One thing is clear: Los Angeles is much more interesting than New York, visually.  This is because it conceals more.  In New York the streets are the city, each facade only hiding an array of more-or-less identical, apartmental shoeboxes of space; the triangular Flatiron building on Twenty-Third Street counts as a major departure from the typical.  In L.A., there is a much greater variety of places: not only rectangular blocks, but plazas, gardens, diagonal intersections, parking lots, beachfront estates, strip malls, green lawns, absurdist signage, hills, winding drives, and houses of every conceivable style and shape.  As well, so many private domains can only be glimpsed from the street: not only the movie studios, with their shopping-mall opulence behind abode walls, but even the average U-shaped apartment complexes, which always  include an interior, vine-shaded courtyard only accessible to residents. 

Isn’t it fatuous, you’re asking, to compare the two cities as though generalizations about each can be made from a few limited observations?  Of course.  Let’s get started.  In Los Angeles, the infinity of kinds of spaces constantly makes for sudden, unexpected vistas.  David Lynch has expressed this aspect of the city much more eloquently than I can, with the dark, enigmatic corner in Bill Pullman’s house in Lost Highway that seems to open into a void, or the frightening space around the back of the diner in Mulholland Drive.  The irregularity of L.A. causes this exhilarating anxiety: you literally don’t know what’s around the corner, or what’s inside that gate.  In New York, there’s no imaginative mystery at all to the physical world: everyone lives in an apartment, only cohabiting couples have a spare room, and ten million guidebooks chronicle every square mile of ground-level space.  Hence, in New York, “secret” bars and restaurants (from Lansky Lounge to Milk and Honey to Freeman’s) proliferate, while in L.A. figuring out what is where is difficult enough without intentional concealment. 

Much of the unknowability of Los Angeles starts with its being so spread out.  As a friend philosophically observed, the entire difference between the two cities stems from one being horizontal and the other vertical.  This kind of irrefutable contrast is what makes comparing the U.S.’s two largest cities irresistible.  Horizontal and vertical, slow and fast, early and late, wide and deep–we might as well go whole hog and make a structuralist comparison a la Saussure and Jakobson: Los Angeles is a metonym, where meanings are arranged next to each other, New York is a metaphor, where meanings are stacked and substituted for each other.  Los Angeles is synchronic, about the arrangement of objects in space in the present, New York is diachronic, about the way the same small space changes over time.  Etc.

Maybe a simpler (and simple is better, and very L.A.) way to express this is to compare the cities’  typography.  In L.A., uninhibited by the past, the vogue is for a bold, beautiful, sans serif typeface.  Check out this restaurant‘s menus (which is excellent, by the way) or the aforementioned director’s coffee-selling website for examples.  These typefaces bespeak a commitment to modernism, a desire to invent anew, a lack of anxiety about leaving behind what’s outmoded and traditional.  What could be more opposite than the Jurassic, faux-medieval typeface of the New York Times?  New York scenesters often cultivate an anachronistic aesthetic, compleat (sic) with beard and suspenders – their blogs always use serif fonts.  In L.A., with its lack of comparable history, new vocabularies displace the old, new forms of yoga and therapy console its citizens, new big-box retailers brashly replace yesterday’s disposable strip malls, the casual is preferred to the formal.  New is good, new works.

In keeping with this attitude, a widespread addiction to youth seems is evident everywhere in the culture.  Living with your parents is no mark of shame; it’s a sensible, workable arrangement until you hit it big.  (Can you imagine telling someone you lived with your parents in New York?)  Adulthood is to be resisted, the self-absorbed dream of youth (or at least its cosmetic facsimile) pursued.  When you’re there, it’s somehow hard to remember that there are other people, even other social classes.  As my sister puts it, you’re stoned by the weather.  And yet, at the same time, there is a much greater diversity of people to be seen on the streets of Los Angeles.  Perhaps because the necessities of life (housing, food) are more cheaply obtained, the range of wealth and ethnicity and age of people you see in L.A. puts New York to shame.  Its visual economy may value the cultivation of the body over that of the mind, but in its way it is a much less pretentious, more frank, and yes, more gritty city than the fauxhemian paradise that modern New York has become.  It’s not that it disavows its traditional culture, however; it’s that it has no settled culture, at least of any longevity.

