This summer Lance Armstrong completed one of the most amazing performances in sporting history, absolutely dominating the three week, 3,000 mile super-race that is the Tour de France to  seal an awesome seventh win in succession. The majority reaction, among fans of the race was far from uniform adulation. Admiration was present, of course, but it was clouded with a wondering – is he a drugs cheat? Armstrong points out that he’s the most tested man in his sport; but more and more people just don’t buy it. It seems incredible – but  scratch the surface it becomes depressingly obvious that there’s every reason to doubt Armstrong and his colleagues in sport.The fundamental problem is that drug testing simply doesn’t work. It’s not just the huge difficulty of finding deliberately hidden compounds within the vastly complex mixture that is human blood; it’s the fact that often, it doesn’t even come to that because scientists simple don’t know what they’re looking for. EPO, arguably the most notoriously abused drug in history, came onto the cycling scene in the 1980’s; even though usage was known to be rife and determined efforts were made to prevent it, it took till the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for a test to be developed and approved. The same is true of the wonder drug of this decade, THG. Drugs authorities did not even know it existed until a coach anonymously sent a syringeful to US drugs authorities. The results are predictable: David Millar won the World Time Trial  Championships in 2003 and passed every test on the way and subsequently; but after a police raid on his home found syringes and banned substances, he confessed not only to cheating but that he still had the syringes he used to win the title!This allows drugs to simply instituionalise themselves within a sport. It only takes a handful of ruthless individuals. Their performances improve; their opponents must then choose between  losing and juicing up. Of course, this is less of a risk in games of skill like football or cricket, but in the realm of sports where athleticism is half the game, it can be pervasive. Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter (pictured) who won the 100m at the 1988 Olympics only to be disquailfied for using steroids, was once asked why he didn’t compete drug free; he replied this was tantamount to putting his blocks a metre back at the start.Even worse, while cheats get away with it there is no incentive for  administrators to crack down: drugs guarantee new records – they are manna from heaven. As former European 100m Champion Dwain Chambers says, “people want a show”; there can be no doubt drugs bring that. Again, the results are plain to see, in American Football and Baseball in particular; here drugs testing regimes were for years next to non-existent. Cyclist Paul Kimmage, in his book on pro cycling, raged at the governing body he felt created a system which left cyclists with little choice but to cheat.Many ask if Chambers is right – does it really matter if athletes use chemicals to enhance their performance? The answer is a definite yes. Performance enhancing drugs are illegal, and with very good reason: they wreak havoc with the human body to the extent that some are nothing short of lethal. Marco Pantani, the 1998 Tour de France champion, later banned for doping, died last year of heart troubles at just 34; Petra Schneider, the star East German swimmer, is just one of a gaggle of her countreywomen who are very sickly today. Quite aside from the moral argument, anything which forces athletes to choose between risking their career and risking their lives must be stamped out. Which brings us back to Armstrong. Is he cheating? Given that others cheat, and that he always beats them, how could he be clean? Along with all sports fans, I think, I pray he is. The cancer-surviving popular hero has come to symbolise gaining sporting success through grit and tough training. If he’s found to have cheated after denying it for so long, it may be a death knell for the popularity of athletic sports. Sprinting, those old enough to remember say, never recovered from Johnson’s disqualification at Seoul; it would be a shame to see more sports follow suit. Personally, I succumbed to cynicism when l’Equipe announced they had discovered six Armstrong samples from 1999 containing EPO. I still think he’s a great cyclist, because I think everyone in cycling cheats; but I’ve little faith in any of Armstrong’s protestations of innocence.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

I keep being told that Peter Crouch is surprisingly good on the ground (for a big man). But wasn’t Emile Heskey a great team player (for a striker) and didn’t Nicky Barnby have a surprisingly good left foot (for a right footer)? Crouch was considered among the top two available strikers for England against Austria on Saturday afternoon. This would be funny, if it wasn’t the cold truth. It’s certainly no small feat that the 6ft7in Liverpool target man made the team considering he has yet to score this season. His unorthodox looks and running style make him easy to mock. Arsène Wenger called him a basketball player last season and he was cruelly ridiculed by the crowd for his clumsy play, but he did complement Owen quite well with his famed knock-downs and compared well with the other relative newcomer, Luke Young. With no disrespect to Crouch and Young they are not in the class of Rooney and Neville and maybe more realistic options should have played – Defoe with Carragher at right back. Lampard’s penalty success, after Beckham’s three consecutive misses, was a big help and with Owen sharp the team should easily be capable of picking up their game when it becomes necessary.The pub crowd, powered by the Crouch sized pint-and-a-half beer glasses, seemed happy with the result, though perhaps it was more at the relief of not being Scottish (as in, not having to support their football team). England did after all qualify for the World Cup finals with this result, although necessarily in tandem with Holland beating the Czech Republic, and England can be a side with new impetus when the summer comes.England’s direction seems to have blurred in the last few months. It all had been going well for them since the previous match against Austria. The emergence of Robinson as a reliable goalkeeper has been a relief for fans after the desperate years of Seaman and James, and Joe Cole’s surfacing as an exciting left winger has been comforting, if not ideal.  