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uncloseted · 3 years

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i related to effy an unhealthy amount when i was only 13 when i first watched it, but at the time i wasnt doing drugs, homewrecking, doing anything that young lol. however i was extremely mentally ill but undiagnosed, and so confused but i found solace in effys character because of how similar i felt to her. flashforward to being 20 now and im a nic addict/borderline drug and alcohol addict that forgets to take my prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotics. i cant tell you how many events of effys life have mirrored mine now 7 years later, both the pretty but mostly the ugly. it all feels like a joke to me, and the thing is of course it wasnt effy the fictional character that did this to me, it was the fact that i was genetically and epically set up to do this to me for as long as i existed and i saw myself in her too young. everyone ive ever met and started to befriend has fallen in love with me, has found me beautiful, and then seen my flaws and hated me even if they didnt tell me to my face. ive been a horrible friend and partner and im flighty and unreliable and destructive. i never saw effy, or a person like effy, find a happy ending and im afraid even when im at my manic highs i will never find a lasting happiness and will always accidentally self sabotage until i die. what im trying to ask is, how can i save me? i know its dumb to ask a random tumblr user but ive been following this blog since i was 13-14 and since you know effy through and through, you might know a little about me. its a long shot. (i’d also like to say this isnt a cry for help and im safe/not actively suicidal so i dont want you to feel like theres any pressure like that, but i did use this ask box as a free therapy session.)

I'm a bit biased, but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking a random Tumblr user at all. I'm happy to be a free therapy session when you need one, and I'm really touched that you've trusted me with your thoughts and feelings for so long. Hopefully I've been some help over the years 😆

Coping with mental illness can be really, really hard, but the good news is that with the right tools and support system, you can absolutely recover. It sounds like you already have a psychiatrist in your life, which is a great start. If you've having trouble remembering to take your medication, it might help to set calendar reminders on your phone, set up text prompts to remind you to take your pills, to link taking your pills with something else you do every day (like brushing your teeth or eating breakfast), or to reward yourself for taking your medication (for example, putting a piece of candy in your pill box that you can eat after taking your pill).

If you don't have one already, a therapist might also be a good idea. It can take a while to find the right therapist for you, so schedule a few appointments and see which therapist you "click" with. A therapist can help you work through any reluctance you might have towards taking you medications, as well as helping you come up with day to day strategies that help you achieve your goals and helping you work through the beliefs that you hold about yourself and the world that may be holding you back.

Moving on to talking about addiction for a bit. I strongly believe that addiction doesn't come from some type of inherent lack of willpower or moral failing, or even really the drug itself. It's the need to escape reality. And that's actually supported by scientific literature; most famously, the Rat Park experiment by Bruce K Alexander. Practically, we've seen that same thing in the aftermath of Portugal's decision to decriminalize all drugs. They took the money they were using to keep drug users in prison, and instead invested that money into reconnecting people who struggle with addiction to society. Their goal was to make sure that every person who struggles with addiction has a reason to get up in the morning and has a support system within the wider society. And it actually worked- injection drug use is down 50%, overdoses and HIV infections have massively decreased, and rates of addiction decreased as well. It's much easier to quit when you have something motivating you to keep going.

Why am I telling you all of this? I guess what I'm trying to get at is in order to recover from addiction, I think first people need to understand what the reality is that they're trying to escape. What can be done about those issues? Who's in your corner trying to support you, even if they're not doing the best job at it? Where else can you get the social support you might need? What are you passionate about? What would make it feel worth it to get up in the morning? I think instead of focusing on the drugs, or the alcohol, or the cigarettes, maybe we should focus on solving the root problems that make those attractive options. That's one of the reasons a therapist is a really good idea; they can help you figure out what those root problems are, and provide resources and tools to help you fix those problems.

In terms of practical, do it yourself advice for dealing with addiction, there are a couple things you might try. I did a whole post on evidence-based ways to set goals and follow through on them here, so I won't rehash it in this post, but basically:

Try to set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. For you, this might be something like "My goal is to have only one drink a day (measurable and achievable) for week (time bound) so that I can be more reliable for my friends (relevant)".

Instead of trying to quit something, replace it with something else. For example, "when I feel like smoking, I'm going to do ten minutes of learning Korean instead". Learning something new is easier and more exciting, and so new habits are easier to maintain that breaking old ones. Find a new hobby that you've always wanted to do or that's exciting to you, and try to focus your energies on that to distract yourself.

Identify any obstacles (such as environmental triggers) that you might run into, and develop contingency plans for working around them. This might be something like, "when I drink coffee in the morning, I want to smoke, so I'm going to switch to tea instead." If you can, get rid of all environmental triggers that might remind you of your addiction or trigger a craving.

Get someone else involved. Tell a friend about your goal and have them check up on you. Your fear of disappointing them will help you stay on track.

Put money on the line. Give money to a friend with the understanding that you'll get it back at a set date if you've achieved the goal you set. Tell your friend that if you fail, they should donate the money to a group or cause you really hate.

Write down the reasons you want to quit, and put them somewhere you know you'll see them. Whenever you want to engage in an addiction behavior, read through that list first.

For bonus points, add to that list your contingency plan for when you want to engage in an addiction behavior. These may include ways to redirect your attention or distract yourself until the craving passes.

76% of people who wrote down their goals, actions and provided weekly progress to a friend successfully achieved their goals.

You might also try an addiction recovery app, such as these, or doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy worksheets on your own if you can't access a therapist right now.

There are also some things you can try in order to improve your mood. As much as I hate that this is true, consistent exercise has a huge impact on mood. If you can, try taking a 20 minute walk outside, 3 times a week. Other (boring) things, like making sure you're getting 7-9 hours of sleep a night and eating regularly, can also make a big difference in mood. Some of you might know that I'm a little bit obsessed with the free Coursera class "The Science of Well-Being". It has a lot of great evidence-based tips and tricks for how to build happiness, and I highly recommend it if you're trying to live a happier life. These include things like journaling, meditating, noting things that you're grateful for, helping other people, and having regular social interactions.

Finally, a few philosophical thoughts. One of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism is dukkha. Basically, this is the idea that suffering is an innate characteristic of existence in our world. When I was younger, I never liked this concept, but I think now I kind of get it. It's impossible to be happy 100% of the time, and that shouldn't be our goal. Suffering is the comparison by which our lives gain meaning. But we can do our best to minimize our suffering and the suffering of others, and ride the wave of suffering when it does come. And each time we ride that wave, we can learn techniques to manage it a little bit better, and to make it easier the next time. We will sometimes sabotage ourselves out of fear, but we can learn how to do it less frequently and for the consequences to be less dire. We can learn how to forgive ourselves for our flaws and what we've done in the past, and learn from those mistakes so we don't do them again in the future. It's also okay to backslide, to struggle even after you've made progress. You're never back where you started, because you've always learned more and experienced more.

I know I've thrown kind of a lot at you in this post, and I don't expect you to try all of it or for all of it to work, but hopefully something in there is helpful to you. You can get through this. You can save yourself, but please, also remember to let others help save you. You don't need to do this on your own. And just like I have been since you were 13, I'm always here to give a free therapy session and to lend my support ❤️❤️❤️

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divinevomit · 3 years

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im tired

sept. 26′21 : 8am

thought id try a diary of sorts. cant garrentee how consistant thisll be or how literate itll be either. i cant sleep anymore without some type of medication. with or witohut caffine. im aalways tired an d it shows. when i fo sleep it sall day. never at night. the portals are opening up. tis almost october and it shows. this buildign is full of lost ghosts. i feel for them, honestly. i cant imagine being stuck ina place liek this forever. i feel liek maybe i will, one day again. be stuck somewhere for wahat seems liek too many years, watching the days pass, not knowing when or were i am anymore. seeing the passin gpoeple go by. i was once, it wasnt fun. i dont really remember it, but i know i long forit back from time to time.

i guess i should introduce myself properly, for futiure referencee or for anyone who happens to stumble on this blog. i dont rwally know how. i guess i m kinda liek a ghost. i dont get to leave my apartment often, eithr becuase i have a bad feeling, or because i have no reason or the funds to. i have insomnia, also borderline personality, and probably a good amount of other problems. ihave a good amount of friends i guess, i live with one, (who ill call vamp for future referece),i have two friend groups, both of thm are majority odler than me, but not in a weird way, more liek by chance. anywyas, i also have an online friend, and a long distance lover. i talk to my onlin efriend more than any. ive knownhim for almost twoyears,but i dont know much about ihim. i dont know his actual name, what he looks liek, so basically nothing besides his age, his voice, and his zodiac sighn. all my friends think hes secretly 40, but hes a year younger thanme and proved it. ill probably end up talking atb him mostl.y. i mtoo tired to thikn of a different name than what i already callhim, ill think of one later. my lovr lives in the same state as my onlien friend, and not too far. theyboth live in a different state thanme and vamp. weve beentogether for two years, about 8 months off and on long distance. this is the longest weve been away from ech other at 4 months. i dont get to talk to them too often. thy dont have wifi, and theyve never had a phone with data. their family is odd and doesnt liek me either. what els do i add? ill be a legaladult in 6 months, but me and vamp basically liv aloen. my mom pays for rent and utilties, but is never around and lives with her boyfriend 12/14 days. whenshe does come by, its not good. vamp and i both dont have jobs, vamps family is across the country, and most of mine is comepletely out of the pitcture. neither of us had good childhoods but they r pretty similar. vamps was a lot more extreme thanmin e, and mine was,, easier,, to say te least. i dont know what else i should add. im very pale due to lack of goingoutsid eduring daylight hours and probably lack of nutrients but naturallu im very tane. im reely clairvoyant, liek scary clairvoyant. ican read someones mind to a t with ease, can feel others physicalpain even when im inadifferent room, adn emotions clearly. especially when i know thm, dcently just by looking at them too long. its reallu exhausting. (beleive me or not idont care, its not liek anyone will see this anywyas.) my mom is pagan (for 22yrs), and my dad is a satanist (for 42 yrs) and i am second born to them. i turned out a pagan who lieks red magic and my deity is venus aphrodite. (did yu knoew aphrodite was nonbianary?) i refuse to do black magic or anything to mess with anyons freewll. i refuse to end up liek muy dad. my favorite color is baby pink andblack.