Beautiful, casual, young, stoned by the sun: am I just reciting a litany of cliches about Los Angeles?  What next, an assertion of how bad the traffic is?  Well, sometimes a city performs as advertised.  The impossibly tall, slender palm trees of Santa Monica; the bookstores devoted to auras and chakras; the tennis-playing lotharios drinking mineral water at bars with skateboarders and stylists; bronzed limbs and smoggy sunsets; maitre’d’s who greet you with “What’s up?”; the presence of Richard Gere; and, yup, infuriating traffic jams that break out at random; these all really exist, to the wonder of a New York-based correspondent.  At the Getty Center, above their surreal and gorgeous landscape garden, there is a certain outdoor walkway overlooking the city.  As you approach its end, there is a low stone wall beyond which you can see nothing but a nebulous, blue haze.  It goes on forever, it’s impossibly beautiful, and it gives you vertigo.

The rest of Dispatches.

I’ve not been reading much about art lately, as I often find reading/analyzing and doing fairly incompatible acts when attempted simultaneously, but I have just read an old essay that turned out to be unexpectedly timely. Published in German in 1766, and first translated into English in 1853, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerie und Poesie (Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) is a delightful rumination on the limits of two sister arts. He ultimately ends up praising these limits, which is why I find the work so timely, now that we’re in an age that seems to let any medium try to become any other. A few months ago I’d first tried to get through a remarkably inelegant, almost incomprehensible English translation of it that appeared in 1898, and gave up—it was atrociously faithful to the German, to the point of becoming an absurdist text in English, curious but insufferable. The McCormick translation published in 1962, on the other hand, is a gem. In the spirit of Herr Lessing I’ll digress for a brief moment only to note that, no, Gotthold isn’t any direct relation of our contemporary writer Doris; for several years—after reading her Golden Notebook and long before reading anything of his—I’d thought (or wanted to think) that was true. In terms of lucidity and sharp critical thought I’d claim that they are related, but that’s the extent of it. Those who feel deceived by my title are welcome to quit here.

But back to the essay: his exploration of the respective limits of painting and poetry is, to a certain degree, a response to the Horatian simile ut pictura poesis (as painting, so poetry) and a potential misinterpretation of it. While Lessing’s work as a translator is clear in his analysis of language, his later point that a work’s poetry may well lie in concision is exposed by this first reaction to the (likely unintended) assertion that poetry should be as painting is.
    Opening with a comparison of how poetry and painting affect amateur, philosopher, and critic, he seeks to establish a balance between the two types of art. The amateur equates the two—both proffer absent things as present and appearance as reality, and both create a pleasant illusion. The philosopher looks instead at the nature of the produced pleasure, and names the source as beauty, with its subsequent rules applicable not only to artistic form, but also to thought and action. Finally, the critic takes these general rules and examines their application in various art forms with differing and often complimentary roles.
    Mentioning in passing Winckelmann’s “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” it becomes clear that Lessing will continue his predecessor’s preference for classical antiquity. Noting that a still, deep soul can be expressed even in its moments of stirred passion, he claims that, contrary to modern German (or European) traits, the ancient Greeks held up the paradigm of artist and philosopher as one, and condoned the depiction of beautiful bodies to the exclusion of any other sort. The end purpose is the highest goal: of knowledge, it’s truth; of art, it’s pleasure. The reciprocal nature of what we might term “artistic culture” is outlined here: good (beautiful) men produce good (beautiful) work, and vice versa. Beauty is the supreme law of both visual and poetic arts. The expression of passions, and degrees thereof, is circumscribed by certain limitations; the depiction of unpleasant or upsetting passions should be limited, or at least portrayed with some beauty. In the Laocoön, the pain was too great to be shown with beauty, so it was tempered, hence the discomfort inspired by the pain is transformed, through beauty, into pity. Beauty is transformative.