The loss to Northern Ireland has been dissected to the bone and lessons have been learnt but the Lampard-Gerrard centre-midfield issue does have to be thought about.If both players start displaying the same form as they do for their clubs, England would be driven by goals and searing runs from the middle of the field – before teams could work out a way to stop them without hampering their own style, we would have collected the Jules Rimet trophy and EasyJetted home to celebrate for another 40 years. I love the idea of playing Michael Carrick behind those two, in the Makalele role, and making Lampard and Gerrard the focus of the team in place of Beckham. Beckham plays consistently well for England but gets an unjustly high proportion of the ball and he needs to work out that his crosses (which are effective for the Brazilians at Real Madrid) fly over the heads of Rooney and Owen (though not, admittedly, Crouch). The sending off, however, was clearly quite harsh and the quality of his crossing and set-pieces remain enough for Beckham to retain his place on the team.Dropping Joe Cole to the bench would make the team unbalanced but Gerrard was more inspiring left of the three centre midfielders than when overly burdened with defensive concerns. It worked in the previous World Cup with Nicky Butt, and Carrick is a better player than Butt, though somehow Tottenham team mate (and defender) Ledley King is ahead of him in the pecking order. The next England manager, if there is going to be less of Sven, is a dilemma. The cautious Steve McLaren is as uninspiring as he is tainted with the association of Erikson’s rule.  Desperately, he is currently the 5-4 favourite, and Erikson’s real choice, but there is something to dislike about the toadying inside track he is taking to become ‘the obvious successor.’ Sam Allardyce is a good man but is perhaps too Mike Basset to be the first choice. Someone should put some money on the talented Wenger, realistically an outsider as a foreigner, but he probably needs some support with Paddy Power already paying out on Mourinho’s Chelsea for the league.Despite Saturday’s melodramatic headline in the Guardian – ‘Five days to save a manager’ – this should be a discussion for 2008. We all hope, fortunately with some reason, that Erikson’s England will shine this World Cup – in player terms he believes that he has 10 of the top 50 in the world, and adding Beckham gives a full team that need not be fearful of anyone. Holland, Brazil and Argentina are great to watch but lack England’s all-round strength- I would rather play them than the always-menacing Germany. No comparison to the Ashes is helpful: the World Cup always brings out its own excitement, though it should be noted that Australia are only a play-off away from qualifying…ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

As rugby players go, they don’t come more controversial than Austin Healey. Despite 51 caps for England and two for the British and Irish Lions, opinion both on the player and the man remains firmly split. Many fans of his club, Leicester Tigers, revere Healey and would have him back in the England squad tomorrow; others have labelled him childish and unprofessional, a loud mouth, a show pony and even a selfish player who puts himself before the team. Yet Healey’s genius for rugby is undoubted, and with English rugby in deep gloom, I rung him to find out how its most unshakably cheery player thinks it will get out of the rut. Before getting stuck in, I wanted to get a sense of Healey’s style. With a man known in some quarters as Oz ‘the mouth’ Healey, I wanted to make sure that when was saying something for a reaction, or just pulling my leg, I’d know. We started off on Healey’s approach off the pitch. At the forefront of my mind was an incident from the 2001 Lions tour: with Richard Hill swimming in a shark tank beside him, Healey was videoed banging on the walls and urging his fellow players to help him “make it angry!” Was Healey always such a joker? “Oh yeah – I want as much pissing about as possible.” The man takes his pissing about seriously: “to be honest, professional rugby training is a bit dull – you’ve got to keep it entertaining.” Coming from a man who’s been a professional rugby player for a decade, I take his word for it. But don’t people object? “Some players don’t take it very well.” And Coaches? “Well, coaches are coaches. They think if anyone’s having fun they shouldn’t be there.” He makes an exception, though for Leicester’s forwards coach, Richard Cockerill “Richard Cockerill’s has a right laugh with us…though it’s probably because he doesn’t understand what’s being said in the conversation most of the time”. What about the outspokenness? In 2001 Healey was fined £2,500 by the Lions management for branding Wallaby Justin Harrison a “plank” and a “plod” in a newspaper column. Healey is unrepentant: “I’m always perfectly honest, and I truly believe what I say. That Australian was a bit of a dickhead.” He was widely castigated at the time, particularly by the Australian media; but since 2001, Harrison has built up a terrible reputation for niggle, and finished his Australian representative career by calling South African winger Chumani Booi a “stinking black cunt” during a provincial