from our – Charles Brass and my - participant-observer experience at the FCC since early July this year.

The Fertility Control Clinic's front gate is a frontline of the struggle over life and death rights in Melbourne. There a group of Catholic protestors meet six days a week at 7:30am to protest patients' moral rights to a legal service authorised by elected representatives of the people of Victoria three years ago. Their protest expresses their unflagging commitment to expunging this parliamentary offence against the revealed word of gods.


Our goal is to improve the FCC patient experience by reducing the negative effects of the protestors' manner and methods. To do so we have to take into account all the players, direct and indirect, in the theatre of the public patient experience. Anything we do which increases patient stress is not a viable strategy. By chance, so far, the net effect of our presence has been an unintended positive for patients. Our presence appears to constrain protestors' harassing behaviour. We did not set out to do that at the start. We do now.

There is a set of regular players in this drama – the protestors, the security guards and large numbers of local residents and locally officed workers who pass through the frontline the five work days the FCC is open. The sixth is quieter.

The theatre of protest – a gauntlet to run

The typical 'facts' are simple. This is what you might see repeated perhaps twenty times a day:

The set: a two way black top with one lane access in the middle; one verge marked with a white line the other corralled by a 6 foot stone wall; midway is a recessed gateway with Fertility Control Clinic advised in large letters.

Onto this set six days a week between 7:30 and 10am a pregnant woman, with partner or family member(s) accompanying, walks along the footpath on Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, to the gated entrance of the Fertility Control Clinic. If she is coming for an abortion, she may be filled with conflicting feelings amongst which anxiety, shame and guilt may predominate. She may also have been told to expect watchers in wait for her – the 'pro-life' protestors whose aim is the reversal of the recently (2008) legalised practice of abortion in Victoria, and so they will explicitly and openly disapprove of her walk.

As she approaches, the protestors first appear standing on the curb side of the footpath. A couple, both men, have display boards dangling from their shoulders like spruikers for a year 8 sex-education class… 3D plastic portrayals of early stages in foetal growth and screen prints of ultrasound scans. A security guard, whom she perhaps has not even noticed, signals to her that she does not have to talk to the protestors.

Next, the patient encounters an 'offer' of help, often from a female protestor, to see her experience in the light of the only Catholic option – birth. She accepts it by stopping to talk or refuses by walking on by, sometimes with a verbal clarification on the way. Some protestors push their offer beyond the patient's refusal, to the point of attempting a verbal assault unless physically blocked. The patient's last message from the uninvited outside world may be "Don't kill your little baby…" as she's entering the inner world of the Clinic. Its door is always locked. Only a guard can admit her.

The 'set' – an emotional portrait

I have been a watcher, too, standing with the security guard for the Clinic, watching the watchers and at times explicitly protesting their protest by physically blocking their access to arriving patients who made it clear they did not want to hear from the protestors. The mood of this setting is just below the physical violence threshold. The guards and protestors have faced each other across the footpath for months (and years in some cases). Each day is a stream of boredom¹ with sharp irruptions of rough water as a patient comes into view and a dance of offer and protection as in the theatre above is stepped out. The boredom produces a slow build of inexpressible energy which even the protestors occasionally fall victim to in moments of baiting the guards. For protestors and guards this is an experience of waiting with fear and anticipation. Fear roused by possible conflict runs from slight discomfort to irritability thru frustration on into anger and occasional rage. It is expressed in a running background struggle between protestors and security for judicial ascendancy: who can prove who is harassing who? Who can catch who fudging local short term parking rules?

Anticipation adds an edge of fight to the fear's possible flight - a situation poised for action; players waiting to take up their roles; the boredom of no patients being present holds them in suspension. This edgy experience fills about 2 of the 2 ½ hours each morning. The ½ hour of action is approximately 20 X 1 minute flurries, each event having its own specific, unique dramatic energy as the dance of entry plays out.The protestors and the guards both see the other as more powerful than themselves, and so threatening. The guards have physical and legal power on their side, though they have very limited right to use the physical – much less so than in other security contexts like night spots. The protestors have persistence, baiting and the niggling stretching of the notional behavioural limits of public protest on theirs. Both spend time trying to catch the other out in derelictions of roles. Hence the role of cameras in the daily drama, especially at moments of patient arrivals.

Patients walk into this set already tuned to potential assault from without by the assault from within of their own feelings. Refusing a protestor's offer is culturally more difficult for some than others, as it is psychologically more difficult for some than others. The simplest evidence for the acceptance which is not an acceptance is the number of protestor handouts given by patients to the guard as he accompanies them to the locked front door for which only he has the key. The guard's slow ritual shredding of the handouts in the protestors' faces completes the loop of patient refusal.Behind the scenes…

All of the regular players – protestors, guards, local residents and locally officed workers - are aware that this clinic is the symbolic centre of resistance to the Catholic, and other (religious) fundamentalist, "pro-life" protestors. It is not a political playground. A guard died here 10 years ago at the hands of a madman², armed in part with the beliefs offered by the protestors to arriving patients. The protestor's case against the FCC sits, in part, on a thorough misunderstanding of what professional counselling's role is in clinics like the FCC. As has been explained to me first hand, that role is first to help generally with patient understanding of their fertility issues and second to help sort through the personal implications of a pregnancy, checking that all implications and options have been taken into account, including proceeding to normal birth.