me and vamp share a room. im not allowed to be alnoen because everyone thinks ill spirsl. vamp has lived with me for 4 months and, dnt get me wrong, i lvoe having him here, hes liek my brother and i cherish him forever, but i missbeing alone. jes asleep right now so im downstairs typig this.

i have a bad habit of rambling. i talk too much. i wont read this over becaause i know itll be all ovr the place and ill just delete it. i dont really know what to use this blog for, i never really have. i go backand forth on wat to do with it, first it was aesthetics, then a dream journal and now this, but im bad at keeping p with anything and loose motivation quickly. i might try more for tihs. but i cant promise anything, i did this on a whim.

#1 #divinevomit #divinejournal

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vincent-frankenstein · 5 years

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different anon, but heck yeah u should definitely infodump about lucid dreaming!! im really interested in it

aaaaa okay !!! uh hold onto ur ears yall im abt to talk em off lmao

so !! if u didnt know, lucid dreaming is basically when you become aware that you’re dreaming while youre in a dream. once you’re aware, you can take control of the dream in literally any way u want — u can do anything, go anywhere, meet anyone, all with the knowledge that nothing can hurt u and nothing can stop u

its a fascinating concept and, the feeling when u actually become lucid for the first time? its better than anything else in the world. its the most invigorating thing u can ever feel, i think. but actually becoming lucid is, ,, , , hm. a time and a half.

putting the rest under a cut bc, hooooo boy this is gonna get long

first things first! you absolutely have to keep a dream journal. forgetting ur dreams is all well and good when ur not trying to accomplish anything in them, but if you become lucid and then wake up with only the vaguest memory of what you actually did? thats painful.

u can either go all out and get a fancy journal and write them down physically each morning, or u can do what i do and just download an app. i personally use the app Dream Catcher, which lets u tag ur dreams for easy organization. just get in the habit of writing down your dreams every morning, and if you really, really cant remember anything, just write down that you didnt dream anything that day. you’ll train your brain to remember your dreams better

secondly! reality checks! are absolutely imperative! the idea behind them is that, if you do something throughout the day that “proves” your reality, eventually you’ll start doing it in your dreams as well. for example, a common thing in my dreams is that i’ll have extra fingers, so i check my hands a lot throughout the day.

it can’t just be a casual thing, too. if all you do is glance at your hands and b like “yo looks normal, we gucci”, then you’ll do the same in your dreams even if you have Weird hands. trust me, Dream-You is an idiot, you gotta be obvious with this stuff. take a few moments, look at your hands, count out your fingers, and really think to yourself “am i dreaming?”

try to get in the habit of doing that at least 15 times a day, and eventually you’ll start doing it in your dreams too.

now, if you just stick with doing those two things — which is what i’m doing right now — your chances of becoming lucid will raise astronomically. even just those two tiny things can train your brain into realizing when the world around you is real and when it isnt. you can also attempt something really easy called a MILD — a mnemonic-induced-lucid-dream — which can help your chances even more without upping the effort

whenever you go to bed, just take a few moments — even just five minutes can help — and just. lay there. and think to urself, again and again “the next scene will be a dream” or “i will become lucid in my dreams tonight” or something similar. get ur brain really focused on lucid dreaming right before you fall asleep and chances are, those Vibes will bleed over into ur dreams and you’ll become lucid

practice those three things consistently, every day, and pretty soon you’ll start becoming lucid. it takes time, though! dont be discouraged if you end up not becoming lucid for the first few weeks, or even months. sometimes your brain just needs a bit of extra training

that’s what ive been doing for the past year or so — bc damn do i Not have the energy to actually put in too much effort — but!!! there are other techniques!!

my personal favorite is the WBTB, or wake-back-to-bed method. with this technique, you set your alarm for roughly 5-6 hours after you go to sleep so you’ll wake up inside of one of your REM cycles, specifically one where your dreams will be the most vivid. dont do anything, just roll over and go right back to sleep.

you can even use a MILD along with this, repeat whatever mantra u usually use as you fall back asleep. you should start to see hypnagogic imagery — blobs of color and vague shapes floating before your eyes. just observe them. at one point, they’ll start forming more familiar shapes, and places, and maybe even people — and there should be a moment, a snap, where you go from observing these images to actually being in the scene. you literally build the dream around yourself, its magical

i have read that WBTB can cause sleep paralysis, but i’ve never personally experienced any problems with it, aside from the fact that im always tired the next day.

another thing that could severely increase your chances of being lucid but also involves Effort — meditation. specifically mindfulness meditation. the act of bringing full awareness to your Existence, honing in on just Your body, Your mind, Your breath, will make you a more aware, mindful person, which in turn makes you more perceptive of dream signs. also, the ability to clear your mind and center yourself with a moment’s notice really comes in handy when the dream becomes destabilized and you have to take control

if ur an adhd lad like me — or neurodivergent in any way, really — the idea of meditation can be,,,, terrifying. honestly, i havent meditated in like six months now, because it really wasnt?? doing anything for me?? mostly because im absolutely incapable of sitting still for that long without Something to stimulate me

so! loophole! guided meditations. having someone else guide you through the process can make it a bit easier to focus. just find one that works for u on youtube. there are even guided meditations made specifically to prime ur brain for lucid dreaming!

so thats how you get lucid. now for when youre lucid

at first, lucid dreaming is going to be extremely hard. dreams fall apart very easily — if you get too overexcited or if a dream-character looks at you the wrong way or if you cant seem to do what you want to do, your lucidity can fade and you’ll either go back to being your normal dream self or you’ll wake up. dreams are volatile and hard to control, and even harder to master

thats where meditation comes in handy. youll have a much easier time controlling your dreams if you can look at the world around you, take a breath, center yourself, and know that you can control it. that being said, you can absolutely learn to take control without ever having meditated a day in your life. its all about your mindset!

you have to go into it with confidence. the key to controlling your dreams is knowing that they’re your dreams. you cant forget that you’re in control. thats why i feel like learning to lucid dream doubles as a lesson in self-confidence — you have to learn to trust yourself, trust that you can handle any scenario thrown at you and come out on top.

if you can achieve this mindset, you can literally do anything. ive had maybe 50 lucid dreams since i started learning about them — which… is honestly a really low amount, but. i havent really had the time/energy to really throw myself into it as much as i want to. but just in those dreams, ive flown, ive shapeshifted, ive met my sides, ive teleported to vast, gorgeous lands and seen some of the most beautiful things ive ever seen. anything is possible in a lucid dream; thats why its so worth it to put in the effort

but when youre first starting out, itll be extremely hard to maintain that mindset. like i said, Dream-you is dumb as shit — you’ll forget youre dreaming, you’ll be unable to control anything, you’ll wake up before you manage to accomplish anything. more often than not, the dream will destabilize, which is Not Fun

if the dream starts to destabilize — basically, if things start going fuzzy or vague, if you suddenly cant see, if you can feel ur body in bed, basically anything that points towards you waking up — there are ways to fix it. literally just spinning around helps for some reason? spin around, fall down, run ur hands along anything u can find and feel the texture, or just demand that the dream stabilize itself. most of the time, thatll work

and if it doesnt, dont be discouraged. theres always another night to dream

so basically: start a dream journal, do reality checks, mmmmaybe meditate if youre up for it, and your dreams will become like. at least 10x more interesting. trust me, try flying: its literally the best feeling in the entire world

its just !!! such a huge, incredible thing, and its so fascinating to learn about too. all the different ways you can train your brain, all the different things you can do, all the studies done on the subject. i suggest reading about Steven LaBerge or keith hearne. hearne led the study that proved lucid dreaming existed in the first place! he got a lucid dreamer to signal to him that he was conscious while asleep using REM (rapid-eye movement), because lucid dreaming happens during the REM state. also, robert waggoner’s book Gateway to the Inner Self is really fascinating too!

hm wow i really went ham here lmao

thanku for giving me a chance to infodump im very happy rn

#me: /spends a full half-hour infodumping abt something most people havent even heard of/#now if only i could remember this much when it comes to schoolwork lmaooooo #ty for the Infodump Permission im !! vibin rn #lowkey highkey this makes me wanna get back into it. . . might do a wbtb tonight...#personal #logan talks #lucid dreaming #Anonymous

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musingsofanewbienurse · 5 years

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Transitioning to Veganism

In January 2019 I decided to take part in veganuary with the intention of being fully vegan afterward (bar what was already in my cupboard and needed eating up). It wasn’t a sudden decision, in fact, it had been a gradual choice that I had been considering for months at this point. I had been vegetarian since July 2017 and had been gradually decreasing my intake of animal products so that by the end of 2018 my diet was 80-90% plant based already. I had been avoiding dairy for the most part anyway as it causes my skin to break out badly and cheese was an expensive luxury on a furgal university budget. The only thing that really let me down in that aspect was when I ate out or by not checking labels.