match. “I do feel a bit vindicated – I’ve always been a good judge of character,” says Healey; but he immediately adds that “how people are on the pitch is very different to how people are off it. I’ve met Justin off the pitch and he’s actually quite a nice lad”. It’s apparent that Healey doesn’t take himself or his public antics too seriously, certainly not half as seriously as his critics – but the same couldn’t be said of his approach to rugby. “I’m very competitive. The other day I was playing golf with [England scrum half] Matt Dawson and I threw my sand wedge at him ‘cause he accused me of cheating. When I race my daughter, who’s three years old, I push her over at the start so I always win.” I mention another famous piece of Healey footage: an R&R session during the 1997 Lions tour to South Africa at a go-karting circuit, where Healey had cut across several corners to win a race. Eight years on, Healey is not even close to repentant: “Oh yeah, that ended up with me basically driving down the middle of the track. But it was them who cheated in the first place – the car they gave me was broken and it didn’t work on the left turns.” During matches, the man who’s become known as “the mouth” in some quarters is “actually relatively quiet.”At this point I know where I stand. It’s clear Healey’s not left the Tigers’ lunch hall where he took my call and that some of his comments are intended for his team-mates’ benefit and not mine as I can overhear their laughter following his more choice comments; at the same time, it’s clear he can be genuine and very honest. We can move onto the real question – what’s gone wrong with the England team, and what can be done to correct it? Healey is not without hope. He speaks of the importance of established players taking responsibility, as he has “tried to be a bit more of a senior player” at Leicester following the retirements of stalwarts Neil Back and captain Martin Johnson. But he emphasises that the key to plugging the holes in the England side is bringing in young talent. At openside, for example, “Neil Back found a niche in the game, and he filled it very successfully. We need to find the next one.” Leicester have already had great success in bringing in young players: their academy, managed by Dusty Hare – “You might have heard of him. He wouldn’t have made an impact in the modern game, but he was a good player in his day,” says Healey of the England and Lions star who’s scored more first class points than any other rugby player – has already produced first team players like Harry Ellis, Will Skinner and Louis Deacon. Healey also stresses the importance of gaining a “winning habit”: speaking of his legendary break through the Stade Franais defence to create the winning try for Leicester’s first European triumph, Healey says “I didn’t really know what was happening. That’s the aim – everyone knows what to do and everyone just delivers. The majority of games are so tight these days that it’s all about the last twenty minutes. The difference between a good team and a poor one can often come down to confidence under pressure.”But Healey makes clear just how far England has to go to return to the top table of international rugby; he really doesn’t mince his words. “Rugby moves in trends. At the moment, the focus is on powerful runners and a forcing errors game. You could say that at the minute, England are behind the times,” Healey explains, an analysis which cannot be faulted when one compares the resurgence of the Springboks, who employ the aggressive, focussed game plan he mentions, with the directionless displays put in by England in 2005. “It stems from the coaching,” says Healey, who believes the current England management, led by Andy Robinson, will not be able to learn from their mistakes sufficiently well: “We need to change the personnel. The current lot are too much in the shadow of Clive [Woodward]. They’re trying to be Clive, but they haven’t got the skills that he had.”Fans hoping for a rapid return to the top will be disappointed. When Healey speaks of England’s rebuilding, the 2007 World Cup doesn’t feature – he’s thinking on a longer time scale “in three or four years time, once the squads have been together for a while.” He makes clear that the glaring inferiority of basic skills highlighted by the Lions tour to New Zealand is no coincidence: “It’s their national sport over there, so even as kids they just play rugby. They don’t get pigeonholed – no one’s told ‘oh, you’re tall, you’re a lock, and you’re a fly half’. Everyone just plays rugby.” Our professional coaching structure undermines skilful, adventurous players further: “players get to eighteen and coaches want them to get big and strong. There’s much more pressure and focus on contact. Players are trained to weigh up the risk of the plays they make.” At professional level, “the emphasis is on speed, and weight training, when maybe we should spend more time on basic skills.”I aim to round off by asking Healey if England can recover as Leicester have done. His response shows just how difficult the road ahead will be for England. Despite reaching the final of the English league and the semi-final of the European cup, Healey points out, “the club hasn’t won a trophy for two years”. Even if England’s performances do improve, as they have shown occasional signs of doing, they will face the difficult challenge of regaining the many titles they have lost before they can claim to be truly back at the top.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

It has been an eventful long vacation. Whether you were stuck in an office in the city, sunning yourself in exotic climes or living your dream internship, you would not have been able to ignore the magnitude of the summer’s eventsAt a time which is normally a news-free “silly season”, the holiday saw some significant, and some shocking, developments. Daily news
