I was walking down Regent Street a few weeks ago, and as you often do in that part of London, I saw a minor celebrity. In real life, Gok Wan, host of the UK makeover show How to Look Good Naked looks as you might expect. He is a tall bloke, with unusual features. He was well dressed, but not in a showy way. If it was not for the small film crew around him, most people would not notice him. Even with the film crew, few of the Regent Street shoppers gave him a second look. But there was one thing I noticed about this fashion guru. Standing around, not doing anything in particular whilst waiting for his crew to do whatever they were going to do, Gok Wan looked content.

It would be hard not to like Gok Wan. Normally I find television about fashion, and especially fashion makeovers of ‘ordinary’ people, to be dreadful. Fashion does not bear rational analysis, so most explanations of what looks good or does not look good are absurd and pointless. All that television can do is just show us the clothes and tell us what styles are more prominent this year. The only way to really know if an item looks good on you, is to put it on and stand in front of a mirror. The golden rule is not to worry about what other people think, because everyone has different taste. Trying to dress to please others is always going to end miserably. Gok doles out his advice on his show, and most of the time just says sensible things, though every so often he makes a dud suggestion. I mean, Gok may think the woman looks good when dressed like a rock chick looks good, but if she is a hippy, it will not be good for her. The way you look has to somehow reflect who you are. The occasional bad idea is okay, because Gok is paid to come up with ideas and not every idea is going to be good. He can be proud of his day’s work if four out of five of his ideas really do suit the person being made over, especially if they keep following his advice in future.

The secret of Gok’s success does not lie in his fashion sense. Most of his advice is so obvious that anybody, if forced to take some time out and think about how they look, would come up with independently. Wear nice clothes. Try to work with the shape of your body, not against it, nor hide it. Accentuate your best bits. Get a decent hair cut. Wear make-up that is right for you. The biggest ‘trick’ in the Gok Wan book of beauty involves the selection of underwear. In other words, wear the modern day equivalents to the corset - which is hardly a new invention. Select undergarments with the right combination of lycra and wiring to squeeze or support where a woman’s figure might benefit from squeezing and where it might benefit from support. But in the end, the title of his show is a complete misnomer. If the women Gok Wan dresses look good naked, it is not because of the way Gok Wan dresses them. Even the haircuts and make-up are a form of dressing-up, so when stripped down to their naked glory, the women look no different after a Gok Wan makeover - except in one place.

What makes Gok Wan’s show enjoyable, when most makeover shows seem designed to manipulate and mould the shapes of the poor women who appear on them, is that he does not really try to change the way these women look. There is no talk of cosmetic surgery, or dieting, or any of that. Sure, he makes them get into underwear that boosts where boosting is needed, and flattens where flat is best, but for the most part he selects items that also would be comfortable. Where the moral of most fashion makeover shows is that if you look good, you will feel happy, Gok Wan has realized it works the other way around. Feel happy, and you will look good. Most of the show is dedicated to boosting the self-esteem of the woman being made over. He does not change the way they look naked, he just encourages them to have a positive self-image. Everything is designed with that in mind. He devises situations where random strangers will speak, without prompting, in flattering terms about the woman’s appearance. He challenges any negative thoughts they have. He gets the women to pose naked for an artful photography. He parades the women, dressed in sexy lingerie, on a catwalk alongside real models, so that friends, family and passersby can all clap and cheer. To top that all off, Gok Wan’s straightforward and irresistible encouragement leaves the women with little choice but to be positive. The title of the show is a misnomer. It should be called, “How to Believe You Look Good Naked”, or better still, “How to Know You Look Good Naked”. Having confidence in your looks is self-fulfilling - you will look better as a result. The women who goes on Gok’s show get a huge confidence boost, and so will tend to make better decisions about how they look in future. Simple, really. The one place where Gok really changes the way a woman looks naked is her face. As they take their clothes off, he gets them to put a smile back on.

The feeling good, looking good philosophy of Gok Wan has its limits. For the most part he realizes people will not look good if they do not feel good, so comfort cannot be ignored. However, Gok does sometime forget himself - on one episode he suggested high heels for a pregnant woman! Not every idea is a winner, but that is forgivable if there are plenty of them and most of them pay off. Gok does play the part of the myth-buster to some extent, by running experiments where groups of women try unmarked beauty products. These often conclude that the cheap supermarket labels are better than the expensive brands. But in the end, Gok does not battle convention. Gok has no sympathy for body hair, even though the human race has had body hair for millions of years. Our ancestors were perfectly able to find each other attractive without the needing razors and depilatory creams. The fascistic idea of stripping the body of all unwanted hair should be deeply troubling to an intelligent mind. We are animals, and hair grows on our skin. Hair is a sign of sexual maturity, so the obsession with its removal suggests some confusion in the associations between youth and beauty. Gok may give advice on how to sooth the skin after the purging of every last follicle, but that hardly compensates for his ruthless imposition of a societal norm that causes pain for the women on the receiving end. Those women may well question whether they really are less beautiful with a little bit of hair sticking out here and there, no matter how many other people pull childish faces of disgust as if their bodies did not have the exact same design feature. Conventions like this are impervious to a rational mind, so I can understand why Gok Wan can only parade women on a catwalk after their bikini-line has been waxed. Nevertheless, it is worth pondering how Gok Wan would react if confronted with some other notable beauty conventions that have come and gone. Would he have discouraged Coco Chanel from getting a tan, and dispelling the dominant fashion that women should be pale? How does he feel about real tans, still craved by many, despite the cancerous risk and the terrible long-term damage it does to the skin? If real tans are not safe, and pale used to beautiful, why do some people think fake tans are beautiful? Tanning is a safe but useful example of how our conventions can be re-examined, but history tells of societies that encouraged systematic deformity in the name of beauty. Some ancient peoples forcibly moulded the shapes of baby’s heads, in order to artificially change them. The binding of women’s feet was accepted in China for a thousand years, and lasted up to the start of the 20th Century. The use of brass rings to elongate a woman’s neck is still practiced by the ‘long neck’ people in Burma and Thailand. Nobody is entitled to say whether a majority is right, or a minority is wrong, to make the aesthetic choices they do. Perhaps one day people will look back at Gok Wan’s disgust at body hair and find his behaviour as perplexing and discomforting as we would when shown images of bound feet and deformed heads that are meant to be ‘beautiful’. But if you cannot change the world, change yourself, and at least the women are smiling at the end of Gok’s changes.