Like most people I had watched the world-famous Netflix document ‘What the Health’ in the spring of 2017 and that was probably one of the first major catalyst that lead to me analysing and changing my diet. I had grown up on a small, rural island off the mainland of England, one of its main agricultures being farming. Every-day I would see cows and sheep grazing in fields both outside my bedroom window and on the way to school, I saw these animals had a good quality of life (in a way that they do not always in larger areas of Britain and the US), and like many people, never really questioned the connection between that and my dinner plate.

I was also notoriously fussy, and although I liked most varieties of meat, the same could not be said of vegetables. In fact I hated every single one until I was 16 and then I could just about stomach carrots. A healthy diet I did not have, despite how much my parents tried to push otherwise. Going vegetarian was simply not a viable option for me back then; but on joining university I started to cook for myself and my taste matured, leading me to today, where I now love 99% of veg (broccoli is legitimately my favourite food) and it makes up the bulk of my diet.

It meant, that when I watched the documentary I was able to genuinely consider becoming vegetarian, and started to slowly phase meat out of my diet. Even then, I knew that ultimately I did want to become vegan, after seeing the impact the meat and dairy industry has on our health*, the environment and on the animals who are subjected to it. But I wanted to do it the right way and for the long-term. If I cut out everything at once I knew after a week or two I would revert back to my usual diet, my body craving things that had always been present. I also wanted to be educated about things I substituted meat for; I go to the gym regularly and I wanted to know that what I was eating would have a good variety of nutrients. And most importantly, I didn’t want my mental health to suffer.

Like most young women growing up in this century I have had issues with food and my body. Although I have never received any formal help or diagnosis I definitely had an unhealthy relationship with food, especially in my mid-teens, though even now some days are harder than others. For the most part I am a lot better, but I was wary that if I suddenly cut out a lot of different foods and placed a lot of restrictive rules on my diet that I would be taking a huge step backwards, that I would go back to obsessing over every little thing that I eat. I didn’t want to sacrifice my health and knew that if I was to do this safely, then gradually converting my diet was the only answer.

And that is what I did. First it was dairy milk, an easy swap as there are so many alternatives on the market. I mainly go for soya at home because it’s the cheapest and I really don’t need anything fancy in my bowl of porridge, but oat is by far my favourite and go-to when I’ve gone out for a coffee.

Eggs was one of the biggest changes. In my second year of uni I had eggs for breakfast nearly everyday that I wasn’t on placement, and I genuinely didn’t see myself as able to give them up. But in third year I found a love of porridge and overnight oats, or tofu scramble if I fancied something closer to what I usually had eaten. And eventually I was only having eggs when eating out, there is nothing nicer than an eggs benedict (and if anyone can link me to a good vegan recipe for it, I will love them forever).

Like I previously mentioned, cheese wasn’t a large part of my diet, because as a university student it just wasn’t worth budgeting for. I’ve never had a problem with any of the vegan alternatives I’ve tried, though this may be because I ate cheese so rarely that I couldn’t really directly compare the two.

Chocolate, the crux for many people, was a big one. “But how do you live without chocolate?” I’m normally asked by my horrified coworkers, and the answer is that I don’t. In fact, I probably have it in some form everyday, it just took a bit of getting used to looking for the vegan friendly alternatives in tescos. But there are plenty, and even some of the major brands are accidently vegan (looking at you bourbons).

Eventually it just left occasions where I was eating out (laziness would sometimes lead to me choosing the vegetarian option, and other times it was simply because that was what I wanted to eat), and items where I had not checked the label for hidden ingredients. Milk powder is in bloody everything, and if it’s not that, it’s normally eggs. Quorn in particular is well-known for this, though their vegan range is steadily growing.

By December 2018 I felt ready to take on Veganuary. I no longer felt like my diet, or lifestyle would be negatively impacted by it and I saw it as a great chance to draw a line under the sand. When speaking to my dad on the phone two weeks in he asked if I was struggling yet. And honestly? I hadn’t even noticed, as there had been so few occasions where I would have chosen the non-vegan option anyway. To me it just made sense that after January I continued to eat plant based, and now, at the end of February I haven’t regretted it once. I am a giant advocator of eating a vegan diet. I feel so much healthier than when I ate meat, am more active than ever and can’t remember the last time I fell ill. I do understand it’s not possible for everyone, people who have had or have eating disorders may definitely struggle, and placing a load of rules on what they can and can’t eat wouldn’t be beneficial to their mental health in the slightest (just as it wouldn’t have been for me once upon a time).

I also understand that if you’re not educated about nutrition and the aspects of a healthy diet, then becoming vegetarian/vegan doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be any healthier, especially with the wide range of plant based foods and meals now out in supermarkets (I’m not berating any of these releases in the slightest, it’s amazing to see so many options and makes it a lot more accessible than it once was, it just means navigating for a healthy option isn’t always the easiest thing). Being vegan is still a privilege, I only have to support myself on my wage and it leaves plenty of room to opt for the more expensive meat alternatives and keep my diet balanced. A single parent with two kids however doesn’t have this option, and places like Lidl and Aldi are brilliant for selling a large quantity of meat for a relatively low price.

But reducing your meat and animal product intake is good for the planet, and I do think that every little thing, whether that be partaking in Meatless Monday or swapping dairy milk for soya helps. No-one has to be perfect or commit to the most severe of changes, especially if they feel it is what they should do because Instagram told them to, but making a substitution here and there helps massively.

*I am not saying that meat and dairy cannot make up a healthy diet, though like anything in large quantities it isn’t beneficial. There is also plenty of evidence against cows milk and how we digest it. In early 2019 the Eat-Lancet commission (linked below) was published, outlining global targets for the world population to achieve a healthy, nutritionally balanced diet whilst keeping food production sustainable. The diet consists mainly of fruit, vegetables, grains and legumes, with a small amount of meat and fish. It is fairly similar to the Mediterranean diet, and emphasises that you don’t need to cut all animal products out, but reducing them would be highly beneficial on a number of levels!

Walter, W., Rockstrom, J., Loken, B. et al (2019) Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Products. The Lancet. [online] Available at: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext#seccestitle10

#nursing blog #nurse #newbie nurse #veganism #vegan #nutrition #nutrition blog #lancet

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themeed · 3 years

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Daily Log 2.13

DW: 178.0

Calories: 776

Food: cream cheese, toast, chicken w onion, protein bar

Exercise: pushups, minimal

Notes: had another depression day. period is supposed to start today or tomorrow. i hit 178, if i see 177 on the scale tomorrow im gonna be so fucking happy. i havent been this small since college. once i hit 170, ill be the size i was in senior year of high school. 160 was junior, 155 was sophmore... i dont remember ever really taking my weight before then. maybe once in middle school i was in the 130s? like a year apart 120s to 130s. it wasnt fun and i started avoiding the scale. yeah i was like 150s when i first got my license and i was Not Happy about it that was 15 and a half, so sophmore year. safe to say i was gaining some 10 pounds a year consistently since middle school. and now im dropping it as fast as i can all at once. and it started. after quitting martial arts. once i stopped exercising basically.

Anyway that's not something I'm fully prepared to engage with emotionally. I'm getting s e r o t o n i n from the numbers going down. measured myself, lost a couple inches but not a whole lot since i was 184 two weeks ago. then again, that was my low point in my monthly so... ill be checking in again in two weeks or when i hit 170. also either my boobs are lifting or they swell. might be both. im stress relieving right now. updated my journal and added a channel on a personal server for mental health tracking or major/periodic updates... considering something like osdd or bpd. i already have a section for venting and memories and general etc but i didnt have a revelation or development channel. which. things have been moving fast. needed it. right stress relief rn is my legs are tied up and im relaxing. im gonna tie my wrists too before bed. might blindfold as well. depends how anxious i am. well see. i have a plan to get rid of the perishables and get protein this week before the trip! and its under 700 a day! might have to up that a bit bc trip friend is recovered and will notice if im eating TOO little. will be noting approximates in phone. well actually... theyre portions are still pretty small and habits arent great... they might not notice, especially if we get absorbed in something. is that manipulation or avoidance? i think its just avoidance cuz wed normally do shit like that anyway.

ugh. im nervous about the trip. im gonna log off and tie up my wrists now.