of bombings and uprisings in Iraq, Bali, Israel and across the world were brought violently home by the terrorist attacks on London’s travel network in July. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita swept through swathes of the southern USA.Back in Oxford, these events seem unbelievably distant. But it is now that the real discussion begins. All of this will be analysed, investigated and dissected. Countless undergraduates in countless tutorial rooms will conclude profound consequences of the hike in oil prices, use Bush’s response to Katrina as a moral example in ethics tutes, and draw analogies between the 7/7 attacks and an obscure passage in an Eliot poem.Much is made of the freedom which freshers feel when they first come to university. But Oxford brings another element to this equation: while here, it is difficult not to be lulled into a comforting sense of security.We spend our days and nights posing rhetorical questions and answering them, and treating the outside world very much as a theoretical playpen to demonstrate the lessons we learn in lectures.It is not surprising that we should feel sheltered here. Many of us live in centuries-old buildings with walls, built once to keep out riotous townsfolk, which are now sufficient to shield us from modern reality.Chaplains, college welfare officers, OUSU and university services are ready to demonstrate, with genuine concern, that there is always someone to talk to.But perhaps it is time to shake ourselves free of this comforted assurance.Oxford has its own shocks, as a glance at the news pages of its papers will show. The fires which raged in the Longbridges boathouse do not compare to the scale of the July bombings; the Norrington table does not echo through opinion columns as A-level results are bound to do. Yet both have the potential to change the landscape of Oxford’s well-established status quo.When real change happens, it is felt throughout the town. And Oxford cannot hide forever from the realities of the outside world. In 1920, in its first ever editorial, this newspaper vowed to “drive out all those agencies that disturb our little community”. These words sound archaic to modern ears, but behind them lies an undeniable relevance to our current situation. Whatever we pretend about the importance of our Oxford lives, their stereotypes and institutions, it is to the outside world that we will return, bleary-eyed from libraries and flush with success, to find that there are many lessons still to learn.And yet, despite the clear need for us to acknowledge this external reality, we must also make time to revel in the luxury of insularity which Oxford represents. No doubt we will all look back fondly at things which did only and could only have mattered in Oxford.ARCHIVE: 0th week MT 2005

Oxford careers literature proudly proclaims that this university has educated twenty-five Prime Ministers, six kings, and three saints. This alone might go some way to explaining the seemingly endless ambition of many Oxford students. Then again, ten centuries are bound to produce a couple of famous alumni. Maybe it’s time to regain our sense of perspective: we are, after all, unlikely to be the next Thomas More, however well we do in our finals. That said, pressure from friends, parents and tutors, no matter how well meaning, can be immense, to choose a direction and a career, preferably one that brings financial reward and qualifies the weight of expectation upon us. It is tempting to wonder exactly how soon this year’s Freshers will start planning their glorious city careers, attending presentations and attempting to procure work experience placements with random investment banks.
Despite the high workload of subjects like medicine, it’s likely that many have envied those of us whose subjects are so vocational in nature. “Transferable skills” are all very well, but graduating (as most of us will do) with a 2.1 in a non-vocational subject leads to the realisation that, however much we worried about “narrowing our options” by choosing A level subjects, such panic was probably unnecessary. For many, there may be a myriad of options, but no obvious choice of career. Students may, as the Careers Service confirms, be securing internships gradually earlier in their university careers, but many others are increasingly choosing to defer career decisions until after graduation. The 46% of Oxford graduates who entered immediate employment after graduation in 2002 was the lowest figure for more than seven years, and this fall has been coupled with a steady rise in the number of those “not available for work”, which typically refers to those who follow their degree with a period of travel.
When the search for a career does begin in earnest, however, scanning careers literature can swiftly make one disillusioned. It is all very well to read twenty advertisements for city firms, but the difficulty comes afterwards, when trying to mentally extricate one from another and work out exactly why one firm is better, or different, to another. You may be able to decorate your room in college entirely with promotional material acquired at Freshers’ Fair (or, indeed, have been in possession of a free muffin at Summer Eights because you were able to say that Deloitte’s line of business is “professional services”) without really having been any the wiser.
Of course, beyond the initial confusion, enlightenment will probably have come by the time one actually ends up working for said city law firm or investment bank. Graduate recruitment schemes offer job security, and, lest we forget, a starting salary far above the national average. But the structure and culture of many of these organisations means that career advancement happens within pre-ordained limits, and although well paid, the hours that some of these firms expect one to work means that a social life may become a distant memory.