It is professionally unethical to promote a particular patient conclusion as much as to hide a medically understood, socially viable and legal option. Those charged with the welfare of patients do neither³, if they can. There is no complaint book suggesting the FCC's counsellors have compromised their role. Fulfilment of that role does not include any assumption of what the right resolution is for any patient, other than that patients' unintentional ignorance of factors and options may produce sub-optimal resolutions.

Reality photo shoots??

Think of yourself being paraded by fate before an avowedly prejudiced audience which seems likely to judge you as falling short in some painful regard – an audience which will record your shame and give it a life by reciting it as end of day stories to their families and friends. And, they'll have a photo record of it, too!! Welcome to celebrity health in the name of the lord.There is always a hidden camera in the dress of one protestor capturing the daily comings and goings. This occurs in other protested sites in Australia and the US. That the cameras are hidden means they are ashamed of their actions because there is no legal reason to hide them. They know it is an unwarranted intrusion. Private photographs of anyone are just that until they are made public at which point pay-for-use and defamation concerns arise immediately. They know this, too. We've discussed this explicitly with the protestors.

The bigger picture

We guess that for protestors the patients are both individuals making their personal way through life challenges and symbols of mistaken pathways at the same time – that is, representations of big ideas, not people. I know that some protestors label patients, and us⁴, as evil. In their symbolic form for protestors, patients are bigger than their own reality and so open to any influence process, and righteously so in the minds of protestors. They, the protestors, would not present any assaultive materials if they wanted to maximise low-emotion responses from patients. High emotion responses express automatic defensive reactions, likely to elicit an automatic rejection of the protestors' offer – the reaction of someone feeling punished by unreachable others.

 Because they are confused about their aims – helping the patients vs. helping the church achieve its mission of repealing the law – they assault as often as they solicit. One could say that any offer by a "protestor" under such circumstances is always a potential assault.

Larger struggles of this sort surround us in increasing numbers and depths. They take tangible shape in the human scale of face-to-face settings like the Clinic entrance on Wellington Street. That's just fine. However, this protest is executed through invasions of patient privacy in the open space between their transport to the Clinic and its front gate. They feel harassed, and 14 once-a-week participant observations by both of us support this claim. These are palpable harassments of visual, verbal and physical sorts. Research makes this observation more than a passing or stereotyped perception of ours⁵.

Onto this stage patients appear solo or in couples, in widely ranging states of disarray from the wholly contained to open crying. The core cast of protestors (in bunches of five or more) and guards (always only one at a time) can see them coming 100 meters away. The guards almost never mistake a patient for an in-transit local. The protestors, though more experienced than the guards (some being on deck at this site for 18 years) often propose their offers mistakenly. And if rebuffed by an actual patient, they are too likely to persist with a plea like "please save your little baby…" and follow them to the gate (unless blocked by the guard) repeating the plea over and over. At the same time, in the background, a visual assault is on offer. We know from the guards and patient reports that protestor actions are more invasive in our absence.

Disapproval and disenabling are the weapons of moral intimidation. The disapproval is obvious. The disenabling, more veiled. The agent of disablement is shame, with a backdrop of guilt. Shame is the public face of guilt and the passage from transport to clinic aggravates its power. Patients arrive in a context in which they are at best amateurs and are confronted by a working practice, an established order of things whose role players are thoroughly at ease with their purposes and moves, though not with each other!

Vulnerability and intimidation – the harassment equation

This makes the very presence of the protestors – physical, visual, and verbal – potentially invasive. It is especially so for those patients most affected by the experience of unwanted pregnancy. They are the most vulnerable and the least able to defend their vulnerability. In my most recent conversation with the most articulate and sympathetic of the protestors, there was no recognition of the immense power imbalance that patient vulnerability gives to the protestors, perhaps because they are so often unheard themselves.

They are aware that harassment is a matter of perception, but not that some perceptions of harassment have ethical priority over others. Clearly in counselling, patients' perceptions of their own vulnerability always comes first at the beginning of any work. This is also the medical rule. How else can we find out what they think/feel is wrong?I know the protestors are open to moral intimidation because I have quietly threatened to threaten them morally twice and the reaction was faster than the twitch of an eye offended by a wandering mote. So, they should appreciate their effects on patients, but the powerful seldom do appreciate their effects except as benefits to themselves. When I aim an openly held camera at them they shy away, while training a hidden one on me. Shame is a wondrous thing.

We are in the early stages of negotiating an agreement between all the players. Whatever form an agreed result might take, it will have to respond to the factors above. Keep posted.

1-boredom is a high energy state expressing one's frustration with a context with no accessible action opportunities, no way to focus an interest into anything.

2- see Dr. Susie Allanson's Murder on his mind (2006); Wilkinson.

3-declaration of interest: I am an AHPRA registered psychotherapist with a broad caseload of biopsychosocial disorders in which degrees of danger to patient viability are common; they are in danger from others or themselves.

4- "Fear the lord…" - In one of my more effective patient shielding efforts recently I earned the attention of a candle wielding, female, septuagenarian protestor's ire : "Fear the lord" she said drawing a roar out of her 4'10' body. I asked her later what she meant and she said (roughly) "…because it's written in black and white, thou shalt not kill and what you are doing is evil and the lord will come and take you away, snip, snip, just like that (with a snip of her fingers as if pinching off a wayward stem)."

5- see Hilary Taylor's Parliamentary Intern Report "Accessing Abortion – Improving the safety of access to abortion services in Victoria", June 2011.