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thoughtsandeverythingelse · 4 years

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21st.

i found myself bawling at the end of the night by one letter (and only) i received - which was actually just sufficient for me.

for someone that has been stressed out and annoyed by this entire situation, i’d say i had a pretty good time.

i didnt have much - but i had friends from school who bothered to celebrate right after our exams ended, i had friends from church in the vastly different communities having fun ideas and thinking of how they can make this celebration special. i had a bouquet of flowers, dinner at a v nice restaurant with amazing ambience (which was also very romantic). besides all the cake i received, i am left with three gifts. one starbucks card, an angpao and one letter. i received text messages from people who remembered (like its been months since we had conversations, but they actually dropped a text like wow), and still bothered to text me about it.

but yet, my heart feels so full. i dont have much, in fact it can be considered nothing compared to the extensive list i can pull out of my head. but i bawled so hard at the realisation that im so loved, and i feel like i dont deserve it. its not about how well the surprised turned out, or how much a gift can cost, but the fact that someone took the time out to think about my needs, to think about me, and how they love me in my best and my worst times - that is enough.

i bawled at the realisation that this love is so undeserving and privileged, but yet here am i, a recipient of the things that i can so freely give, but yet struggled to receive.

i am unsure why i feel this way, but God - this life i thank you for the overwhelming love that i receive. i have nothing much to offer, because this is literally all that i have - with two hands raised, knees kneeling and head bowed, God i want to say that this all belongs to You. You fill me and give me so much more than i can imagine.

i am getting choked up as this is being written, because the reality of emotions is so very real - but acknowledging it and accepting it is a whole other issue. i am also not sure if its the hormones speaking, so we’d see about that.

part 2: this is a continuation of the 21st celebration which i deem is noteworthy hahaha - for memory’s sake.

old time pals decided to bring me out for dinner, by initiating a date and picking a location. to be honest, i never really thought about anything simply bc it was so caught up with school, but they took the time out between their busy schedules to celebrate me.

it wasnt much - they brought gave me a soft toy, brought me to a place where they deem the food was good, and hung out with me.

they followed me into a store as i contemplated to get a dress that was on my mind for a few days, and ended up paying for it - like a boss ass bitch lol.

i nearly cried at that moment, because it wasnt about the crazy commitment to friendships that we placed on ourselves. heck, they’re all in commited relationships, things to study, jobs to work for and dreams to pursue. but the fact that they thought about what i’d like, thought about the things that reminded them of me, thought about how i would appreciate it - that made me feeling like i was so undeserving of the love that they gave.

i wasnt the best friend in the whole world, i move as my seasons pass, while attempting my best in keeping up with the relationships in my life. i segrete them by seasons, by long term, in my very very selfish ways. they’ve stuck through it, seen through the uglist in secondary school, had fun with the wildest side, patient with the negligent side. over all these years, they have been quite consistent with their nature (although one can debate if its a good thing or not haha) but the idea of having people coming together from previous seasons and still sticking through it, makes my heart a lot feels things.

part 3:

the more i journal these things, the more i find myself being so blessed.

kingdom friend asked me out for a “girls night out” but haha it was clearly getting suspicious as the days were nearing, bc of the text i was receiving haha. it was a simple dinner, investing in each others’ lives, then it led to a surprise fun activity with the people that love me.

these are kingdom friends, which can lead to this being lifelong. perhaps with that perspective, 21 years doesnt make a whole lot of difference. its literally the first 21, what more the next 40? the night ended with good drinks, fun conversations and intense mahjong lol.

part 4: besides the awkward cake we had in school after our intense papers, we decided to head to jb for our post exam activity and they actually got a pair of earrings i casually mentioned was cute. the best part could have been how he remembered what i liked. like he was actually noticing and he remembered after all that smack i talk haha. with the idea of having people love me, think about me (without me knowing), trying to make something nice happen for me - still feels all so biazzre. to have people love me for me, and after me knowing, i’d still have to receive and say yes, i want this. it almost feels so shameless, which makes me feel so undeserving, unworthy almost.

after this entire celebration thing, what i concluded is that its not about the amount of gifts one can receive, but i saw how people valued me for me, how they loved me because they wanted to, the thought process that they went through to make something happen - be it a card, a surprise, or even a simple decision on the cake that they should get.

for that, i am thankful. the thoughts of unworthiness is ungodly, but i am thankful that He brings people into my life, to show me what love can look like, through them.

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wildlyhardphilosopher-blog · 5 years

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how to house train your dog | training puppies

New Post has been published on https://dogtraining.dknol.com/english/how-to-house-train-your-dog-training-puppies/?utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=Tumblr+%230+Freda+K+Pless&utm_campaign=SNAP%2Bfrom%2BBest+Dog+Training

how to house train your dog | training puppies

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J9’s K9 Courier Tips and Tricks for Leash Training Officials said the officer interviewed the trainer, staff and a manager, who said the dog in the video was getting the “alpha training” for being really aggressive. Don’t forget to reward him with praise, special treats, play, or walks for doing his business outdoors! WebMD Magazine Bear Bear’s Blog Show More Whippet More From A Dog Lover’s Handbook Sponsor Opportunities Belgian Tervuren Schipperke If he’s about to jump up to join you, tug sideways and ignore him until he sits quietly on the floor. Sport VetBabble is a pet care site ran by veterinarians to babble facts and opinions for everyone and everything. We enjoy helping animals and technology and want to combine both to give readers and pet lovers a place to share our enjoyment and make lives better for everyone. Personal Development 3.4 Animal services decided the trainer’s behavior in the video didn’t rise to the level of animal cruelty and the case was closed. © 2018 Four Paws Inc. All Rights Reserved. Purebred Dogs Buy Now Bark at the Park Cheezie Chews The important thing to remember is by the time your dog is relieving himself on your floor, your opportunity for a successful potty break outside has passed. Insuring you’re doing your part in helping your dog succeed is the most important aspect of housetraining. That’s one tough lady who never gave up.What was this perv even doing walking the streets after so many prior sexual attacks? © Depositphotos.com / AOosthuizen Remember that puppies don’t have good bladder or sphincter control yet, and excitement can make them need to pee or poop. Take your puppy out to potty after 15 to 20 minutes of play, as well as after every meal. A potty run should be the first thing you do with him in the morning and the last thing you do with him at night. What is the best way to potty train a puppy in winter? As soon as the poop/pee is complete, immediately praise him, quickly give him several treats and then play. International Editions: 20 This is very unfair on your puppy and it will destroy the crates power as a house training tool if they lose the instinct to keep it clean. Malaysia MY Current News A: Please please email customer service at ([email protected]) or call our customer service team at 1-800-832-2412 for assistance. They have the ability to update the email address so you can put in your correct account. Nutrience Hi I have a shitzu pup she is 16weeks old….I have read all your articles about potty training.I have been trying very hard with this and days she does good and other days she’s bad.Like today for instance..we went out at 9am and was out there til 1pm she peed twice but never pooped till 4pm in house on peepee pad.I have put these pads where she has gone before in my kitchen. I have to get that cleaner natures Miracle sounds great.Today wasnt an ordinary day..usually the pup eats in the am and about an hour later poops and usually after dinner she poops too..but not today she is quite off her normal schedule.And the other problem I have her ..I would like to know how to get her to stop barking when I leave her and she continually bites and chews when petted.Have any ideas would be truly appreciated.I do crate her but she hasnt been in crate too much lately cus I have been home from an operation…she use to be on a tight schedule…will this be bad for her when I go back to work..and what should I do to get her use to it again.Thankyou, Book Online Did you know there are five kinds of barking? Professor Donaldson examines the various reasons dogs bark and provides suggestions to train your dog out of this behavior. 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fbq('track', 'ViewContent', content_ids: 'dogtraining.dknol', ); Play specialized games to build reliability The best way to do this is to include it in your vocabulary lessons and your respect lessons. If you teach words and respect properly, acceptance of being handled will come naturally – they go “hand-in-hand”, so to speak! Check your puppy’s tail – it should be wagging. Is your puppy comfortable? Does he like the trainer? Here’s the trick to a clean poo pickup… turn the bag inside out, place your hand inside and grab the poo. Fold the sides of the bag up around the poo, turning it right side out, and tie the bag tightly. That wasn’t so bad, was it? POTTY TRAINING FOR PUPPIES Complete Guide: How to potty train your puppy in just 7 days A STEP-BY-STEP program so your pup will understand you! (potty train puppy, puppy training potty, potty train) Dog Breeds Training (7) Link a “call” to a “reward.” Mental Health Experts recommend confining the puppy to a defined space, whether that means in a crate, in a room, or on a leash. As your puppy learns that he needs to go outside to do his business, you can gradually give him more freedom to roam about the house. For example…. brushing, bathing, clipping nails, cleaning teeth, giving a pill, putting on a collar or harness. So pick a command like ‘toilet time‘ that you will only use when you’re taking them to the bathroom and you will not allow them to do anything else. Share your thoughts with other customers 4 Housetraining Ground Rules March 24, 2018 at 3:26 pm Catcher doing an NW3 Nose Work vehicle search If you can’t keep your eye on her, she should be crated (such as at night, when you are gone, etc.). Luke Kountz Is a Christmas Puppy a Good Idea? Pocket Beagle How to potty train your puppy if you work full time – method 2 Tropical Carnival August is… The idea is to test your Dog to see how he responds in an environment which is new to him. Set-up a situation where you are in control of the environment and your Dog. What You Should Do Between Scheduled Bathroom Breaks Good luck…let me know how you get on! Sign Up & Save puppy training tips for kids | Puppy Training Session: Stop Running Away and Stopping Other Unwanted Habits puppy training tips for kids | How to Train your Puppy to Stop Biting puppy training tips for kids | 6 Dog Training Questions YOU Probably Don’t Know the Answer to… Legal | Sitemap

#how to teach a puppy to walk on a leash #In Home Puppy Training

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cardigans-and-bowties · 7 years

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While I’m making long, rambling personal posts, why not talk gender

I remember thinking that I wish I was more open on tumblr or a journal or anything about my sexuality. I think the same thing about gender... but Im still afraid to put it down somewhere to an extent.