One third year, who this summer took part in a vacation scheme at a city law firm, recalls her supervisor, an Oxford graduate, saying that she had not made any evening plans during the week for four years. Of course, at the age of twenty-five, long hours may not matter very much. For many, mostly unencumbered by relationship or family ties, the salary provides ample compensation for a life spent mostly in the office. ARCHIVE: 0th week MT 2005

OBSERVANT NEWSPAPER readers may have noticed, over the last year and a half, papers have been getting a lot smaller. However, unlike the scandalous creme egg shrinkage, they’ve also been getting a lot thicker. The broadsheet, once the beloved darling of all highbrow newspaper readers, has fallen out of fashion. As the Guardian jumps the bandwagon, downsizing to the obscure Berliner format, we at Cherwell lament the death of the broadsheet.
The more pedantic reader may have noticed that many of the Sunday papers still come in broadsheet format, as does the Daily Telegraph. However, how much longer the fine tradition of giant sheets of paper in bed on a Sunday morning will continue is unknown. And whether the Daily Telegraph (for the home counties Daily Mail reader in denial) counts as a proper newspaper is up for debate. The golden age of the broadsheet has definitely come to an end, and like hyenas by a dying zebra, the Cherwell obiturists have decided to tuck in before it’s technically stopped breathing.
The broadsheet was born in 1712 out of two noble traditions. Firstly, the great, slightly eccentric, British legal system, which decided that to raise funds, it would be a good idea to tax newspapers per page. And secondly, the even greater tradition of tax evasion that decided, instead of coughing up, that it would have fewer pages but make them bigger. The giant paper came into vogue, spread worldwide, and the rest is history. Broadsheets took on a reputation as the intellectual papers, eschewing sensationalist and celebrity stories for a more in-depth perspective on serious issues.
A few years ago, something started to change. Perhaps it was our “small is good” micro-mobile and iPod Nano culture. Perhaps it was our crowded public transport system; when you’re crammed in like sardines, opening a broadsheet puts you at serious risk of taking out someone’s eye. Perhaps it was the dumbing down of our education system, which meant the finely- honed flick of the wrist required to turn a broadsheet’s page without turning it into a crumpled mess was no longer being passed on to the younger generation. Cherwell, ahead of the times as always (whatever The Oxford Student motto may claim), changed way back in 1953. However, 2004 seemed to be when the winds changed for good, and suddenly everyone couldn’t get enough of “compact” newspapers.
But have we been too swift to abandon broadsheets? While tabloid papers can still convey the news, can they fulfil broadsheets’ other social functions? Can you make a pirate’s hat out of them? Are they big enough to be used as impromptu umbrellas in this inclement climate? Can you easily spread out a few to house train a puppy (or small sibling) on? Can the cheapskates among you use a sheet as wrapping paper? And how else are you supposed to recognise other intellectual snobs in a crowded public place?
Farewell broadsheets, you will leave a 29½ by 23½ inch hole in our hearts.ARCHIVE: 0th week MT 2005

So, you’re at Oxford now. You must be pretty clever then. But then again you’re probably pretty ugly too. And a virgin. And that’s not going to change soon. Especially if you’ve put on the 15lb of Freshers’ Fat. But I thought Freshers’ Week was all about getting pissed and getting laid?
I’m afraid not. It’s all about the library inductions, baby. But don’t worry, it only lasts for three days. And I heard that the second and third years really help to make the Freshers feel at home?
Absolutely. College families are a great idea. Only in Oxford is incest not only legal but positively encouraged fun for all the family. And if you are getting FAF-ed about, you might want to write (and rewrite, and rewrite) a quick email to your college welfare officer asking for condoms. What’s this ‘Oxford by Night’ thing I see in the schedule?
Well, the SCR wasn’t happy with an event called ‘The Three-Legged Pub Crawl’ so it had to be renamed. ‘Oxford by Night’ seems to be fine with them. So what’s the highlight of Freshers’ Week?
Forced fun formal hall with your geriatric and world famous (in academic circles) tutors is inevitably followed by a visit to the ever delightful Park End. Yeah, I heard that was Oxford’s premier clubbing experience.
Undoubtedly. There you’ll meet all the other people you won’t be having sex with for the next three years. And the Regent’s Park freshers – both of them. So, where’s the after-party?
In the Bodleian. And if you do manage to lure a fellow Fresher, who hasn’t been battered about the head with the ugly stick, back to your room, just hope that they’re still wearing their name-badge. Otherwise you’ll have to resort to the derogatory nickname that the rest of college has had for them since the first drunken night. Remember, there’s no better passion killer than ‘Come Here Projectile Vomit Girl!’.And the next morning?