Gok Wan satisfies the 80-20 rule. Most of the time he gets it very right, so we can forgive him if he sometimes gets it wrong. He has realized that no end of fabric or tailoring will make someone look good, unless they feel good. I have no pretension to being a fashionista, but in that same vein, here is my own three-step approach to looking good naked:

Eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full. Being hungry is your body’s way of telling you to eat more, and being full is your body’s way of telling you not to eat any more. Your body knows best, so trust it. Keep your body happy, and it will look better.

Do some physical exercise now and again. We are animals, and our ancestors lived by chasing and gathering our food. Your choice of exercise does not really matter - our ancestors used their bodies for purposeful activities, not body-sculpting sessions down the gym. Our bodies are meant to be used, and look better if they get some use. Your body will thank you by giving you more energy, which will brighten your mood and make you more positive.

Take a deep breath. Relax. Smile. Everybody looks good when they are happy. So be happy and stop worrying about looking good naked.

Only a nation that encourages its citizens to vote for its public prosecutors and prom queens could deliver the ultimate in popularity contests. The USA is nearing the completion of another four-yearly cycle to pick its President. This is of importance to the rest of the world. As head of the greatest military power and largest economy on the planet, the US President is arguably the most powerful person alive. The influence of the US President is often greatest outside of his country, as the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan can attest. On domestic policy, the President must negotiate and reach deals with Congress. In the realm of foreign policy, the US President is relatively unfettered. Judged by the rock star adulation he received on his recent international tour, Democrat nominee Barack Obama would be a shoe-in if the whole world could vote. But only the land of the free and the home of the popularity contest will have a vote when the Presidential election takes place on Tuesday, November 4 of this year. Overseas popularity counts for nothing. Republican nominee John McCain, who was often well behind and nearly ran out of cash at one point during the nominee race, has every reason to believe he will ride his “comeback kid” bandwagon all the way to the White House.

Obama’s popularity is rooted in the message of change. For McCain, distancing himself from an unpopular incumbent, whilst still trying to securing the support of his party and its voters in 2004 is a tricky challenge. National and international events may very likely throw an unanticipated curveball, like an overseas conflict or domestic terror attack, into the run-up to voting. If that happens, the responses of the candidates may be crucial in swinging key votes. However, it is impossible predict what will happen between now and November 4. What we can say is that the polls are currently telling us that the race is very tight, that Obama is more popular, but that McCain will win.

Yes, you read that last sentence right. Remember that the US President is selected based on a collegiate system, designed to pick leaders that have popular support all across the country, and not reliant on a dominant powerbase in a few populous regions. Each state has a number of delegates, in proportion to its population. The winner of the election is the candidate who gets most delegates. As most states allocate their delegates on an all-or-nothing basis, it does not matter if you win the votecount in a state by one vote or a landslide, as you get the same number of delegates either way. The odd exception aside, for each state the winner takes all the delegates, and the loser gets none. There is no advantage being the clear winner in one state if you are also the narrow loser in another state of equal size. So far, the poll results suggest that Obama will get more votes, by a few percentage points. See here for the averages from Real Clear Politics. However, when polls are analyzed state-by-state, the spread favours McCain, who would take more states and more delegates. Obama is on course to win by large margins in some of the biggest states, like California (55 delegates) and New York (31). McCain is ahead, if narrowly, in more states. Compared to the 2004 election between Bush and Kerry, the poll averages suggest that only the states of Iowa and New Mexico have swung from Republican to Democrat. Between them, Iowa and New Mexico represent just 12 delegates out of the total of 538 in the electoral college. In 2004, Bush beat Kerry by 286 delegates to 252, so Obama needs a total swing of 18 delegates to get the 270 he needs to become President. On current projections, he is 6 short, and McCain will win. That means he needs to take a couple more small states, or he needs one of the larger but borderline states like Ohio (20 delegates) to swap sides.

There is no rational way to analyze what makes somebody likable, but it is vital to winning an election. Many Americans liked George W. Bush. They thought he was the kind of guy they would want as a neighbour, and could talk to whilst sharing a beer. They liked Kerry less, who was seen as being remote and elitist. Many pundits have focused on the awful dilemma McCain faces. He is a relative centrist and free-thinking candidate by Republican standards, but has to hold together the core vote that got Bush into power, even though Bush’s popularity is exceptionally low. That means McCain is bogged down by association with Bush, but he cannot afford to distance himself from his former nemesis for fear that mainstream Republicans may just stay at home on election day. Obama’s message of change has been easier to make thus far. The problem with such a message, though, is that it offers the maximum hope so long as the details remain vague. As we get closer to the election date, and details need to be provided, some voters may find that the changes being offered are not the ones they wanted. There are already signs that Obama’s campaign has fallen into typical patterns that bely his emphasis on change.

Obama’s campaign carefully exploited the perceived negativity of his rival Hillary Clinton whilst landing quite a few blows of their own. Being negative is an effective way to win votes, but it may undermine the presentation of Obama as being a candidate who represents something substantially different to what has gone before. Take a look at this recent negative ad about McCain forgetting how many homes he owns.

With America in the midst of a mortgage crisis, McCain’s gaffe was a gift to his opponent. Time and again Obama’s team tries to link McCain with the unpopular and failing economic policies of Bush, whilst highlighting McCain’s personal wealth. However, the zeal with which the Obama team moves to exploit their opponent’s mistakes, only opens the door for McCain’s campaign to hit back, and hard. It simultaneously solves the problem that dogged Clinton, who was unable to successfully go on the attack for fear of being portrayed as a negative old-style politician. The more Obama attacks, the more McCain can counter-attack, bringing Obama from his lofty heights into a genuine fight, but without hurting McCain’s credibility in the process. McCain’s team has already done a good job of pointing out Obama’s suspect house purchase. In the end, Obama’s mystique, like anyone’s, disappears when seen too close. However much he represents change, the young mixed-race intellectual Obama, raised by his mother after his father abandoned them, is today a multi-millionaire lawyer enjoying a lifestyle and privileges that many supporters may aspire to, but few will ever attain. Presented like that, Obama is less a man of change and more a representation of continuity. Power will remain in the hands of a wealthy elite, even if the colour has been adjusted. Making Joe Biden his Vice-Presidential running mate, a man who criticized Obama’s lack of experience, further emphasizes the tough compromises that Obama is now having to make. Biden bolsters Obama through his experience, especially in foreign policy. Biden was a candidate for the Democrat nomination not only this year, but also back in 1988, undermining the idea that an Obama Presidency would lead to change. Biden’s 1988 bid was strong, but he was forced to bow out when he was caught not making enough changes - he copied a speech by Neil Kinnock without giving credit. Picking Biden shows Obama is a realist, and that he is trying to secure his appeal by addressing his weaknesses. It also shows that political change will not be as great as some may have hoped.