It’s so hard to parse through everything when youve been told for so long that you have to be a certain way. I wouldn’t say I was particularly girly growing up, save for Disney movies and loving animals - neither of which make sense to gender. I wasnt really into make-up. I was “allowed” to wear it in 6th or 7th grade but (despite being given it at holidays by certain family members) did not care for it. I wore pretty much whatever but my stepmom cared a ton about clothes and my cousin would pick on me about clothes.

This insecurity regarding clothes and make-up has fucked a lot. There was a lot of thinking that I was ugly and bad at make-up when I did wear it. When I started wearing it regularly in high school, I’d only wear certain kinds of make-up because I thought I was just bad at doing it any other way. I was equally bad at doing it other ways - I was just used to my face looking that way. The times after high school that I’ve done make-up consistently, as much as I wanted it to be “for me”, a lot of it was feeling like people would think I was ugly or tired or like a 12 year old without it.

Sometimes I really am feeling it. But more times, I feel like a clown. Sometimes it is nice, but a lot of the time I just end up feeling weird and ignoring it.

A lot of the time, especially when I was younger, I really don’t know why I picked certain clothes. But I know that how I specifically looked in them was not something I had a full picture of.

Honestly saying most of this makes me feel so fucking weird. I dissociate a lot. I was depersonalized a lot. I don’t remember a lot of what I thought about myself because I didn’t think anything about myself. Am I making shit up at that point? I am not about to go into a spiral like that.

There was a period Sophomore/Junior year of college where I wore dresses and make-up a lot. I thought that I didn’t like wearing certain things because I thought I was fat or ugly - which maybe wasn’t entirely untrue - but I told myself that negative thoughts about my body was bad. And truth be told, at that point I looked super cute in those clothes. If I didnt think about the fact that it was me in those clothes, nothing would be wrong with it. I was thinner than I’d been (and have been since then). I didnt have a bad face - but I still felt bad. I just thought I was fucked up and Bad™ and didn’t have words for it so I chalked it up to me thinking I was fat and ugly. So I wore those so I could condition myself to feel less bad about it. Eventually I was sure enough that I could wear more clothes that I liked without worrying about other people and as I’ve gone more that direction, I’ve gone more androgynous with hints of femininity.

I’ve been trying to wear just what makes me happy (which is fucking hard - this post doesnt even really touch that mess). And I definitely gravitate towards more neutral things. I do wear feminine things sometimes - sometimes it’s fun but it’s more like dress-up.. It’s not me, it’s just a fun thing to do occasionally. When I do wear make-up (like cat-eyes and eyeshadow), it’s in that dress-up context or when I’m dressed more neutral/masculine and feel like the femininity gives it a good contrast. Or when I feel like looking like a 2000s emo kid (eyeliner all around).. mostly that tbh. I still feel the need to wear it in some contexts. For instance, I found this awesome outfit for a wedding I went to. A simple patterned button up and guys pants - so I thought id wear make-up for that contrast (but mostly bc I was seeing people at the event). At first I felt good about it, but more in the dress-up kind of way - it was just fun. But before we even got to the event, I really hated it. It was a mask to make the people around me feel comfortable. And I took some really cute pictures that day! I just wish I’d worn less or no make-up.

I don’t even know how to approach body stuff. CLOTHES were hard to figure out because I have felt so separate from my body - Imagine trying to figure out my body. The only times I’ve liked how my boobs look has been in a performative context. My boobs had to look like x y z because theyre boobs and theyve got to be presentable (??? yeah I know it makes no sense - a lot of engrained shit doesnt make sense). When I bind, I feel comfortable with how I look with myself. But I get scared to go out because I don’t want people to notice BECAUSE it’s different. They will notice it’s different and say something about it. And its not like “oh no - theyll think I dont have boobs” - its about them noticing something is different and asking me why Im doing it. Or I even get scared of positive attention. I don’t want people to notice if I start binding or dressing differently. I REALLY wish I could just do and try different things with that and just have no one say anything about it. Like compliments are fine but noting that its different or asking questions is just incredibly uncomfortable.

Words are a bit easier to talk about. Ive ignored discomfort, just like Ive ignored a lot of discomfort. I know that feminine language sounds weird and fake. But Masculine language is largely just as weird. I’m not a “girl”, I’m not pretty, I’m sure as fuck not a “woman”, but I’m not a “boy” and definitely not a “man”... but sometimes I can get behind “boi” (why is that more neutral in my head? I dont know) and “handsome” and I’m mostly always down with “cute”. I don’t even really like feminine pronouns. They feel fake - it’s just convenient and asserting neutral pronouns just sounds like way more explaining that I want to have to do.

My name is harder to talk about though. “Rebekah” makes me feel like I’m supposed to be Amish or have braided pigtails or something. “Bekah” is okay - but mostly because my friends use it and it’s a lot nicer than “Rebekah”. “Bek” has specific connotations to specific people and I don’t think I could use that as my primary name. So Mostly I feel kinda weird about the name situation. But I sure as fuck wouldn’t tell my family if I wanted to change it. I’m not even out as not-straight to most of them. I don’t even want to think about that. Honestly I can’t imagine trying to implement that kind of change. I don’t like the idea of people potentially asking questions about why Im binding - this is a whole nother level.

Sometimes I think maybe I should just shove everything down. Just dress really femme - hell, buy a wig - and just make myself be super feminine... maybe Ill just stop thinking about it then. But I know thats not how life works. Repressing has always just brought more shit to deal with.

#personal #gender #its 5am and i have Fellings

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adambstingus · 7 years

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The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Its the most fucking ridiculous story, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. I mean, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. Well blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from land? they asked the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resorts party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. Hungover lads boat trip boob lands them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board party boat in Ayia Napa and end up in war-torn SYRIA, guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good nights sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole thing five months later, Ellis, a 26-year-old with a business degree and a marketing masters, couldnt totally wrap his head around it. I think I found 35 stories about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I mean? (Notwithstanding that there doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I definitely do.)

What made it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting enthusiasm was that the story was total cobblers. I could not believe how gullible they were, Ellis said, a top note of glee still in his voice. We were just having a laugh! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of banter. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious attitude that took up a position on the outskirts of the culture in the early 90s and has been larging its way towards the centre ever since. There are hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain (no memes insinuating child abuse/dead babies!!!) to Wanker Banter 18+ (Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page (The only rule: keep it banter). You can buy an I banter mug on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four branches of a restaurant called Scoff & Banter. When things were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all banter in an attempt to focus their minds, and that terminology appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it meant. Someone has created a banter map of London using a keyword search on the flatshare website SpareRoom, showing exactly where people are looking for a roommate with good banter (Clapham tends to feature prominently). When a 26-year-old man from Leeds posed for a selfie with a bemused aeroplane hijacker, Vice declared it the high-water mark of banter.

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the term all the time. Either you have banter (if you are funny and can take a joke) or you dont (if you arent and cannot). The mainstream, in summary, is now drunk and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged expressions of fraternal love, it is now also a word used to excuse uninhibited displays of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and deplored by cultural critics; it is dominant, hotly contested and only hazily understood.

And so, whether he intends it to or not, Ellis use of the term raises some questions. Is he throwing his lot in with the most pervasive branch of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and benevolent hilarity that stretches from lad-dad panel shows to your mates zinger about your terrible haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist imitators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of racists, and, as we shall see, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible authority and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest intention of going to Syria. We werent really trying to fool anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats entirely consistent with the facts. We were out for a stroll, and we came across this area that looked really run down, we thought it looked like Syria. So we put it on the club reps [Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we said, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous story, see if the media believes it. See if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, they could. Eventually, the truth came out, not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his tale of magnificent idiocy was a fiction. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession only brought another cycle of attention. Publications that had picked up the story in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to reflect the audacity of the invention; social media users adduced it as evidence for their views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian embassys Twitter account called it a telling example of how many Syria (and Russia) stories are made up by UK papers, which was great geopolitical banter. The attention entertained Ellis, but he says it wasnt the point. We just thought it was funny, he said. People are too serious. I keep being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off work, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, desperate to take every opportunity, just to say yes to everything I can. We were on a night out in Manchester with his friends Tyson, John and Chris. In the course of the evening, the following things found their way into my beer: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 note; and, I hazily remember being told after the fact, at least two shots of vodka.

Everyones got a thing in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one bar to the next. One guy, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks like a Peperami. Tysons got this mole on his face, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your face. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they call me Potter, thats my nickname. Every single one of us has something. So you youve got Chinese eyes. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit endorsement is what makes such offensive epithets a commonplace, and so it troubles me that it made me feel mysteriously welcome, just as it had when John punched me lightly in the balls when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss sincerity: as he spoke, the sheer daft beauty of male friendship seemed to amaze him, almost to the point of physical pain. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we show our love, he said. So many group chats on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry. And its like, when youre really killing them, you go, Ill stop if you want, because you know they cant say yes, so you just keep going. Then we arrived at the next bar, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had undermined my ability to take useful notes, Ellis broke off from talking as we walked down the street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully made bed by climbing into it and rolling around. Everyone cracked up. Give the world a laugh, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a boat, and youll end up somewhere great; make the boat up, and youll get there faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he said, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about making the world a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what banter is, thats hardly a new problem. The first usage of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from noted Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit song The Fart, in a satirical 1677 play called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a definition by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. (Swift mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, turning a cork into a horse would be classic banter.) Both are a little disgusted by the word, and neither unearths much of an origin story: by their accounts, banter is so coarse that it emerged, fully formed and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it turns out, though, the OED is not at present fully able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a search of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous examples are missing from the dictionarys definition, which was first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 translation of Don Quixote. (After examining the history, Maier told me that she would be adding banter to the list of entries that are up for review.)

