Photo by Flickr user oronzo. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The English comedian, writer, and now technology columnist Stephen Fry has a wonderful way with words. Fry is also an accomplished documentarian, a gay activist, and evidently an environmental activist as well. What I didn’t know is that he’s also a total gear head, allegedly having bought the second Macintosh ever sold in Europe (the Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams having owned the first.) My family has been enjoying Fry and Hugh Laurie’s pitch-perfect Jeeves and Wooster DVDs from the early 1990s, and the funny thing about reading Fry’s blog is that he writes almost exactly the way Jeeves speaks in the TV series (not too surprising it being the same actor and all) but also in Wodenhouse’s original stories.

Anyway, in the opening paragraphs of his first technology review column Fry inadvertently demolishes any rationale for maintaining the two-sphere model of gender wherein if a man is to be strong then a woman must forgo that in favor of good looks, and if by chance one side or the other might overlap then if it’s a man he’s revealing his “feminine side” or if it’s a woman then she’s either “got balls” or, less generously, a “ball buster.”

Digital devices rock my world. This might be looked on by some as a tragic admission. Not ballet, opera, the natural world, Stephen? Not literature, theatre or global politics? Even sport would be less mournfully inward and dismally unsociable.

Well, people can be dippy about all things digital and still read books, they can go to the opera and watch a cricket match and apply for Led Zeppelin tickets without splitting themselves asunder. Very little is as mutually exclusive as we seem to find it convenient to imagine. In our culture we are becoming more and more fixated with an “it’s one thing or the other” mentality. You like Thai food? But what’s wrong with Italian? Woah, there… calm down. I like both. Yes. It can be done. I can like rugby football and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. High Victorian Gothic and the installations of Damien Hirst. Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and the piano works of Hindemith. English hymns and Richard Dawkins. First editions of Norman Douglas and iPods. Snooker, darts and ballet. Such a list isn’t a boast, it doesn’t make one an all-rounder to rival Michelangelo, it’s how humans are constructed. Adaptable, varied, versatile. So, believe me, a love of gizmos doesn’t make me averse to paper, leather and wood, old-fashioned Christmases, Preston Sturges films and country walks. Nor does it automatically mean I read Terry Pratchett, breathe only through my mouth and bring my head slightly too close to the bowl when I eat soup. (None of the above, I grant you, excuses a 50-year-old for saying that anything “rocks his world”; that’s just too horrid and must stop.)

He said it here.

“How humans are constructed.” Pretty cool, eh? And yes, presumably barkingly obvious. Except that it isn’t.

Yes, yes, gone are the days when the actual crime for which Joan of Arc could be convicted and burned at the stake was wearing men’s clothes. Gone too are the days when my 7th-grade classmate, despite being the most respectful and respected girl in our public school that year, was sent home for wearing pants instead of the required-for-girls skirt to school on the coldest day in 75 years. And yes, yes, even knuckledragging Idaho legislators deny trying to push women back into their kitchens.

But really, if it really was more widely recognized that people can hold two ideas in our heads at the same time, that we can have more than two interests, that we can enjoy, say, hockey or football without being “one of the boys” or baking pies and rolls all day for Thanksgiving without being “one of the girls” then Fry’s exposition wouldn’t be so refreshing.

And, of course, the application of the principle goes on and on. Another, closely-related point Fry raises in another post about a nettlesome global-warming apologist dinner companion, deals with the problem of inconsistency of ideology as when, for instance, one supports, say, 100% of a gender-progressive agenda but still have the occasional boneheaded slip-ups, or when one supports, say, 85% of the agenda but not others.

So far as I know Al Gore hasn’t gone around saying we should all stop using jets, it seemed to me from his film that his whole argument was that we don’t have to get all medieval and pre-industrial in order to halt the threat of global warming. I appreciate it would be terribly convenient to those who deny the problems he has drawn our attention to if he could be leapt upon for not recycling this, not saving that, for actually using electricity, for shamelessly driving a car etc etc. But even if Al Gore had said that no one should fly around in jets or use electricity, then does it actually mean the world isn’t getting warmer and that we shouldn’t do something about it? I mean it’s perfectly possible that he’s a hypocrite, but how does that alter the central facts? After all, I can say “always be kind, always be responsible, always treat others well” – if I then spent a day being unkind, irresponsible and unpleasant in my treatment of others if might make me something of a Tartuffe but it would not instantly render the ethical standards I had recommended worthless, it would simply mean that I hadn’t lived up to them. So even if Gore is the completest hypocrite, it has no bearing on his claims.

Read more about the questionable sincerity of global-warming apologists here.

The trick, I think, in this department is to get over the use of the word “but,” as in “I’m a feminist but…“ As if that too was a two-sphere possibility where one could be only one thing but not the other without the universe grinding to a halt… or critics having to actually pause for a moment and think.