Lessing’s observation that his times have expanded (or even abolished) the classical limits placed on art, and beauty is but a small part of art’s newer priority of depicting nature in all its sorts, carries echoes of Caravaggio et al. and the scandalous idea of working directly from nature, which was so highly criticized at the time. Art’s aim at truth and expression places beauty below these primary goals, and they in turn transform even the ugliest bits of nature into what Lessing Romantically terms “artistic beauty.” Despite this, artists must nevertheless restrain their depictions, and never show an action at climax. Here he addresses the key difference between painting and poetry, or visual versus verbal arts. Painting carries with it material limitations and the ability to show only a single moment of time from a single vantage point (cubism, anyone? Might Braque have been egged on by this essay?). Additionally, the most “fruitful” or effective point of view is the one that is well thought out for long-term contemplation and leaves the imagination free. Needing to choose one moment of an ongoing action, that action’s culmination is generally the least suitable, weakest moment from which to imply the whole in painting or sculpture, as it limits the imagination by showing the most extreme point, forcing the mind and eye to focus on the lesser aspects. Permanence comes into play here—the chosen single moment depicted, although it should hint at the rest of the action, mustn’t have anything fleeting about it. Returning to impassioned art, Lessing cites the late Byzantine painter Timomachus, whose work is known through the writings of Pliny the Elder, as an artist paramount for his ability to combine two major things in his work: the precise moment that most fires the viewer’s imagination, as opposed to exposing all to the viewer’s eye, and a visual approach to the passing moment that keeps its pleasantness even when captured forever, perpetuated as a frozen object in art. Lessing discusses Timomachus’s superiority over another, unknown painter; the former depicted the murderous Medea before she commits infanticide, whereas the latter shows her in the act; what might he have had to say about Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes?