It’s not the walk of shame, but the walk of fame… to the library. But, wait, I gave up alcohol on my tedious gap year breast-feeding orang-utans; what’s there to do for the non-drinkers?
Precious little. Film-nights are the Entz team’s (or Dean’s) answer. So I’ve heard at least – haven’t been to them, doubt anyone else has. But if you do want to solo The Lion King while knocking back orange squash it might well be for you. The whole thing doesn’t sound much fun then?
Oh, it is but only when you’re a second year. There’s still alcohol aplenty, you’ll probably have friends by then and, if things didn’t go too well with members of the opposite sex last year, there are loads of new ones to try your luck with.ARCHIVE: 0th week MT 2005

In the cult novel American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis describes, necessitating frequent book closing and book reopening for the faint of heart, the axe wielding, body dismembering, pre-mortem sex, post-mortem sex entailing serial sexual murders of its sociopathic protagonist, Patrick Bateman, with no lurid detail spared.
Enjoyment of satire and social comment aside, our disturbingly morbid compulsion for reading such books and watching (through the parted fingers of hands clamped fearfully over eyes) films of this genre arises partly from our fascination with the seemingly impossible and unfathomable. Sex and violence, even in this most gruesome of combinations, sells. Such acts, whether fictional, in literature and on the silver screen; or transposed, horrifically, into reality, on the front pages of the paper or the breaking news on TV, seem to exist in a malevolent fantasy world. They may be well within the realm of physical possibility, but the norm and value set up of society place them far from the boundaries of moral possibility.
As a result the prospect of developing and accepting a coherent theory of how a person can be driven to such a cold-blooded way of life is often an excessively daunting undertaking. Even accepting the idea that a human being could commit these crimes in the first place is too overwhelming for many. Faced with the task of comprehending the apparently incomprehensible, it is far easier to ignore the plethora of thorny questions they summon and simply dehumanise the criminals in question. Hence we read tabloid headlines screaming, ‘PURE EVIL’ or ‘MONSTER,’ when reporting such cases. Yet, however inhumane the acts they have perpetrated, ultimately we cannot deny the common humanity of these ‘pure evil monsters’. We eventually must ask and answer the question: how did this instance of humanity go so wrong?
The most convenient explanation for the phenomenon of the serial sexual killer is insanity. Again, the incomprehensibility factor and the fact that they unsettle the comforting notion of the world as a stable and predictable place inclines us to assuming the rule that perpetrators must necessarily be insane. It’s true that many cases of serial sexual murder do appear to lend themselves well to psychiatric analysis. This kind of criminal behaviour is often seen as a symptom of Psychopathic Personality Disorder.
Psychopaths dabble in only the most shallow of emotions. Empathy, guilt, and remorse are all lacking from their repertoire; they are easily bored; they are pathological liars; but they can also be disarmingly charming and very persuasive. The combination makes for a dangerous and, for Hollywood, rather seductive cocktail. But does the disorder go beyond illumimating the personality traits of the serial killer to answering the question of why these people do what they do?
The term ‘psychopath’ is flung about as an easily applied label for those individuals who we fail to understand. The term ‘psychopathic behaviour’ has become synonymous with ‘motiveless behaviour’. But while the motives of the serial sexual murderer may not be apparent to the casual observer – rarely are such crimes committed for externally evident grounds, such as jealousy, revenge or money – there is usually an underlying internal motive.
A common motivating factor is sexual gratification; many serial killers are paraphiliacs, indulging in necrophilia, compulsive masturbation, sadism, voyeurism, piquerism (sexual arousal resulting from stabbing), and coprophilia (use of faeces during sex). These paraphilias are often such a driving force in the mind of the serial sexual killer that murder becomes merely incidental to their criminal acts. The serial killer Peter Kurten indulged in piquerism, but only to the extent necessary to reach orgasm. Should sexual fulfilment be achieved after a non-fatal number of stabs the victim usually survived.
In some cases sexual dysfunction is to blame. The notorious American serial murderer Henry Lee Lucas engaged in necrophiliac acts because he was incapable of achieving erection with a living person. Murder became a necessary prerequisite for sexual gratification.
Psychopathy can then kick into the explanation of serial sexual murder as the mechanism which serves the murderer in justifying his crime, or even in voiding the need to justify his crime. Psychopathy explains the serial nature of the crimes – should the paraphiliac be engulfed by guilt following his first murder, he is unlikely to repeat the act.
We are now tempted into a regression of reasoning: how does one become a psychopath or develop warped sexual fantasies in the first place? Biology may have its part to play but so do developmental factors: a combination of nature and (a very unnurturing) nurture.