Because of the way votes are counted, McCain is in the lead in this popularity contest. He does not need to beat Obama where the Democrats are strongest, though the support of the like-minded centrist Republican Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, will probably force Obama to expend more resources than he would like in that key state. To win, McCain only needs to hold on to the states that voted Republican last time. If he does that, and the polls currently suggest he will, then he will be President. McCain may have been dubbed the “comeback kid”, but oddly it is Obama who needs to come from behind to win this race. The irony for Obama is that he is behind McCain in most of the states he won in order to beat Clinton in the Democratic primaries. Take a look at the table below, which compares the 2004 election result, the Real Clear Politics average polls between Obama and McCain, and the Democratic party nomination race between Obama and Clinton. The yellow marks those states where current polls run counter to the 2004 election result. The blue highlights those states that Obama took in the race for the Democratic party nomination, but where he trails McCain in the polls.

The table shows that Obama mostly beat Clinton in the states that Bush won in 2004. However, so far the polls say he has not swung those states to supporting him over McCain. You could interpret this as proof that the Democrats picked the candidate best placed to beat the Republicans. But if that is so, their candidate needs to do something extra in order to win. Far from being a front-runner, and despite his leads in the national polls, Obama has yet to find a winning formula to win the Presidential election. Finding the extra ingredient he needs for success, and incorporating it into his campaign without creating rifts in his current support, may prove a greater challenge for Obama than McCain’s relatively straightforward challenge of holding on to Bush voters from 2004. The way this popularity contest is judged, the most popular man in the world finds himself currently lagging behind.

A relatively minor news story grabbed my attention this week. Or rather, I noticed it briefly, and then kept remembering it as I found a lot of examples of the hypocrisy that underpins the supposedly civilized society we find in modern Britain.

Perhaps that last comment is not fair. A society is not hypocritical just because its members contain opposing views. The people who make up our society often do hold opposing views. Whether you can call society hypocritical comes down to whether you think society, as a whole, does a good job of reconciling and managing the differences of opinion between its members. A positive way to do so is to recognize that not everybody can be right, and to be clear why a decision may favour one opinion over another. A negative outcome seeks to keep everyone placated, without making a proper decision. It will be interesting to see how British society copes with yet another debate surrounding the greatest of taboo topics: sexuality.

The story that kicked things off was that campaigners and local government leaders had been pushing for a change in the way lapdancing clubs are licensed. See here for the story, as presented by the Guardian, Daily Mail and ITN. Like most people would have, I read the story (in my case, on msn) and did not pay it great mind. In short, when you cut through the waffle, we have some people who do not like the idea of lapdancing clubs at all. They would like to get rid of them completely, but they have no realistic hope of that at present, so their current objective is to make it harder for lapdancing clubs to obtain a license. For councilors, always wary of pleasing the minority of people who actually bother to vote in local elections, taking a stand does them no harm. Their powers would be increased and they can tell local NIMBYs that they are doing everything they can for them. In the end, it is a minor issue, because even with the emotive choice of words selected by campaigners, who talk of “floodgates” and being “powerless to stop the spread” there are only 300 lapdancing clubs in the country. That makes them small beans in the big scheme of things, even when you consider the number has doubled in recent years. Here comes some miscellaneous UK stats to put UK lapdancing into perspective: 1 lapdancing club for every 90,000 adult men; 1 lapdancing club for every 1.7 people who sleep rough in the UK, 1 lapdancing club for every 4 people murdered last year; 1 lapdancing club for every 3,000 burglaries last year. You can probably infer what I think council leaders should be spending their time worrying about.

The reason why the story stuck in my mind was that the people who were pushing for the change were described as campaigners for women’s rights. Which women are the ones who need more rights? Presumably not the women who want to make money from lapdancing. For the remainder of the day, I saw example after example of women exercising their rights. My friend flicked the television to an unedifying “documentary” about gold-diggers (the people who exploit other people to get money, not the ones who rush to the Klondike carrying a pickaxe) that was shown on Virgin 1. For several minutes I was subjected to an “interview” with a woman boasting of how much money she made as a professional escort. Apparently, one evening she made UK£10,000 from a single punter. She also revealed how much time and effort went on regular maintenance of her looks (nails, hair, Winehouse-like cakes of make-up) and on one-off enhancements (lips and boobs) in order to augment her earning power. All of which is her right, I suppose. Afterwards, Davina McCall spent the whole of Big Brother eviction night brushing the hair out of her eyes. That long, lustrous hair so prominently featured in ads for Garnier’s haircare products. Doubtless it was just a coincidence, but if not, that is her right. After that, we saw Kylie Minogue dancing in a tight-fitting outfit and towering boots, as is her right. Bored with television dross, I flicked back to browsing about the lapdance licensing story on the internet. On the Daily Mail’s site I noticed a story from their “Femail” column, highlighted alongside the story about lapdancing laws. It was about former swimmer Sharron Davies wearing revealing outfits that showed off her boobs and legs whilst presenting the Olympics on the BBC. As is her right. Below that, the next highlighted story was about a woman who acted beyond her rights. That was about a Thai woman who murdered her older British husband for his money. Nevertheless, it was an example of a woman who did what she wanted to do.

The thing about women’s rights is that they are a convenient fiction. There are no women’s rights. There are rights. Human rights. In a tiny fraction of circumstances, there may be very particular ways in which human rights need to be interpreted or applied specifically for one gender. An example is the practice of female genital mutilation. The point I am making is that female genital mutilation is not exactly the same, and does not happen in the same way, as male genital mutilation, but the rights of the human being are essentially just the same. It would be intellectually untenable to be against female genital mutilation whilst in favour of male genital mutilation. People have all sorts of rights. The right to shelter. The right to treatment for mental illness. Of course, I pick those examples to make a point. In Britain, far more men sleep rough than women. In Britain, far more men commit suicide than women. But that does not mean homelessness or suicide are “men’s rights” issues. Even if far fewer women are homeless, and far fewer women commit suicide, their suffering as individuals is the same, and rights are the same for all people, not just a gender.