Lessing goes on to consider whether or not both painters and poets enjoyed real freedom in their work, or if it was constrained by external dictates like religion (that word freedom does warrant a digression about autonomy and heteronomy, which I don’t dare go into here). Whereas pleasure is the ultimate goal of the work of art, religious demands and superstitions often confined the artist. Lessing opts for unfettered art as the true art above those done for religious aims, which focus more on meaning than on the pure depiction of beauty. And conceptual art? Though perhaps a loss for us, yet luckily for him, he wasn’t around to have witnessed the past sixty-odd years. His mention of artists who “create for art’s sake” is dubiously credited in a note from the translator as “possibly the first use of the expression ‘art for art’s sake.’” I’m not so sure about that, but it would be radical.
    Citing a statement by the British writer Joseph Spence marveling at poets’ brevity in describing the muses—goddesses to which, after all, poets owe their very art—Lessing in turn critiques Spence’s seeming obtuseness in not recognizing that the name and function of a character, expressed in poetry with words, serve the same purpose as the visual attributes, in lieu of words, with which a painter is forced to depict a character. Here Lessing is simply pointing out that it would be redundant, not to mention a betrayal of each art’s respective strengths, for poetry to describe a character as she would be visually depicted in painting. While I don’t quite follow his differentiation between the “allegorical beings” of painting and the “personified abstractions” of poetry, as it seems to me that these are the same things merely expressed in different media, his point is quite clear: poets can concisely use words, painters must rely on visual clues. Neither should worry about mimicking the other art, and both should focus on the strengths of their own means of communication. He returns to this later when discussing his surprise at seeing a painter use the poet’s device of cloaking something in a cloud when it is meant to be invisible to the other characters in a scene. Just as it would be silly for poets to adopt verbal descriptions of things as seen in painting, it’s equally absurd that a painter would adopt so literally the poet’s device of rendering things invisible with a shroud of fog or darkness, something quite effective when described in words, yet odd when converted into paint.
    These limitations—painting’s need to visually depict, poetry’s need to signify in words—determine the very nature of each art. Continuing to take examples from classical antiquity, he imagines how a painter could go about showing Minerva as stronger than several men combined. In Homer’s Iliad she is described as such, and the listener’s or reader’s mind conjures this up in the imagination, whereas a painter, forced to depict her visually, inevitably loses that advantage. In choosing to show her several times larger than a man and hence convey her strength through size, the “marvelous” disappears and is replaced by an improbable and ineffective rendition that seeks to engage the eye rather than the imagination. Here Lessing returns to the cloud comments I noted earlier, pointing to such a device as “not what the poet intended. It exceeds the limits of painting…” by becoming a hieroglyphic symbol, a visible key to make us read something as invisible, and therefore one step removed from the poet’s direct statement of something’s invisibility.
    He then returns once again to an earlier passage and reiterates that where poetry can describe an event unfolding in time, painting can only suggest an event’s course by choosing a specific moment and portraying actions through bodies and their implied movement. Painting is limited to the “single moment of an action,” and poetry is limited to “one single property of a body.” Each much choose the most effective moment and property, respectively, to communicate its story. The essential rule, clarified in Homer’s epics, is that “harmony in descriptive adjectives and economy in description of physical objects” are necessities. Lessing elaborates this idea of harmony in adjectives later on, and for the moment moves on to the potential objections that could be raised against this rule. Poetry’s symbols may be successive, but they are also arbitrary, and as such should be able to depict bodies in space—like the shield of Achilles, for example. This is dismissed by agreeing that the “symbols of speech” are indeed arbitrary, but that this applies to speech in general, not poetry specifically. Essentially, it’s a question of style; yes, language doesn’t prevent a poet from describing everything, including space as a succession of bodies and actions, but the artistic demands of poetry (i.e., to make things strongly felt, as opposed to just understood or dryly conveyed) make it impossible. We need to be rapt at the “moment of illusion,” rather than distracted by how the poet created the illusion through words.

Lessing digresses for a moment to indulge the idea that even Homer succumbed to a dry laundry-list approach in his descriptions from time to time, casting doubt on his clear-cut line dividing painting and poetry, but he follows it with the clearest summary of his thesis—namely, that the poet reigns over the succession of time just as the painter reigns over the succession of space. Poetry is a verbal, temporal art, pain ting a visual, spatial art. For the two to encroach on one another’s realms is sheer bad taste. He uses the analogy of two friendly neighbors who have a mutual respect for each other’s terrain and maintain a tolerance for any eventual transgressions. Here Lessing is quite indulgent, pardoning artists like Raphael who combine two moments into one as evidenced in a curious fold of drapery, and sees this error as minor, committed in the name of capturing more prefect expression. I wonder what he’d have to say about Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel scenes, wherein Saint Peter is shown in quaint continuous narrative, foreshadowing Muybridge’s startlingly non-static stills….

Forebearance is Lessing’s main mood here: forgive the painter who occasionally shows more than one moment at once, pardon the poet who occasionally uses more words then the strict minimum. His earlier mention of harmony in the use of adjectives returns here, as he dispenses pardons specifically for those extra words that a poet can use according to the lucky structure of his language. Comparing Greek, German, and French, he points out that what Homer could get away with in describing the shield of Achilles, its forging and figurative details, cannot be excused in its less scintillating translations into German and French, which “give the meaning but destroy the picture.” This is made slightly more complex with the addition of the temporal aspect: Homer chooses to describe the shield not as it exists when complete, but rather as it’s being made. The details that are statically coexistent on the final armor, described as they’re being formed, become consecutive in time. Hence Homer perfectly adapts this description to the strength—time, not space—of poetry; a painter would have to approach it quite differently, emphasizing space rather than time.
    Lessing concludes with a reaffirmation of limits’ benefits for each art. By not allowing poetry to use infinite descriptions, poets are forced to focus on the effect their words have on listeners and readers. While Homer doesn’t go into vivid description of Helen’s beauty, he makes her beauty clear through the circumstances and surrounding events, with a jury of elders deeming it worthy of the wretched war they’d endured. By verbally conveying the results of beauty, poets “paint” the beauty itself. The confining lines Lessing has worked to establish between painting and poetry are blurred by his choice of words here, bringing us back to the present. How he pulled this off 241 years ago I can’t begin to imagine.