This is Jung’s conception of the tortured becoming torturers. To begin to empathise we must allow our imagination to transform criminal into victim, child or woman abuser into child abused. Physical and sexual abuse can act to increase the proneness to violent and sexually deviant behaviour. A disproportionately large number of serial sexual killers experienced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse during childhood. Lucas’ mother beat him, curled his hair into ringlets and dressed him like a girl to go to school, and forced him to watch her have sex with strangers. Obviously, these kind of upbringings are not conducive to the adoption of social norms against violent behaviour and disregard for the feelings and welfare of others.
Additionally sexual abuse often provokes victims to attempt to remove themselves from their miserable reality and retreat into a fantasy life. In an endeavour for emotional wellbeing, victims imagine the abuse is happening to somebody else. The fantasies often entail elements of power and dominance, elements severely deficient in the abused child’s life. The creation of this parallel fantasy world sets the stage for the gruesome fantasies the child may later act out.
In the preface to American Psycho, Ellis quotes from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground: “Both the author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, given the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.” The reference could just as well fit the history of the modern Western world as the superficial, self-centred, hyper-consumerist, greed fuelled eighties which Patrick Bateman inhabits.
All too often socio-cultural theories of serial sexual killers are dismissed for the sake of preserving peace of mind, submerging the idea that the same society in which we are active partakers could have itself created something so terrible. But it seems that explaining the occurrence of serial sexual murder necessitates the employment, at least in part, of these society based models, for there are no records of serial sexual killers prior to 1888. This is a uniquely modern, Western male phenomenon.
Sexual violence was initially a way to exert control over women, to restrict them to an inferior place in society, and to vent frustrations encountered in the social sphere. More recently sexual violence has been eroticised. In the West violence has become a means of sexual gratification. A few examples of sexual murder have been recorded recently in other areas of the world, such as India and Japan – there this has been blamed upon Westernisation, here psychological deviance is held accountable.
Why should serial murder be peculiar to Western society? One school of thought links it to the Enlightenment and the predicament it threw up: man is simultaneously an object of science as well as being master of the universe, man is considered “free” at the same time as being the product of social forces and conditioning. Murder, the ultimate taboo, is therefore the very definition of acting freely.
Part of the story may lie in the culturally constructed idea of masculinity, which is closely tied to physical prowess. Violence is the epitome of this. The feminist political agenda analysis has reframed the problem of violence against women as one of misuse of power by men who have been socialised into believing that they have a right to control the women in their lives. Clearly, serial murder itself is not itself socialised behaviour. However, one might argue that relevant precursors, for example propensity for violence and male sense of entitlement to sexual relations are. So serial murder may not be alien to mainstream culture but, worryingly, may actually be expressive of it.
Alternatively, rather than the existence of immoral norms, amorality may be the issue. Durkheim related crime and deviance to the disintegration of social consensus on values. It’s possible that the phenomenon of serial killing was borne out of the anomie, or lack of norms in modern societies.
In all likelihood explaining what makes serial killers tick will entail weaving the stands of biology, psychology, upbringing and society into a macabre tapestry. So if we are willing to delve deep in attempting to understand their impetus we are liable to discover as many alarming truths about ourselves and the society we live in as we are the serial killers who inhabit it.ARCHIVE: 0th week MT 2005

FIGS, “SAID my father to me once, emphatically, “are not fruit.”
“Are not fruit.”
“Are not vegetables… they are inverted flowers.”
“Inverted flowers?” was my puzzled answer.
“Inverted… inverted because the flower was too beautiful to put on the outside my boy…that’s right, they couldn’t put the flower the right way around else the bees and other pollinating creatures alike would spend all day on just the figs. That’s right, they’d be kissing and staring at them all day long so as there’d be no time for other flowers see. They had to make the fig inside out for other flowers to live.”
When I was younger I often got God and my father confused.
“See,” he repeated, “the fig was sacrificed for the others. It had to be.” He paused and gazed through the wet black boughs of the tree he was sitting in, with me. I had grown up around these trees and their figs and their father. We shared that. “You see, the fig is a selfless flower but wretched and jealous as well. It’s all closed up, see?” He held a fig up at me; it seemed to be pulsing like an excited heart. “See? Beauti-ful little balls of emotion.”
It began to rain, thick warm syrup. I remember my father’s face more vividly in that moment than at any other point of my life. It was weathered, waxed by the sun and polished by the wind into an icon for me. Framed by ecstatic brown hair and lighted by two liquid blue eyes that seemed only to be made of two atoms each. A mouth stretched around thousands of moving conversations, a mouth broken by the disappointment of loneliness. I still get my father and God confused.