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

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February 26, 2017

In recent years, banter has barged into our lives at a remarkable clip. Googles Ngram Viewer, a tool that assesses (with some limitations) the frequency with which a term appears in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up about twice as often in 2008, the most recent year covered, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19th century, it often denoted a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term evolved over the 20th, it continued to seem a little prim. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had returned in a new seat after losing his old one, was subjected to a good deal of banter Dear old Granny MacDonald!, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers had successfully protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess banter banned.

Such stories do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor scuffle broke out on the 00.54 train from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no obviously related reason a woman who had a large bag of bagels decided to put one on the head of the guy sitting in front of her, and then another after he took it off and threw it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy victim who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil case with Mr Kipling apple pies (squashed, oozing) because I was fat lost it and screamed Get the fuck out of my face!, and then another fight broke out on the platform, and then the police got on to the train, and every single person fell into not-me-guv silence: this is not Granny MacDonalds banter any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of term to describe it its just that the act of definition makes it more visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some point, though, banter became the name for what British men already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme sarcasm, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, says Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition first lashed itself to banters mast in the early 1990s, and controversy soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian story headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the dismissal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, recorded an early skirmish in the modern banter wars, and an important new layer to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is no longer acceptable. Two years later, the lads mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front smoking a dog-end, under a banner that declared him a super lad. What fresh lunacy is this? the editors note read. Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover.

If banter dismays you, James Brown, the magazines first editor, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he acknowledges himself, he created a title that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and ebullient masculinity that had been searching for public expression. While it was always overtly horny, the magazine was initially more interested in a forlorn, slackjawed and self-ironising appreciation of A-listers (one reversible poster had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to destruction. But it also flirted with something murkier.

To its critics, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise a certain hooliganistic worldview with a strategic disclaimer. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of irony over everything, said Bethan Benwell, senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several papers on mens magazines. The constant excusing of sexist or homophobic sentiments with this wink that says you dont really mean it. Benwell pointed to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown denies that his magazine invented banter. Instead, he says, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the folk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought out into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had run John Major and Michael Heseltine as cover stars, for Gods sake. I took the interests and the outlook of the young men that I knew, and I put them in a magazine, Brown said. Im not responsible for the tone of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied women, not because we belittled them.

The thing about Loaded was that the way we wrote reflected the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a thing that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the people you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and objections become exhausting to sustain: what youre objecting to is an act of affection. Of course, this is what makes it insidious. Because Browns account rests on the intention behind the magazine, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult thing to resist or challenge without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you become complicit.

Loaded gave this new kind of banter escape velocity, and it began to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and celebrity chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same time, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 anthem, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the tone was milder and more conventional than the magazines were: this was the sensibility of the university graduate slumming it before embarking on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism could easily occupy a spectrum from ogling to literature, drawing a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby once said to me that all this stuff you know, fantasy football and his book is men talking about things that they like and for a while in the mid-80s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those comments reflect a kind of sneer at its critics that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself denies that view. Twenty years on, he, like Brown, is at pains to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that came later. I guess me and Frank did specialise in banter, he said in an email. In a time before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 years, two things happened that ushered in the age of banter. (You might call it mature banter, except that its also the opposite.) First, instead of just being a thing that happened, it became a thing that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible cultural product, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed moment, the forms equivalent to Dylan going electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good ideas, it looks simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The predecessor channels audience share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on earth it was supposed to be for. But we had the content, says Steve North, the channels brand manager in 2007 and content of a particular kind that the existing name did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Think Its All Over, Top Gear. Viewers said they loved the repartee, the humour. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men married or in relationships, maybe with young children, not going to the pub as much as they used to, says Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, the agency brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming sessions at which people would shout out suggestions for the name. One of the ones we collected was Dave, he says. We thought, great, but we cant call it that. But then we thought, Its a surrogate friend. If the audience really sees it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really give it a name.

They put their hunch through its paces. The market research company YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a bunch of other names (Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an emotion, a feeling, said North, his tone thoughtful, almost gnomic. Everyone has their own sense of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its hard to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a brand, it needed a slogan. Lots of people claim they played a part in the naming, says Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some point someone, I dont know who, wrote it on a board: The home of witty banter. The rebrand added 8m new viewers in six months; Dave saw a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with banter as an unremarkable part of their demographics cultural mix, the channel crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house idiot savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, the year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shot from below 5m to a record high of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2. (A tie-in book published the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 copies.)

North saw the kind of fraternal teasing that was being monetised by his channel, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key thing is that its two-way, he said. Its about two people riffing off each other.

But like his 20th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has evolved, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he said with distaste. That thing of cover for dubious behaviour we hate and despise it massively. When we launched, it was about fun, being light-hearted, maybe pushing each other without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the turn of the decade,as other branding agencies mimicked the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a peculiar sort of respectability. The men who celebrated it werent just lads in the pub any more: they had spending power and establishment allies on their side. But they were, by the same token, more visible to critics. Aggression from an underdog can be overlooked; aggression from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their necks in some extremely bad banter in 2011. Keys blamed dark forces, but everyone else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist things off-air. Most memorable, at least for its phrase-making, was the clip in which Keys eagerly asked his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray went quickly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with injustice in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, particularly focused on the tape in which he expressed his derision at the idea that a woman, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an assistant referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter, he said. Or, more exactly, just a bit of banter, as he said Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much banter passed between us. She and I enjoyed some banter, he protested. It was lads-mag banter, he insisted. It was stone-age banter, he admitted. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but also, it wasnt his fault if you didnt get it. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Keys insistence that his mistake was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for an imagined era before male friendship was so cramped by the tiresome obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying views were painfully dated, his conception of banter was entirely modern: a sly expansion of the words meaning, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of denying responsibility if anyone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bond between two people by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt please a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies brought it closer to a style of communication with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch (lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same structure. People gossip as a trust game, she said. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something outrageous, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say were friends in spite of the mean things Im saying about you? But now theres a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things Im saying about other people? I think originally it was a harmless thing, said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and intent, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler form of banter is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I found The Inbetweeners adolescent banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That phrase and just banter mirror each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, just banter does exactly what it accuses political correctness of, seeking to close down discussion by telling you that meaning is settled by category rather than content. Political correctness asserts that a racist joke is primarily racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist joke is primarily a joke. In the past, the men who used it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is named all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, says Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit use of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its use as an unanswerable defence, banter has turned from an abstraction into a vast and calcified description of actions as well as words: gone from a way of talking to a way of life, a style that accidentally became a worldview. He bantered you, people sometimes say: you always used to banter with your mates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive chatter with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I trip you up, thats banter.

You might think the humiliation suffered by Keys and Gray would have made banter less appealing as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first refuge of the inexcusable. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having sent texts that referred to Chinese people eating dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and gay people being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real name is Daniel OReilly, established himself as banters rat king, with his very own ITV2 show, and then lost it after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a rape. A man was convicted of murder after he crushed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an argument over badger-baiting, a course of action that he said had been intended as banter. Another slashed the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the incident as a moment of banter after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane measure,banter was falling into disrepute, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of lads on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, asserting its authority in public and saving its creepiest tendencies for the shadows or, at least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a leaflet. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club distributed a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, says the then-president of the student union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student came to her in tears with a copy in her hand. The leaflet talked about trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were passing references to the horrors of homosexual humiliation and outright homosexual debauchery. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the club and join the banter list, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to imagine a more ordinary iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the leaflet came to light, the club knew it had a problem. It issued a collective apology acknowledging that we have a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter, and promised to organise a workshop. But there was reason to be sceptical about the depth of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her colleagues published a report on the incident, they noted a string of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski trip to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other indiscretions it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her clothes off. She hid in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby club or closely associated with it, one notorious senior member was widely thought to be responsible for the leaflet. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) But when they came to defend themselves to the student union, members of the club fell back on one of the most revered pillars of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, says Nona Buckley-Irvine. No one individual was responsible. They were sorry. It was just banter. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored the universitys wider Athletics Union, decided that banter was not an especially helpful brand association, and withdrew funding worth 22,000. The students union decided to disband the club for the academic year. The decision moved some observers to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former team member told me. We were the best-behaved team when it came to actually playing rugby but they banned that bit and they couldnt ban any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tone. I had old members emailing me and calling me a fascist, says Buckley-Irvine. Asking me if I didnt understand that it was just banter. Rugby players chanted abuse at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as sports night, at a bar in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby clubs bleak solidarity. In deference to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for instance, members of the club who were expected to dress in suits werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just shout abuse instead, one female former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she said, went, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a joke. People would say, Its just banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she said, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were meeting someone new, saying they had good banter, that was a pretty high compliment. Whereas if you dont go along with that stuff, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not seen as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby club was disbanded, nothing much changed in sports night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same nights out; they just colonised other teams. They still addressed girls as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they still had shouted conversations about their sex lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna remembers a guy who took her picture as she slept, naked, in the bed they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university sports team via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where banter resides now, and theyll give the same answer: WhatsApp groups and email threads, the safe spaces of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its another world of drama, one former member of the football club said. The details of girls bodies that youd read, a few funny jibes, that was the limit for me. But when it moved on to, like, really, really bad stuff, always about sex it was too much. Those threads are the source of everything.