We are not living in the 19th Century any more. Modern-day Pankhursts miss the point. They are wrong to try to borrow her clothes and dress themselves up in the language of women’s rights. Trying to restrict lapdancing clubs is not like trying to give women equality with men. One woman may feel liberated if free to live in a town without a lapdancing club. Another woman may feel her right has been constrained - her right to use her body as a source of income. One woman may find the thought of writhing naked across a strange man to be disgusting. Another may consider it lucrative. In a society, we need to find a compromise between the rights, and conflicting goals and priorities, of these women. Casting the debate in terms of “women’s rights”, as if this was simplistic battle of the sexes where women are underdogs, trying to free themselves from the subjugation of men, is no longer appropriate. The human rights of women must be weighed on both sides of this debate.

One of the groups that supports the change in the law is called Object. After reading their material, and what was said by their Director in the press, I considered pulling it apart. Their arguments were weak and tenuous. The presentation of data to support them was confused and contradictory. One of the key arguments in this particular case was that lapdancing clubs are places where sexual activity takes place, and so should not be licensed like a cafe. That is a reasonable argument. However, the purpose is to exploit some already fuzzy logic in how cafes, and other establishments, are licensed. Why cafes need to be licensed like bars and restaurants - places that sell alcohol - is beyond me. If you say to me, would I treat a cafe, a bar, and a lapdancing club all the same, I would say no. That is what the current legislation does. The campaigners say that lapdancing needs to be treated differently. I would say they should all be treated differently. In my opinion, cafes should enjoy the most liberal licensing arrangements, and places that sell alcohol should have the most stringent licensing arrangements. Lapdancing clubs, if they do not sell alcohol, belong somewhere in the middle. For all the posturing about the dangers of lapdancing clubs, it is not lapdancing that is behind a wave of violence on our streets, anti-social behaviour in the small hours, and no-go zones in our town centres. It is alcohol. Yet, following the absurd logic of this debate, the government is being asked to clamp down on lapdancing because the selling of lapdancing needs to be more restricted than the selling of coffee. Whilst I agree with that, it is absurd to claim to fight for women’s rights by fighting lapdancing, whilst turning a blind eye to the impact of alcohol on our society, and on women in particular. Lapdancing poses less of a danger to women, than the dangers that come with alcohol. I sympathize with any woman who feels insecure when near to a place that sells sexual titillation. But in terms of risk, the same woman should worry more when near places that sell alcohol. Drunkenness increases the chances of the abuse of women far more than trivial sexplay.

Of course, no sane “women’s rights” organization would campaign to further limit the sale of alcohol, just because pissed-up louts might roll out of a bar, ready to grope, hassle and persecute any women outside. That is because those louts may also be groping, hassling and persecuting the women inside. And that is because women still choose to go inside anyway. Despite all the risks heightened by alcohol - as imbibed not just by the abuser, but also by the victim - women still go to those bars and put themselves at risk. That is their right. They balance the enjoyment they hope to get against the risks, and still decide to go. That is what living in a free society is all about. And that is why demolishing the arguments of groups like Object is unnecessary. Every day, the vast majority of women are already undermining their cause far more effectively than I could with a few words. They do so by the choices they make. Limiting some lapdancing clubs may inhibit the earnings of some women who may otherwise be struggling to get by in life. That makes them soft targets for campaigners, who convince and console themselves the dancers must have all been coerced and denying their right to work as lapdancers is actually in their best interests. These campaigners dare not take on the bigger players. They will never take on big money-spinners like the breweries and their distribution chains. They will never take on high-profile figures like Sharron Davies, or Paris Hilton, or Davina McCall, who have their own reasons to flaunt their bodies and beauty, and in doing so, contribute to the sexual objectification of women. They will never take on a single woman who does any of the normal, ordinary, commonplace things that most women do to objectify themselves in a sexual way. Lipstick. Cosmetic surgery. Diet milkshakes. Wonderbras. Working out. Boob tubes. Miniskirts. Women have fought hard for the right to objectify themselves and their bodies. If they choose to do so, that is their right.

The reason for the name “Object” is the group is against the objectification of women. I almost feel sorry for them. They must see themselves as fighting some imagined cabal of sexist capitalist exploiters of women (who doubtless are also predominantly male). In reality, they are fighting everyone. Which makes them unlikely to win. We all, men and women, objectify people all the time, in countless ways. Not every human relationship is going to be deep. Most of them will be utterly superficial. We just forget that they are relationships, because the encounters may be so trivial. At the supermarket, we objectify the check-out staff. They are the means to an end when it comes to paying for our shopping. We do not see them as fully-rounded people. The same happens to our bus driver. Or to our waiter. Or to our dentist. Even if we make conversation, it is superficial. We see them at best in a very limited way. Did the bus driver brake too sharply, did the dentist make my teeth white, was the check-out girl polite. We do not think about their emotional needs, their backgrounds, their hopes for the future. I was objectified at 7.20am this morning, when the postman kept banging on the door even though I was asleep. He needed a signature, so kept banging (for a parcel that turned out to be wrongly addressed). I was the object to give him a signature. At 9am something similar happened. Then the postman did not wait for me to get to the door. Presumably I was the object slowing down his busy delivery round. So he went, leaving a card asking me to collect a letter that really was intended for me this time. And when I went to collect it, and it was not there, my interaction with the man behind the window was perfectly polite, perfectly perfunctory. Nobody was expecting to walk out with a new best friend.

The same applies with sexuality. Human beings are animals as well. We have our peacock attributes, our mating rituals, our visual and olfactory signaling systems. There is no requirement to be best friends with someone in order to fuck them. If people want to screw a stranger, that is up to them, not me. If they do so, they objectified each other sexually. There is no pretense they really knew each other. Knowing someone’s personality inside and out is not a mandatory precursor to sexual attraction. It rather works the other way - you tend to assume positive personality traits to people you fancy. In order to get your pick of the most fanciable people, you make yourself fanciable, by willingly objectifying yourself. Women resort to push-up bras, eye shadow and cleavage. Men’s gambits are more confused and varied these days, some emulating the female approach of obsessing about beauty and clothes, others going for more traditional status symbols like cars and watches. All of us draw a line somewhere. You can spend a lifetime with someone and still not know everything about them. If you intend to reproduce, that means getting into bed with someone based on only a finite amount of information. Objectification is a fancy way of saying you reduce someone to the key attributes you selfishly look for. Does the bus driver miss my stop. Did the dentist cure my toothache. Does that girl at the bar have nice tits. Does the guy pay for the drinks. Campaigning against sexual objectification is as hopeless as Canute commanding the tide not to come in. Objectification is part of human behaviour, sexual and otherwise.