Seven years, twenty-three days and an hour after this moment my father died under that same tree. I was twenty-four feet away in the branches of another. He must have been lying there for a while. I worked long hours.
When I did get down and discover him lying there I remember feeling calm, mostly. Like that noise a telephone makes when you leave it off the hook, I was in quiet siren. I checked his pulse (not pulsing) and walked back to the cottage. I sat at the table with a large glass of water and a sandwich and waited for him to come in, like always. He always worked longer than me. He didn’t come in. I walked over to the phone and dialled an ambulance. I didn’t cry, I leant forward onto my uneaten sandwich, closed my eyes and went to sleep – it had been a long day. When the ambulance arrived they weren’t sure which of us had done the dying.
The hands of a clock are burnt matchsticks – perpetual reminders. But there is a place within the charcoal still contoured like a tree – that gold coaxes hope.
I find when I recall the first few days I had lived without my father that my memory has knitted for me a patch-work-quilt of days and years held together by a painful thread. Moments from long ago are placed alongside my immediate pangs. I began the process of assimilating my father’s life into my own. I began wombing him, entombing him and his legacy into my solar plexus. He would have wanted me to mourn on the hoof, I know it, but he knew I was lazy – like my mother. He loved my mother. He took the lump out of her throat and swallowed it for me – but one day it got stuck and he never spoke again. My father was better than adjectives. He was better than my mother’s death.“The sun is a clock. Remember that when you wake up.”
“Yes Dad.”The cottage was once idyllic but now it charms through the imperfect teeth of disrepair. The thatch is home to a multitude of chuckling birds and the walls to legions of termites that threaten its cancerous bones. The only stone floor is masked with sky blue lino that flinches and curls away from the skirting board, a plastic wave receding off dead rocks. The windows are filled with grime and glitter from old Christmas decorations. Surrounding these little walls of a house are hundreds of fig trees. Their black elaborate fingers, gloved in bark, touch. In the midst of these trees is a small green headstone baring my mother’s name Mary Pollock and a date twenty-one years and two hundred and thirteen days old. The inscription, embossed with moss, reads “Ripeness is all.” And below it “King (a word missing) William Shakespeare.” She was graceful, I know, I’ve drawn her photo. But I know I don’t look like my photo. You can’t colour a person in without going outside the lines.Sometimes the sun breaks through the clouds like an emergency exit slide inflating from the side of a gigantic white plane that has ditched in heaven. Sometimes the wind flirts with the leaves and you can hear the figs whispering – like lovers in all the urgency of dying. This is the gospel of a body – and just that.“As much as you’ll want to son – never write off anyone. No one deserves to be written off.” Don’t write off. Before I was born my mother and father would bear up in the hard rain as they harvested their figs together – their livelihood, their black eyes, their orchestra. They would talk about me. In all these constellations of beauty I find solace. Figs, Figures and Figureheads continues next week…ARCHIVE: 0th week MT 2006

Emma Jenkinson
Magdalen College, 3rd Year
ActressEmma last starred in the Edinburgh Fringe’s critically acclaimed How I Learned To Drive, and played Titania in Merton’s Trinity production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.How much acting had you done before you arrived at Oxford?
I didn’t do too much actually; LAMDA exams, some school stuff and Am Dram musicals. I can’t sing so always played the evil people; some say I was typecast but I beg to differ. What were your first experiences of Oxford Drama?
I did Cuppers with some friends. We weren’t very good but it was so much fun. I then auditioned lots and lots, before being cast as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.What are your fondest memories of thesping?
Cast parties are always a lot of fun; very drunken and almost always sordid. As for stories, I find that when retold they always sound a bit weird, in-jokey, and very uncool. There have been a few ‘interesting’ moments though. Once while rehearsing Harold Pinter’s The Lover in a freezing cold barn in South Wales, we did a particularly intense scene to the delightful sound of rutting pigs. What was it like taking a show to the Fringe?
What I liked about Edinburgh was that there are no expectations. It’s a complete unknown in terms of acting – there are no previous reviews, or productions, so you are judged solely on your performance in that play at that particular time. Of course if it goes badly then there are no other shows to turn back to as evidence of your acting ability, so it can also be quite daunting. But, as a break from the Oxford environment, it’s a refreshing, and I think, very constructive change. I loved it. It gave me such a rush. Also Edinburgh is just very very cool, and inexplicably full of extraordinarily good-looking men.Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
Oh, married, three kids, house in the country, chickens and a gin habit. Or more hopefully, standing on a stage somewhere – it’s my favourite place to be.ARCHIVE: 0th week MT 2005