So, admit it: if you’ve read this far, or if you even read past the first paragraph, you’ve also read Lessing’s essay, along with Greenberg’s and everyone else’s additions, and likely know a lot more about all this than I do, which confirms my suspicion that I’m probably one of the last people to get round to this piece. My interest in current visual works blending theater and more static visual arts aside, anyone working in poetry, painting, sculpture, video, or anything else would likely enjoy having a look at Lessing’s little essay. I won’t pretend to have any new insights about it—what is most striking is that such a potentially old, musty musing about such old, musty arts and ideas can remain so pertinent today.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

Although I swiped my title from the media coverage of this story:

SCIENTISTS have created “miracle mice” that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.

And when [fetal liver] cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate […]

there are a number of important caveats missing from the “miracle mouse!” version.  (Whenever you hear “miracle”, especially in science, think of David Hume).  Nonetheless, I do think this research marks the point at which regenerative human medicine becomes not just possible but entirely probable.  The article to read is The scarless heart and the MRL mouse by Ellen Heber-Katz (who runs the lab responsible for most of these discoveries) et al., and a good primer on regeneration, including non-mammalian models, is Andrea Rinaldi’s The Newt in Us.

The mouse strain in question is an inbred strain called MRL, and has been around since 1979. It was originally selected for large size and has a lymphocyte (white blood cell) proliferative disorder which gives rise to a variety of immune problems, including autoimmune symptoms. For instance, the MRL mouse is a common model for systemic lupus erythematosus.  The regenerative abilities of this mouse were discovered by researchers marking mice by punching small holes in their ears; within 30 days, the MRL mice healed the ear holes closed whereas other mice retain the holes for their lifetimes (mice live about two years).  The figure above is taken from the linked paper and shows healer and non-healer mice at the time of marking (the authors don’t say when, but typically you do this at about 3 weeks of age) and 30 days later.

Further investigation revealed that the MRL mice can regenerate almost all tissues except brain. This regenerative healing is fundamentally different from normal mammalian wound healing, and takes place without scar formation (which is of particular interest to cardiologists, since scars formed in response to heart injuries, including infarcts, are probably the primary cause of subsequent chronic heart disease and failure). Such healing is known in mammals, but only very early in development — interestingly, prior to the development of certain immune, especially inflammatory, responses.  Heber-Katz et al. report that T-cells from nonhealer mice do inhibit the ear wound closure response. It doesn’t seem, however, that their immune dysfunction is the only mediator of the regenerative response in MRL mice. For instance, matrix metalloproteases 2 and 9 and their specific inhibitors have been shown to be differentially activated in healer vs. non-healer mice (MMPs and MMP inhibitors are primary players in tissue remodelling, including wound healing). In fact, at least 20 genetic loci (chromosome regions) have been shown to be involved in the MRL regenerative phenotype. Importantly, many of these show no overlap with the loci mapped to the autoimmune disorder. (In very plain English: it is not likely that the primary cause of the regenerative capacity is also the cause of the immune disorder, although there may be some overlap; this means that we may be able to replicate the regenerative ability without causing immune dysfunction.)