We are all objects all the time, in countless ways. Sartre distinguished things that exist in themselves, or en-soi, and that exist for themselves, or pour-soi. In his existentialist philosophy, human beings are pour-soi. We are conscious of ourselves as the authors of our own lives. We make our choices. By doing so, we decide who we are. In contrast, the en-soi is just a physical reality - material that has no purpose in itself. To borrow from Sartre’s terminology, to complain about objectification is to complain that we treat a person as an en-soi, and not a pour-soi. We recognize their physical reality, but not their nature as a person. Sartre also talks about being-for-others (être-pour-autrui), by which he refers to how a person stops being for themselves, and instead be for other people. We can choose to objectify ourselves and subjugate our existence to their experience of us. We can also choose to objectify others, and make that choice part of our being. Cutting through the tangle of French philosophic words, we can all understand the truth that Sartre was alluding to. We understand the existence of human beings differently to the way we understand objects… for the most part. However, not even Sartre was a philosopher all of the time, as can be attested by his vigorous and varied sex life. Sometimes we see ourselves through our own eyes, and look at the choices we make. Sometimes we look at another person’s body and see it as a physical object, without seeing anything else. Sometimes we look at our own bodies and see them through the minds of on-lookers, imagined or real. Objectification is something that takes place more or less all the time, in many different ways. Some people are more inclined to it, others less. Some people will focus on objectifying others, some objectify themselves. Objectification can be deep, unpleasant and permanent, like the way torturers objectify the tortured, or it can be casual, in the way we coolly treat bodycounts in far-off wars as mere statistics. People who speak a different language die somewhere we have never been, and we objectify them. People who speak the same language die somewhere in front of a video camera, and we objectify them less. In the same way, a photo on a billboard, or the way a friend dresses, or the way a stranger dresses, or a fictional story in a novel, can elicit a sexual response. That response is objective, not an action of love. That does not make the response wrong, or any less natural.

We can fight our sexuality. Men and women do seem to have differences in what they want from a sexual partner, and act differently as a result. However, in our imaginations we often exaggerate the extent of gender differences for all sorts of reasons. Generalizations are not helpful, as they only encourage the constraint of liberties that may be enjoyed by some at no harm to the rest of us. If Max Mosely wants to be spanked by prostitutes, and they are willing to spank him, and nobody else is able to watch, we should keep our grubby little eyes and minds out of his private life. Trying to turn it into some high-minded debate about the rights of public people to have fetishes about fascism is just an absurd excuse to profit from prurience. I am glad the judge saw it that way too. By the same token, those prostitutes objectified Max Mosely as a walking wallet twice over: first by taking the payment he consented to make for their services, and second by selling secret recordings he did not consent to. Women’s right activists wear photochromic sunglasses when they look at human behaviour. When they look at men, the world is pitch black. When looking at women, it is rose-tinted. Women are not just helpless victims, and may objectify sex just like men. Sometimes their goal will be to enjoy sex, and there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes they have another goal, like the Thai woman who bludgeoned her husband to death. He suspected she was trying to kill him, but did not want to live in a world without her. She suffered no such soppy sentimentality. She calculated that her good looks and relative youth would attract the older, richer mate. Then she calculated how best to kill her husband in order to free herself of his company but retain his wealth.

On this earth, we do have a society which has reached the logical conclusion on how to prevent the sexual objectification of women, whether they like it or not. That conclusion is not friendly to the rights of women. Saudi Arabia’s puritanical strain of Wahabi Islam precludes any opportunity to objectify women as sex objects. Not only do you not see women in lapdancing clubs in Saudi Arabia, you do not see women in Saudi Arabia. You see black shrouded figures which you understand are women underneath. To reduce temptation further, the opportunities to talk or make eye contact with women are extremely limited, not least by very strong conventions. Separate visiting hours for men and women for many facilities, and the vigilant religious police act as further safeguards. Presumably nobody in Object wants this solution for women’s rights, yet their manifesto is negatively against sexual objectification, with no balancing messages about women’s rights to use their bodies as they please. That makes their manifesto too simplistic to reflect the full spectrum of women’s rights. Their scathing criticism of mass media does not extend to complaining about the lazy way journalists reproduced the rantings of the leader of this group without any proper analysis. According to its website, Object has hundreds of members and thousands receive its newsletter. In other words, they probably have no more than 3 members per every lapdancing club in Britain. For Object to act as if it speaks on behalf of all women is more than pompous. A genuine and unbiased survey of women would find many of them to be gladly, willingly objectifying themselves most days, if not every day. Making the connection between Object and the Saudi brand of Islam may seem extreme, but Object are no less extreme in their views than the Wahabi Muslims. Both are prepared to impose their opinions about sexuality by denying people choices about how they behave. The loss of our freedom does not occur all at once, but one step at a time. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and well-intentioned people may blunder their way along it without realizing where they are going. Extreme minority viewpoints, like that of Object, should not be reproduced in the mainstream press as if they represented a mainstream point of view. Extremists are not people in other countries with different religions. Extremists are people in this country and elsewhere who are strongly motivated to impose their view of right and wrong on everyone else, with no regard to the consequences or alternative points of view.

We are all here because of sex. Sex is not just a part of life, it is the start of life. Different people have different attitudes to sexuality. What sexual encounters we permit, and what we prohibit, is a test of our ability to reach civilized compromises in society. It is not hard to understand why lapdancing clubs may face a powerful coalition of forces that oppose to them. Many citizens in our country still have attitudes to sexuality that would have been the norm in the 19th Century, where women should be chaste and chased, and not use their bodies for personal gratification and gain. Many people are NIMBYs, as likely to complain at having a refuge for beaten women located down the road as they would if a lapdancing club were built there. A voter motivated by a single issue enjoys the same number of votes as a voter who tries to balance many considerations in reaching the right decision. Governments need to satisfy the people who vote, not the ones who do not, if they want to stay in power. The mass media makes most money if it sells sex and gives a platform for would-be censors at the same time, so long as they are not the ones censored at the end of the day. Lapdancing clubs are small businesses, on the verges of polite society and automatically assumed to be semi-criminal or disreputable by many people who would never venture inside and have no genuine knowledge of them. It is very easy to be lazily opposed to lapdancing clubs, and doubtless every day there are hundreds of ways that the girls working in them are demeaned and taken advantage of. In the end, those women have a choice to work there or not. That is a right. That right should not be affected by any personal emotions we have about sexuality. A coalition of prudes and misguided activists may well motivate a change in the law, a reduction in lapdancing clubs, and they may even go on to further successes in their mission to harass, obstruct and ultimately close these businesses. Whether they do not, they should not be allowed to take ownership of the bankrupt concept that they are fighting for women’s rights, as if rights should be determined according to gender. Our rights include the right to objectify ourselves. That right is genuine and true for women as for men. The women who exercise that right deserve their rights to be respected, and not denigrated because of any confused or outdated sense of distaste about how they make a living. Women have the right to say yes, as well as no, whatever their fellow women may think or feel about that. Those are the rights of women and all of us. “Women’s rights” is a disguise, used to justify why some people, men and women, would exert their will over other people, men and women. That disguise should be torn from their backs, revealing the naked reality of what lies underneath.