If the threads were an outlet, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to mocking each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one female student remembered, it was just kind of status quo that you could have your arse grabbed. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of weird, but OK, thatll happen. Like everyone else willing to speak about it, her view of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes contradictory. It sounds scary, she said, but that being said, some of my best nights were there, and like it was fun. But then she said: What was defined as serious just got so pushed. I think for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna remembers lots of sketchy incidents. She recalls nights when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she said. And then, youre all living in halls together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last night? Thats hilarious. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of the men she knew at university, she finds it hard to pin down exactly what she thinks of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her mind. On a Wednesday night, he was a banter guy, she said. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time, no one seems to think that it will have cost the perpetrators much. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former member of the football team. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the country, or whatever. The senior rugby man who many held responsible, by the way, has landed on his feet. Today, he has a job at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately spotted and put through the journalistic wringer. (Vices Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive text on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the form.) But when each new absolute legend emerges, we dont usually have the context to make the essential judgment: do the proponents tend towards the harmless warmth of Ellis and his mates, or the frank hostility of the LSE rugby boys? Is their love of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of banter, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise have become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to go postal. Dave, for example, has dropped the home of witty banter slogan. Its not about classic male humour any more, its a little bit smarter, says UKTVs Steve North. We definitely say it less than we used to.

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samanthasroberts · 7 years

Text

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

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February 26, 2017

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Photograph: Alamy

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caredogstips · 7 years

Text

The age of joke

The long speak: It used to be precisely a word now it is a way of life. But is it is necessary to get down the banter bus?

Its the most fucking laughable storey, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last-place summertime in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was wielding as a guild rep. I represent, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking golf-club had closed, and we remembered, We can still depart dolphin watching. Well blag our mode on to a fucking craft and croak dolphin watching.

But when the boat voyaged so far that Cyprus disappeared from panorama, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from tract? they questioned the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in rendition; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the useds party pilgrims used to go terribly awry. The gang wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval basi in the towns of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was , nonetheless, a fib that had legs. Hungover lads boat errand boob territory them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board defendant barge in Ayia Napa and be brought to an end in war-torn SYRIA, laughed the Express. If you envisioned these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon territory; interrogation at the mitts of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a red-hot banquet, a speedy tour of the expanse, and a good darkness sleep, spots on the next angling boat headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the craft in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole circumstance five a few months later, Ellis, a 26 -year-old with a business position and a marketing lords, couldnt altogether wrap his head around it. I ponder I experienced 35 narratives about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I symbolize?( Notwithstanding that there is nothing to doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I emphatically do .)

What became it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting passion was that the storey was total cobblers. I could not belief how unsophisticated they were, Ellis said, a top memo of hilarity still in his tone. We were just having a chortle! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of joke. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious posture that took up a position on the outskirts of different cultures in the early 90 s and has been larging its road towards the centre ever since. “Theres” hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain( no memes insinuating child abuse/ dead children !!!) to Wanker Banter 18+( Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page( The only ruler: keep it banter ). You can buy an I banter jugs on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four sprigs of a restaurant announced Scoff& Banter. When circumstances were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all joke in an attempt to focus their subconscious, and that word appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it entail. Person has created a banter map of London using a keyword scour on the flatshare website SpareRoom, indicating exactly where people “re looking for a” roommate with good banter( Clapham tends to facet prominently ). When a 26 -year-old man from Leeds constituted for a selfie with a baffled aeroplane hijacker, Vice swore it the high-water rating of banter.

Lewis Ellis( left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the expression all the time. Either you have banter( if you are funny and can take a pun) or you dont( if you arent and cannot ). The mainstream, in summary, is now drink and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged sayings of fraternal charity, it is now likewise a word allows one to excuse uninhibited exhibitions of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and regretted by culture reviewers; it is dominant, fiercely contested and exclusively hazily understood.

And so, whether he purposes it to or not, Ellis use of the expression parent some questions. Is he shedding his pile in with the most prevalent division of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and gracious gaiety that elongates from lad-dad panel shows to your teammates zinger about your dreadful haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist impersonators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of prejudiceds, and, as we shall identify, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible dominion and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest planned of going to Syria. We werent actually trying to clown anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats wholly consistent with the facts of the case. We were out for a saunter, and we went across this area that gazed actually run down, we thought it was like Syria. So we apply it on the team reps[ Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we pronounced, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous tale, see if the media believes it. Find if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, we are able to. Eventually, the truth “re coming out” , not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his narration of superb foolishnes was a story. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession simply raised another repetition of notice. Books that had picked up the legend in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to manifest the daring of the fabrication; social media useds adduced it as evidence for their own views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian delegation Twitter account announced it a telling illustration of how many Syria( and Russia) stories are made up by UK newspapers, which was great geopolitical banter. The courtesy entertained Ellis, but he alleges it wasnt the stage. We simply thought it was funny, he responded. People are too serious. I hinder being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off production, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, hopeless to take every opportunity, simply to enunciate yes to everything I can. We were on a nighttime out in Manchester with his pals Tyson, John and Chris. In such courses of the evening, the following circumstances knew their mode into my brew: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 greenback; and, I hazily recollect being told after the fact, at the least two shootings of vodka.

Everyones got a thought in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one saloon to the next. One person, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks just like a Peperami. Tysons get this mole on his appearance, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your appearance. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they announce me Potter, thats my moniker. Every single one of us has something. So you youve gone Chinese attentions. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit promotion is what shapes such offensive epithets a platitude, and so it is a matter of concern that it saw “i m feeling” mysteriously accepted, just as it had when John perforated me softly in the pellets when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss candour: as he spoke, the sheer daft beautiful of male friendship seems to astounded him, almost to the point of physical suffering. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we establish our passion , he spoke. So many group converses on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry . And its like, when youre certainly killing them, you go, Ill stop if you miss, because you know they cant say yes, so you exactly keep going. Then we arrived at the next rail, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had eroded my ability to take helpful notes, Ellis smashed off from talking as we moved down wall street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully established bottom by climbing into it and reeling around. Everyone cracked up. Contribute “the worlds” a shriek, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a craft, and youll end up somewhere enormous; stimulate the boat up, and youll got to get faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he articulated, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about realise “the worlds” a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what joke is, thats scarcely a new difficulty. The first habit of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from memo Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit hymn The Fart, in a sarcastic 1677 participate called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a description by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson.( Speedy mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, revolving a stopper into a mare “wouldve been” classic joke .) Both “re a bit” disgusted by the word, and neither unearths often of an origin narrative: by their chronicles, joke is so coarse that it rose, amply structured and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it is about to change, though, the OED is not at present amply able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a research of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous patterns are missing from the dictionarys definition, which is now being first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 rendition of Don Quixote.( After examining the history, Maier told him that she would be adding banter to the listing of introductions that are up for evaluate .)

dougie stew (@ DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/ KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

In recent years, joke has barged into our lives at a impressive time. Googles Ngram Viewer, a implement that assesses( with some limitations) the frequency with which a period shall be published in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up approximately twice as often in 2008, the most recent year plowed, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a very long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19 th century, it often designated a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term progressed over the 20 th, it continued to seem a bit prissy. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had recalled in a brand-new sit after losing his old one, was subjected to a great deal of banter Dear old-time Granny MacDonald !, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers have succeeded in protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess joke banned.

Such floors do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor hassle broke out on the 00.54 improve from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no plainly related rationale the status of women who had a large crate of bagels decided to put one on the heads of state of the person sitting in front of her, and then another after “hes taking” it off and hurled it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy prey who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil client with Mr Kipling apple pies( squashed, exuding) because I was fatty completely lost and hollered Get the fuck out of my appearance !, and then another campaign broke out on the programme, and then the police got on to the teach, and every single person fell into not-me-guv stillnes: this is not Granny MacDonalds joke any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of expression to describe it its precisely that the act of description draws it most visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some place, though, joke became the call for what British boys already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme satire, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, speaks Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition firstly flogged itself to banters mast in the early 1990 s, and polemic soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian storey headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the removal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, entered an early skirmish in the modern banter battles, and its significant brand-new bed to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is greater acceptable. Two year later, the cubs mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the figurehead inhaling a dog-end, under a placard that showed him a super cub. What fresh crazines is this? the editors note spoken. Loaded is a new publication dedicated to life, liberty and the endeavours of fornication, booze, football and less serious matters Loaded is for “the mens” who guesses he can do anything, if merely he wasnt hungover.

If banter chagrins you, James Brown, the magazines firstly writer, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he recognise himself, he composed a claim that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and exuberant masculinity that had been searching for public showing. While it was always overtly horny, the publication was initially more interested in a lonesome, slackjawed and self-ironising acknowledgment of -Alisters( one reversible posting had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to shattering. But the committee is also flirted with something murkier.

To its pundits, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise any particular hooliganistic worldview with a tactical renunciation. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of incongruity over everything, told Bethan Benwell, elderly lecturer in speech and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several newspapers on mens publications. The constant explain of sexist or homophobic feelings with this winking that says you dont really mean it. Benwell drawn attention to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown is denying that his periodical fabricated banter. Instead, he tells, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the kinfolk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought forward into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had extended John Major and Michael Heseltine as embrace hotshots, for Gods sake. I took the advantages and the mentality of the young men that I knew, and I give them in a publication, Brown suggested. Im not responsible for the atmosphere of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied wives , not because we maligned them.