It is also not clear exactly which cells are doing the healing. In bone marrow transplant/transfer experiments, healing in both heart and ear tissue followed the recipient not the donor phenotype, meaning that bone marrow derived stem cells are not likely to be driving the healing response (although some involvement of donor cells was observed). Moreover, in these model systems recipient hematopoiesis is destroyed by X-ray exposure, so the cells responsible for the healing must be resistant to such treatment. It’s also possible to reconstitute irradiated hematopoiesis using fetal liver cells, which contain a population of hematopoietic stem cells. Heber-Katz’ group has tried that too. The results were somewhat surprising: in the heart, healing followed the donor phenotype (i.e. the fetal liver cells transferred the regenerative capacity or lack thereof), whereas in ear injuries healing followed the recipient phenotype (as seen with bone marrow transplant/transfer). Once again, donor cells are seen in the healed heart but the mechanism of their involvment is not clear, nor is it clear why cardiac but not ear tissue could regenerate in this model.

Here’s the thing that jumped out at me: because non-healer liver cells transferred that phenotype, it appears that scarring inhibits regeneration in mammals. In the MRL animals, something is holding back the formation of scar tissue, and (therefore??) regeneration is taking place. In non-healer mice which received healer fetal liver cells, high degrees of chimerism (~60-80%) were seen, whereas non-healer into healer transfers showed an average of only 12% chimerism. Why was 12% non-healer enough to cause normal healing and scarring in that transfer, but 20-40% non-healer was not enough to stop MRL-type healing without scarring in the reciprocal model? The authors offer one clue: “We do not know which cell population is responsible for [scarring with only 12% chimerism] and it may be different than the population that allows for a regenerative response in the reciprocal chimeras.”

This much at least is already clear: the MRL mouse model will provide profound insights into mechanisms of wound healing (including opportunities for regenerative medicine) and the functions of hematopoietic stem cells.  Let me finish with a direct quote from Dr Heber-Katz, forecasting the future from late last year in New Scientist magazine:

I believe that the day is not far off when we will be able to prescribe drugs that cause severed spinal cords to heal, hearts to regenerate and lost limbs to regrow. People will come to expect that injured or diseased organs are meant to be repaired from within, in much the same way that we fix an appliance or automobile: by replacing the damaged part with a manufacturer-certified new part. Advances in heart regeneration are around the corner, digits will be regrown within five to ten years, and limb regeneration will occur a few years later. Central nervous system repair will occur first with the retina and optic nerve and later with the spinal cord. Within 50 years whole-body replacement will be routine.

….

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Tony Blair says he is leaving before the summer is out, and the race for the Labour party leadership, and the assessment of the likely contenders in the next general election is already generating column inches. There’s every expectation of a bit of (all in good fun) back stabbing in the race for the Labour party leadership, but nobody seriously expects Gordon Brown to lose. What is much more fun is considering  how he will stand up to the Tories now that their new leader, David Cameron, is infusing the Tories with a fresh faced kind of posh boy sexiness (he took cocaine! he wears converse trainers! he listens to the Killers!). What is even more fun is considering how the female swing voters will choose between them.

It doesn’t surprise anyone that David Cameron is exciting more interest at this stage than the normally, intensely serious, and generally dour Mr Brown. None of the previous leaders of the Tories –  Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith, William Hague – has excited this much hope of finally facing down New Labour. What is annoying, however, is the way the public, and specifically, women, are viewed as reacting to the new Tory leader. Recent polls show that David Cameron owes his lead in the polls mostly to women’s votes. But is this because we women like his policies? Because they are sick of the present administration’s conduct in Iraq? Because they would like a change after ten years of New Labour? Hell, no, it’s because we all have the hots for him!

The press in the Tory camp base their campaign on the premise that the female vote is always susceptible to a strong chin, and a full head of hair (read Bill Clinton). There are constant references to Mr Cameron’s looks, charm, and sexiness. We are told how he cooks, he cleans, and that even some of his best friends are women. All in all we are persuaded that David Cameron is new age, young, and passably handsome ergo we must fancy him. As long as he gives us a cheeky grin, and a bit of laddish humour, we’ll be gagging to stuff our votes into his ballot box. Enough of a twinkle in his politician’s eye, and a photo of him on the school run, and he can have us over a soapbox anyday.