We live in a pretty strange society. Walk up to a stranger at random and start talking about habeas corpus and they will probably think you are talking in a foreign language (which I suppose you are, in a way). Chances are they will not be thinking about its vital role in preserving their liberty or its historical roots. But pick a stranger and start talking about zombies, and they will know exactly what you are going on about, even though there is no such thing. So today, instead of pointing out what we got right with habeas corpus (a good thing to do, but boring) I am going to point out what we got wrong with zombies (a silly thing to do, but fun).

To begin with, let us clarify some ground-rules for what zombies are. Unfortunately for any Voodoo disciples out there, this post revolves around a heretical view of zombies. I am not going to blog about superstitious nonsense involving Haitian Voodoo sorcerers casting spells over people who have died already, in order to reanimate them and order them about because they have no will of their own. Nope, such zombies are obviously daft because nobody believes in magic any more. Instead, this blog is about Hollywood zombies, by which I mean the way zombies are depicted in Hollywood films, and not those Hollywood stars - Joan Rivers, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Burt Reynolds, Cher et al - who have plasticated their faces to the point where they look less life-like than a Madame Tussauds waxwork. Pity Michael Jackson, who made millions by dancing with zombie extras, and then spent millions to become one of the zombie extras. No, this post is about the zombie characters in films. In Hollywood films, the rules for zombie behaviour are fairly consistent, but the wrong conclusions are extrapolated from them. The zombie rules are:

• Zombies spread the contagion through biting and scratching, it being something to do with an HIV-like transmission of the zombie factor-Z into the victim’s bloodstream.
• Zombies are pretty dopey and tend to be squishy too.
• What Zombies lack in speed, they make up for in persistence.

So imagine what life would actually be like if there was an outbreak of the zombie disease. Some ordinary Joe Schmoes have been turned into zombies. What would happen next?

Well, for a start, I can tell you one thing that would not happen. The human race would not be saved by a group of attractive teenagers and twenty-somethings riding around on the back of a pick-up truck whilst firing handguns and impaling zombies with various combinations of sporting goods and garden tools. Those clowns would just haul their pretty little backsides as far away from any zombie as they could before the tank of their pick-up truck ran dry. Then they would pull over an old lady, threaten her with the handguns and drive off in her car. No, if anybody is going to be fighting zombies it will be homeowners. They are already distressed at mortgage payments and would be unwilling to let zombies move into their house rent-free. The homeowners would put up a good fight, especially once they had solved the problem of how to distinguish the zombies from all those other people who wander around aimlessly all day and night. Contrary to what you see in the movies, zombies are unlikely to have torn or ragged clothes, because health and safety officials have already removed every sticky-out nail and put fences around every thorny bush. Zombies are likely to be as erudite as most of your non-zombie neighbours. Zombies have bad posture, but then so do many people, so stand up straight if you do not want to be confused for a zombie. One way of telling a zombie from a normal person is that a zombie will be unusually pleased to see you. Another distinguishing feature for adult female zombies is that they would probably not trolley around a pushchair, though the vacant stare would be identical to that of some young mothers. The homeowners should also be on the look out for screaming, wild, feral children that run around and cause mayhem, as zombie kids would be better behaved than that.

Few of the favoured Hollywood weapons for fighting zombies can actually be found in the ordinary household. I mean, how many chainsaws do you own? Instead, I expect the most common homeowner weapons would be electric hedge trimmers, carving knifes, and improvised incendiary devices made using old bottles of creme de menthe and the ouzo brought back from the family holiday in Greece. The whisky and the vodka would only be sacrificed as a last resort. Traditional English sports fans could build a good innings of zombie kills using a cricket bat (much more lethal than the baseball variety) and golfers may get further wielding a driver instead of a nine iron. However, despite the resistance the zombies would face, I expect the zombies would prevail and take over most towns, thanks to their Roy Castle-esque dedication to their cause. Most places would fall long before the Independent Police Complaints Commission had reached a decision on why it took so long to respond to the many 999 enquiries asking “send help immediately because we are under attack by zombies…. arrgghhh…” which had wrongly been assumed to be a rash of prank calls. However, I feel sorry for any zombies intent on attacking Newcastle, Glasgow or Liverpool, as the resistance would be fearsome.

Zombies never seem to drive cars, and even the most inept public transport official would likely suspend bus and train services in the midst of a zombie attack. This means that once the zombies had taken over a town, they are unlikely to have anywhere else to go. Dedicated though zombies may be, they would not be organized enough to send out scouting parties to walk in random directions with the hope of finding other municipalities. This point is glossed over in Hollywood films, where studio greed seems to guarantee that if a town is lost to zombies by the end of one film, the whole world is in peril at the start of the sequel. Instead, the zombies would just have to settle down to life in their new habitat, devoid of fresh meat apart from the occasional poorly-informed individual who drove into town to visit relatives. Which leads us to the next mystery of Hollywood zombies, which is why they never eat each other. Presumably zombies taste similar to ordinary people, and have the same nutritional value as the rest of us. It seems unlikely that zombie flesh would be poisonous to other zombies. So once all the ordinary people have had a chunk bitten out of them, it would be inevitable that the hungry zombies would resort to eating each other. In the end, after the zombies had gone through a cannibalistic frenzy, there would be only one very fat zombie left. After a while he would starve to death, leaving the town ready to be repopulated. However, let us indulge the Hollywood fantasy a little longer and assume that zombies find cannibalism as repugnant as we do. Short of humans to feast on, we can only assume that the zombies would do what most of us would do in a post-apocalyptic scenario, and eat anything else on offer. Zombies may struggle to open tin cans, but I expect even the dumbest zombie can open a fridge door. In supermarkets, zombies may survive for many months by consuming long-life milk and Mr. Kipling individual fruit pies. In many ways, life in zombie town would be pretty similar to life in the average university halls of residence. Devoid of the facilities or knowledge to prepare food, lacking the motivation to stick to a regular schedule of activities, getting used to a new and unfamiliar way of life, and controlled by the most basic of emotional needs, the zombie’s behaviour would be remarkably similar to that of most first-year undergraduates.