The thing about Loaded was that the mode we wrote manifested the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a act that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the person or persons you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and dissents become exhausting to prolong: what youre objecting to is an behave of affection. Of route, “its what” stimulates it insidious. Because Browns account remainders on the intention behind the publication, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult act to withstand or objection without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you are complicit.

Loaded leaved this new various kinds of banter escape velocity, and it has started to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and personality chit-chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same occasion, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 chant, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the colour was milder and more conventional than the publications were: this was the insight of colleges and universities graduate slumming it before starting on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism is likely to be dominates a range from ogling to literature, depicting a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby formerly said to me that all this stuff you are familiar with, imagination football and his journal is gentlemen speak about things that they like and for a while in the mid-8 0s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those explains manifest a kind of sneer at its pundits that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself is denying that view. Twenty times on, he, like Brown, is at hurtings to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that arose afterward. I approximate me and Frank did specialise in joke, he said in an email. In a hour before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 times, two things happened that ushered in persons under the age of joke.( You might call it matured joke, except that its too the opposite .) First, instead of just has become a circumstance that happened, it became a situation that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible culture make, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed instant, the forms equivalent to Dylan extending electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good theories, it examines simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The precede channels gathering share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on globe it was supposed to be for. But we had the contents, remarks Steve North, the channels brand director in 2007 and content of a specific kind that the existing appoint did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Belief Its All Over, Top Gear. Sees said they adoration the repartee, the comedy. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men marriage or in relationships, maybe with young children , not going to the inn as much as they used to, enunciates Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, relevant agencies brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming periods at which people would shout out recommendations for the call. One of the ones we compiled was Dave, he enunciates. We felt, enormous, but we cant call it that. But then we reputed, Its a replacement friend. If the audience really pictures it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really pay it a name.

They employed their hunch through its paces. The market research corporation YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a cluster of other refers( Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist ), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an spirit, a sense, announced North, his tone astute, virtually gnomic. Everyone has their own gumption of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its difficult to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a firebrand, it needed a motto. Lots of people claim they played a part in the identify, announces Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some part someone, I dont was well known that, wrote it on members of the board: The dwelling of funny joke. The rebrand contributed 8m brand-new spectators in six months; Dave watched a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with joke as an unremarkable part of their demographics culture desegregate, the canal crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house jerk savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, its first year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shoot from below 5m to a record high-pitched of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2.( A tie-in volume written the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 transcripts .)

North checked the kind of fraternal pestering that was being monetised by his canal, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key happening is that its two-way, he responded. Its about two parties riffing off each other.

But like his 20 th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has advanced, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he added with dislike. That circumstance of cover for dubious behaviour we detest and hate it massively. When we propelled, it was about enjoyable, being light-hearted, maybe pushing one another without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the become of the decade, as other labelling bureaux simulated the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a strange kind of respectability. The all those people who celebrated it werent precisely fellows in the inn any more: they had spending ability and organisation allies on their surface. But they were, by the same token, more visible to commentators. Invasion from an underdog can be overlooked; aggressivenes from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their cervixes in some highly bad joke in 2011. Keys accused dark armies, but everybody else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist acts off-air. Most memorable, at the least for its phrase-making, was the time in which Keys eagerly requested his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray became promptly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with sin in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, specially focused on the strip in which he conveyed his derision at the idea that the status of women, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an aide referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter , he suggested. Or, more exactly, just a bit of joke, as he mentioned Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much joke elapsed between us. She and I enjoyed some joke, he protested. It was lads-mag joke, he contended. It was stone-age banter, he acknowledged. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but likewise, it wasnt his faulting if you didnt get onto. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some particularly bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Picture: Richard Saker/ Rex

Keys insistence that his correct was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for the purposes of an guessed age before male love was so cramped by the tedious obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying deems were painfully dated, his thought of joke was only modern: a sly expansion of the words signify, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of disavowing responsibility if someone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bail between two beings by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt satisfy got a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies accompanied it closer to a style of communicating with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch( lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same organization. People gab as a trust competition, she alleged. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to do now reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something appalling, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in joke was traditionally is expected to be: do you trust me when I read were friends in spite of the aim circumstances Im replying about you? But now theres two seconds version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean thoughts Im announcing about other parties? I repute initially it was a harmless event, enunciated Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an repository of male group conversation, predominantly entered by her students, that goes back to the 1980 s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when gentlemen were caught out fully participate in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and meaning, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler pattern of joke is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I obtained The Inbetweeners youngster banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That word and just joke reflect each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, merely joke does exactly what it alleges political correctness of, seeking to close down argument by say to you that making is settled by category rather than material. Political correctness is saying that a racist prank is mainly racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist pun is mainly a pun. In the past, the men who use it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is mentioned all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, remarks Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit call of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its give as an unanswerable defense, joke has altered from an abstract into a vast and calcified description of wars as well as texts: started from a lane of talking to a way of life, a form that inadvertently became a worldview. He joked you, people sometimes remark: you always used to banter with your copulates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive yak with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I errand you up, thats banter.

You might think the mortification suffers from Keys and Gray would have constituted banter less plea as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first sanctuary of the indefensible. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having transported textbook that referred to Chinese beings devouring bird-dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and lesbian parties being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text letter banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real identify is Daniel OReilly, established himself as jokes rat king, with his very own ITV2 display, and then completely lost after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a assault. A man was convicted of assassinate after he mashed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an disagreement over badger-baiting, a course of action that he added had been intended as banter. Another trounced the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the accident as a few moments of joke after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane quantity, joke was falling into dishonor, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of fellows on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, insisting its expert in public and saving its creepiest partialities for the shadows or, at the least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a circular. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club shared a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, suggests the then-president of the student solidarity, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student has now come to her in tears with a emulate in her hand. The brochure “was talkin about a” trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were legislating cites to the frights of lesbian mortification and outright lesbian gluttony. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the team and meet the banter register, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a run knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to suppose a more everyday iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the circular has now come to sunlight, the association knew it had a problem. It questioned a collective justification admitted that we have a lot to learn about the injurious effects of joke, and promised to organise a workshop. But there are still reason to be sceptical about the magnitude of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her peers published a report on the accident, they memo a fibre of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski tour to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other follies it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her invests off. She obscured in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby society or closely associated with it, one notorious elderly member was widely thought to be responsible for the booklet.( He did not respond to requests for explain .) But when they came to defend themselves to the student uniting, members of the squad fell back on one of “the worlds largest” revered mainstays of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, mentions Nona Buckley-Irvine. No private individuals was responsible. They were sorry. It was just joke. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored colleges and universities wider Athletics Union, “ve decided that” banter was not an specially helpful firebrand association, and moved funding merit 22,000. The students uniting decided to disband the golf-club for the academic year. The decision moved some commentators to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former unit member told me. We were the best-behaved unit when it came to actually playing rugbies but they censored that bit and they couldnt proscribe any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tint. I had old-fashioned members emailing me and calling me a tyrant, articulates Buckley-Irvine. Expecting me if I didnt understand that it was just joke. Rugby actors sung mistreat at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as boasts night, at a prohibit in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby organizations bleak solidarity. In homage to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for example, representatives from the squad who were expected to dress in dress werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just holler abuse instead, one girl former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she replied, get, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a pun. Beings would say, Its precisely banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she spoke, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were convening someone brand-new, saying they had good banter, that was a reasonably high congratulate. Whereas if you dont go along with that material, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not to be considered as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby squad was disbanded , good-for-nothing much altered in plays night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same darkness out; they are only colonised other squads. They still addressed girlfriends as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they are continuing had shouted speeches about their copulation lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna recollects a person who took her portrait as she slept, naked, in the bunk they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university plays crew via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where joke resides now, and theyll give the same reaction: WhatsApp groups and email yarns, the safe seats of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its a different world of drama, one former member of the football club pronounced. The details of girls people that youd read, a few amusing jibes, that was the limit for me. But where reference is moved on to, like, really, really bad trash, always about sex it was too much. Those strands are the source of everything.

If the threads were an store, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to lampooning each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one girl student remembered, “its just” kind of status quo that you could have your arse grab. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of strange, but OK, thatll happen. Like everybody else willing to speak about it, her position of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes self-contradictory. It seems spooky, she said, but that tell me anything, some of my best nighttimes were there, and like it was enjoyable. But then she enunciated: What was defined as serious just got so pushed . I envision for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna recollects lots of sketchy incidents. She remembers nighttimes when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she remarked. And then, youre all living in vestibules together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last nighttime? Thats funny. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of “the mens” she knew at university, she find it hard to pin down exactly what she recalls of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her recollection. On a Wednesday night, he was a joke person, she told. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time , no one seems to think that it will have expenditure the perpetrators often. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former is part of the football crew. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the two countries, or whatever. The senior rugby boy who numerous held responsible, by the way, has territory on his hoofs. Today, he has a activity at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately discerned and put through the journalistic wringer.( Immorality Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive verse on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the structure .) But when each new absolute myth rises, we dont typically have the context to shape the essential points finding: do the proponents tend towards the harmless excitement of Ellis and his copulates, or the frank hatred of the LSE rugby boys? Is their affection of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of joke, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise had now become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to runs postal. Dave, for example, has plunged the residence of funny banter slogan. Its not about classic male mood any more, its a bit smarter, alleges UKTVs Steve North. We certainly say it less than we used to.

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