It’s a bit worrying that female voting attitudes are still viewed as this simplistic. If it isn’t the “he’s so handsome” gag, it’s the old “he changes nappies!” routine. David Cameron is supposed to be winning hearts with his caring dad demeanour, and his tie less suit and white shirt combos. He woos us with his talk of the “family”, “work/life balance”, and “saving the planet for our kids”. We see photos of his youthful figure riding a bike to work, while in reality, his Lexus trails behind him carrying his shoes, papers, and a statelier change of clothes. He affixes solar panels to his roof, and talks of sharing childcare responsibilities. And with every pronouncement he affects a posh, but loveable Hugh Grant inspired charm calculated to win over the ladies. Does everyone really think we are that easily swayed?

Granted, men aren’t so likely to be patronised on this front due to the disproportionate number of successful female politicians on the scene. And perhaps the fact that – in the main – older women aren’t considered half as desirable as shiny young political interns. Nobody would have wanted to jump into bed with Maggie Thatcher unless they had fantasies of the whip and leather variety, and most men would have had to close their eyes and think of Mother India before Indira Gandhi would have got a look in. But although every Frenchman worth his salt maybe panting over pictures of Segolene Royal in that blue swimsuit, you are unlikely to hear of the male vote swinging Royal’s way because she is sexy. You’re much more likely to hear that she puts off less capable, more wrinkled, female voters due to sheer female jealousy. As a sex, we’re still considered capricious voters – but the spin doctors approach us on the basis that our emotions are predictable, and our interests defined by childcare, family life, and, at a push, the climate. All grassroots, smaller scale, and domestic (with a small “d”) interests.

I won’t pretend that politicians can’t be sexy. I’ll expose my deviant taste in men by admitting that I think Gordon Brown oddly sexy, with that dishevelled lock of hair hanging over his face. And I even quite like the way he quotes treasury statistics with a sort of smug post-coital smile. But, unlike Cameron, his behaviour is not premeditated to set female hearts aflutter, in fact it is hard to see anything approaching (at least talented) spin in his normally serious demeanour. If anything, women voters have labelled Gordon Brown as “trustworthy” – high praise from members of a normally distrustful electorate, and at least recognition of a proven track record.

But despite the fact that David Cameron’s policies are so far variable, and given his lack of experience, largely untested, the statistics appear to show that Cameron’s play for the female vote may be working. An unproven Tony Blair came into power in 1997 on a tide of women’s votes. That tide seems to be changing. A Guardian/ICM poll last summer reflected women’s discontent with Labour, and swing towards the Conservatives. The Tories were 1% behind men, but scored an 8% lead among women. In a November, a Times/Populus poll showed that while men would vote for Labour and the Conservatives in equal numbers, women gave Cameron 37% of their vote to 31% for Labour.

Viewed through the prism of gender politics, it is fairly clear that Labour comes out miles ahead. It has 95 women MPs, to the Tory’s 17. It has a female foreign secretary, and several female ministers. It has made unprecedented strides in anti discrimination laws, contributed record levels of spending on education, and health, provided all children of nursery school age with guaranteed and quality childcare, and raised the minimum wage – mainly affecting a badly paid part-time female workforce. There is little, apart from the spectre of Margaret Thatcher, the Tories can point to in terms of increasing women’s participation in the political process, or at least easing the burdens of a modern working woman’s life.

If anything surely this would force commentators to a different conclusion on the figures, rather than the effete observation that women must be attracted to Mr Cameron’s kindness to children and puppy dogs. Perhaps that women are not only concerned with “women’s issues”. That perhaps their concerns are much wider, and not just rooted in domestic homebound concerns. Also that, for example, women may have a greater aversion to war, a greater propensity to take risks, or the intelligence not to stick to lifelong party commitments, but to change with the times. Or maybe it’s just because they think David Cameron is a cutie. Go figure.