Even first-year undergraduates have to move on eventually, and it is to be hoped that the authorities will try to take back zombie town after a while. In doing so, they should be mindful of the value of property, and minimize the need for heavy ordnance. Indeed, there is no reason to clear out the zombies from the town in order to resettle people. It would be more cost-effective to provide settlers with all-over body armour. The body armour should be a burqa made of chain mail. Wearing the chain mail burqa would remove most of the stress when encountering a zombie, as there would be no possibility of the zombie biting or scratching their way through the garment. The anxiety of encounters with the slow-moving and weak zombies would be reduced to the same level experienced when riding on a crowded tube train, or trying to get served in a busy bar on a Saturday night. After a while, the zombies would tire of chipping their teeth on the chain mail, and would learn to peacefully cohabit with the resettlers. However, the zombies would still be starving to death, and hence will plague any grocers or butchers that reopen their stores. Rather than fighting the zombies, the townsfolk may prefer to keep the zombies as pets, feeding them scraps and getting mild amusement from taking them out on walks and throwing sausages for them to chase after. Former loved ones, now turned into zombies, would have special sentimental value and serve as ideal playmates for the family’s children. The house-trained zombie would be a willing participant in games of dressing up and musical statues. The cleverer zombies may even be able to act out popular television shows whilst playing charades. Zombies, like dogs and cats, would accept their role in society in exchange for regular food. As with dogs, there would still be the occasional unprovoked attack, and some aggressive zombies may still need to be put down. However, sometimes a zombie may actually be encouraged to bite or scratch in order to spread the factor-Z infection. For example, zombie infection may be offered to elderly relatives who are in pain and nearing the end of their days. With zombie revitalization, a grandparent may go on being a loved member of the family for many more decades. This would also alleviate the costs of healthcare. Zombies may also provide a low-cost source of manpower for many service industries. With appropriate supervision, fast food restaurants, car valet services and coffee shops could be almost entirely staffed by zombies, leaving more leisure time for the rest of the town’s inhabitants.

Despite all the negative Hollywood propaganda, it seems to me that zombies would bring tangible benefits to our economy and way of life. In many areas where our society currently faces difficult choices - childcare, low-paid jobs, health services for an aging population - zombification would be a boon. Zombies and humans could work together for a better world. Our more courageous political leaders would band together with zombies to usher in a new era of human-zombie prosperity and joy. In time, zombies would fight for and gain their zombie rights and would overcome the mindless prejudice spouted by the mass media. The struggle for zombie civil rights would help us to refresh our understanding of human rights, by adding new meaning to old phrases like habeas corpus. Just imagine the placards: “help the undead, improve quality of life”, “love me, love my zombie”, and “zombies: live and let die”. You see, the problem with the Hollywood portrayal of zombies is not that they would pose a risk to our survival. The problem is that zombies would be so like the rest of us.

Did the title grab your attention? Cannot believe it is true? It IS true. The dots are there, people just refuse to join them up because of fashion. I need to do more work on researching the numbers of how much damage is being done, and how many are to blame, but let me sketch out the idea here.

Let us start with some simple basics. First, old Einstein pointed out that matter is energy. That means even things made of matter are, essentially, just another manifestation of energy. Everything in our physical universe is energy, in one form or other. Remember this, it is the cornerstone of the argument.

Second, fashions come and go. When in the midst of a fashion, what seems perfectly sensible will, once the fashion is dead, seem very daft. That is why we no longer see people wearing powdered wigs or daubing white lead on their faces. Fashion does not apply to clothes only, it also applies to ideas. White lead was popular because a pale skin indicated someone who did not work in the open air, and was hence more refined. Coco Chanel went on a cruise from Paris to Cannes, and got a suntan. That instigated the idea that a suntan represented wealth and luxury. Instead of wanting to turn white, women started wanting to turn brown. More recently, thanks to medical research, the circle has started turning the other way, as there is nothing sexy about skin cancer. Two of the predominant fashions of this era are healthiness of the individual and concern for the planet’s environment. I say these are fashions not because they are wrong or devoid of meaning, but because human perceptions of them have changed and will likely change again. As such, our perception of how to achieve both goals may be at odds with each other, especially in areas where fashionable thought obscures the real issues.

Getting back to the real issues, and real issue number one is where we get the energy to live our lives without killing the planet. Remember, everything is energy. Some energy sources never get depleted, like the Sun (of course, even the Sun will eventually run out, but we have time to worry about that later), or get used less quickly or as quickly as they are replenished, like hydropower or burning rubbish. Some energy sources get used up far more quickly than they get replenished, like coal and oil. I say “sources” because, ultimately, all of these sources stem from the same source - the Sun. I distinguish the sources based on our day-to-day experience of them (oil is black stuff in the ground, the Sun is a big light ball up in the sky etc).

To be healthy, we humans also need a source of energy. Otherwise we die. We predominantly obtain energy from what we eat and drink. Our food and drink may also provide other raw materials for our well-being, but most of it is consumed for the purpose of providing an energy source. This is why crops may not be a wise alternative to oil. Biofuel may be used to run our cars, but still needs to compete for resources (land, and hence ultimately exposure to the Sun) that may be better used producing food.

The amount of food we need is related to the amount of energy we expend. That is a FACT. It is, to borrow from Al Gore, an inconvenient fact that many people try to gloss over. It is inconvenient to lots of people pushing diet pills, exercise programs, and low-cal substitute foodstuffs. Eating gives most of us pleasure, but in wealthier countries there is the risk of consuming more food than is needed to meet our energy needs. That makes us fat. Similarly, if we ate less than our energy needs, we would get thinner. We may also get unhealthy in various ways, but we would, eventually and inevitably, get thinner. Forget all that advice about eating something for breakfast or selecting the right kinds of food in order to lose weight. In the end, lots of people all over the world still die because they do not have enough food. Do not kid yourself that it all comes down to how you eat, and not how much you eat. The less you eat, the thinner you will get, because you are not consuming enough energy to meet your energy needs. I am not advocating eating less, because your nutritional needs, and hence your health, are much than just a simple what goes in versus what goes out equation, but I am pointing out the equation is fundamental and relevant.

One aspect of healthiness is exercise. If we are active, our bodies work better and, as we age, degenerate at a slower pace. This means, to be healthy, we need to expend energy on exercise. I say “exercise” in the broadest sense of physical action. There is also a narrow sense, of exercise for exercise’s sake. My concern is that exercise, for exercise’s sake, may be good for your health, but otherwise is a waste of energy. It consumes the energy delivered in food, but has no productive outcome other than improving the health of the individual. This may be contrasted with purposeful exercise. In other words, it is the difference between riding an exercise bike in the gym and riding a bicycle to work. In the former, the only goal is to exercise. In the latter, a necessary transportation goal is also realized.

Our diet is another aspect of our healthiness. We need energy, which may be measured in calories, we need water, and we need nutrients. Certain foods, like lettuce, are low in calories, high in water content, and rich in nutrients. This makes lettuce quite a fashionable food, in the sense of being a good choice for healthy living. But it is a terrible food for the environment. Why? Because the total energy used to produce and distribute a lettuce, like any foodstuff, is not the same as its calorific content. Lettuce contains energy, which we can access by eating it, but some energy used in the production of the lettuce, and most obviously in getting the lettuce to the person who eats the lettuce, does not add to the calorific content of the lettuce itself. Think of the energy spent planting the lettuce, or tilling the land, or involved in making or spreading fertilizer or pesticides, or collecting the lettuce, or building storage capacity for lettuces, or transporting the lettuce, or chilling the lettuce whilst being stored or transported, or packaging the lettuce, or even in the energy you consume to eat the lettuce. All of this energy is used in order for you to eat the lettuce, but none of it goes into, or comes out of, the lettuce itself.

Can you see where I am going yet? That lettuce, which may be so fashionable, may arrive on the plate of a wealthy person only because of a lot of energy-expensive activities beforehand. Lettuce is particularly energy-expensive, because it is big, bulky and is mostly water. If you split the lettuce into nutrients and water, and only transported the nutrients, you would use a fraction of the energy needed to transport the whole lettuce. We already have more efficient ways to transport water than in the form of lettuces, so human needs could be satisfied at far less cost to the planet if people drank water from the tap and ate the nutrients than if they ate a lettuce. It would be less fashionable. It would not “feel” as healthy. But it would be a lot better for the environment, by reducing energy consumption, particularly that spent on transporting the lettuce. When you factor in that your lettuce, because of largely inefficient distribution chains designed to give you nice-looking lettuces when and where you want it, has quite probably had to travel from a foreign country to get to you, you end up with lettuces that consumed over a hundred times more energy to get to you, than you get when you consume them.

Lettuces are not the only culprits in the criminal roll-call of energy-wasting foods. They say that eating celery consumes more energy than is contained with the celery. That may be great if you want to lose weight, but represents a wasteful process from the perspective of conserving energy.

Energy wastage in food production and distribution is one problem we need to tackle if we are to help the planet, even if it means not having food that looks and feels so healthy. Energy wastage due to consuming food for pleasure is another side of the equation, even if the pleasure is related to “healthy” foods. It is easy to be critical of fat people who eat poorly. Being fat may lead people to consume more of other energy sources - they weigh more so consume more fuel to transport, they need bigger clothes, and they may eventually consume energy in terms of drugs and medical treatments. But some of the “bad” foods, like sugar, are bad because they are highly concentrated forms of energy. Somebody (probably me… hopefully somebody else) needs to do an energy audit comparing how much energy is expended producing and transporting “bad” foods versus “good” foods. It may be that the bad foods are better for the planet, if they consume a lot less energy relative to the calorific content provided to the person eating them.

Even if you cycle to work, as opposed to cycling to lose weight, you may be harming the environment more than helping it. It takes energy to fuel you. You expend that fuel when riding your bike. If you did not ride the bike, you could have ate less. If the energy you use riding the bike comes from lettuces, and those lettuces come from another country, then an awful lot of energy was expended prior to you getting the little bit you use to turn the pedals. Most of that energy will have come from non-renewable sources. Factor all those numbers into any equation for how good the bike ride is for the environment. Then compare those numbers to the numbers involved in drilling for oil, transporting the oil to your car, and then used in powering the car. Cars are heavier than bikes, but oil is a very concentrated source of energy. It may be that the total energy cost, in terms of the non-renewable energy expended, is lower if you drive to work. I am not saying it is, I am just saying I have not seen anyone do the maths, and it is a long way from obvious as to which equations would represent the most efficient use of our non-renewable sources. It does not matter that the fuel in the car (petrol, gas, diesel, LPG, whatever) is 100% non-renewable and that the fuel in you (lettuce, strawberries, white sugar, celery, hamburger, Pepsi, whatever) is 100% renewable. What matters is the total non-renewable energy cost in getting the necessary amount of fuel to you, including the energy expended on production and distribution. In short, powering your bicycle with lettuces may have a higher total carbon cost than driving your car.

Of course, the carbon cost of the lettuce, and of your diet in general, rather depends on where your food comes from. If it comes from your back garden, then the costs will be lowest (though we still need to factor in the energy cost of tools you may use, fencing to keep out animals etc). If it comes from a local farm, it will be low. If it comes from the other side of the world, it will be high, although we should avoid over-simplification. It has also been reported that the production of New Zealand lamb is so much more energy efficient than the production of lamb in the UK, that New Zealand lamb represents a lower total energy cost to UK consumers than UK lamb does.

If we want to eat healthy and save the planet, it would be a good idea to print the total non-renewable energy costs involved in production and distribution on those expensive and obsessive labels so loved by nanny governments. Until that time, the safest bet is to eat in moderation, grow your own food, and pay attention to where food comes from. Digging up the garden is a more productive use of energy than pretend rowing at the gym, so perhaps you should swap one form of exercise for the other. There must be a fair few people who feel very self-congratulatory when they ride their bicycle into work, and then eat a big salad for lunch. For all we know they are killing the planet far more quickly than a 4WD driver who ate a small burger from Burger King. As I said before, I need to do a lot more research before reaching conclusions, and there are many variables, but if I sowed a seed of doubt, that is enough for now.