Speech on Body Image for International Women's Day.

I'm still up, so it's still International Women's day. Here's the speech I made at today's launch of the Real Women campaign in Portcullis house, alongside Susie Orbach, which was more than a little intimidating. The campaign aims to bring together people who are working on body image, beauty fashion and feminism into a broader political movement, and has specific policy objectives like kitemarking of heavily airbrushed images in advertising. I wrote this speech in about half an hour, but it came from the heart more than many things that I've had more time to think about.

Hope you enjoy - and Happy International Women's Day.

* * *

I understand that I've been invited here to speak to you today because of my experiences with anorexia nervosa when I was younger, and because of my ongoing struggle with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. And I welcome that sentiment - too much contemporary policymaking, even good feminist policymaking, talks about young women and to young women without listening to young women.

So, I could talk to you about the deep pain of stuggling to feed oneself. I could talk to you about the years and years I spent fighting the condition, the battle to overcome the cues that even very intelligent young women pick up from parents, peers and the overculture about how young women ought to look and behave. I could tell you about the deep gouges I had to physically slice into my personal paradigm to persuade myself, against every message I was recieving, that it was okay to take up space, that it was okay to have physical and personal flaws, that the actual weight of my humanity as a woman was not repulsive or aberrant, that I did not have to starve myself and punish myself in order to be acceptable. I could tell you how I almost died, how I jeopardised my future and my education, how I broke my family's heart and set an incredibly bad example for my two younger sisters. And I could tell you how a culture that assaults us at every turn with images of impossibly thin, impossibly perfect, impossibly white, impossibly beautiful women made that process of recovery harder and more painful at every turn.

But I don't want to talk about that to the exclusion of all else. You all know, because you've read melodramatic personal stories in the papers, about how anorexia, bulima and other eating disorders work, about the hurt they cause to young women, their families and friends. Much of the rhetoric around eating disorders and hyper-sexualisation seems to patronise or even fetishise young women as impossibly vain, helpless victims who can't even look at one picture of a stick-thin model without rushing to the nearest bog to vomit up their breakfast. It's not that simple, and sensationalisting the victims of this sick culture of airbrushed femininity risks watering down the real message. Focusing on our victimhood risks turning the focus away from where our political energies should be directed - at the narrow coffin of corporate womanhood and the way it inveigles itself into every aspect of our society, at the unassailable market logic of brutal, homogenised, white, heterosexual femininity pushed by as a political obstacle rather than as a fact of life.

Imagine if it were young men whose plasticised, airbrushed, blandly sexual images you saw everywhere around you, imagine if it were young men who were starving themselves, sicknening themselves, neglecting their futures and their studies, paying doctors to butcher their bodies, bleaching their skin to make themselves resemble the relentless consensus of white, hetoronormative corporate gender fascism. Imagine if it were young men who understood that in order to get and keep a job they had to starve and bleach and punish themselves into a sick image of perfection, to literally shrink every aspect of their personhood, imagine if it were men who the market were complicit in erasing. We would be filling the streets in protest. There would be speeches in the House of Commons every day until change came. We would have to acknowledge that this is an issue of political urgency, and not a secret, private shame.

This campaign to get advertisers to label airbrushing is of vital importance. As a socialist I instinctively distrust the politics of symbolism, but this campaign does more than just send a message - it creates a precedent that attacks on women's personhood are political, that body image and beauty fascism are political, and attempts to erase real women and our real lives are something that Westminster should be addressing. When the deputy leader of the party in government is ridiculed for her quite normal appearance in the press, when she is insulted by being nominated for the 'rear of the year' campaign, sending a message that even powerful women can be contextualised and dismissed within a framework of patriarchal sexual and physical judgement, it's time for women in politics to take a stand. It's time for women and men with seniority and influence to take a stand on behalf of the selfhood of the next generation of leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs, homemakers, mothers, athletes and artists. It's time to take a stand, and it starts right here, with a campaign to tell advertisers and others with financial clout that there are things that matter more than money.

Fighting the sick, damaging influence of the corporate imagining of womanhood on the lives of real women might seem like an impossible task. When I've talked about this campaign over the past few weeks, I've been met by a resigned cynicism - you'll never get advertisers to stop selling products off the back of this endless parade of diseased, plastic woman-meat, it would be nice if you could, but you can't fight the market. The autonomous logic of misogynist capitalism can only be resisted at a personal, private level, and if individual girls can't resist it, that means we're not strong enough. I say: bollocks to that. For three reasons.

The first is that we are living in a society which is beginning to analyse the unstoppable logic of free-market identity politics for the first time. Particularly for young people, the recession has allowed us to dare to imagine that the market can't solve all our problems, that it can and should be questioned, that something isn't great just because people are prepared to pay for it.

The second is that there is a new energy for feminist activity. Women are beginning to remember that our failure to have it all and be it all is not a private shame but a political statement- we are beginning to wake up and feel the weight of our chains, some old, some new, and imagine lines of resistance.

And the third reason is quite simple. This is International Women's Day. One hundred years ago, when the first International Women's Day took place, the socialists who convened the conference could not imagine a world where women would be allowed to vote and to participate at all levels of the economy, a world where women would not be the property of their husbands, where we would be able, in most civilised places in the world, to access abortion, contraception and sexual healthcare. Women have won incredible victories in the past century against impossible odds, and today of all days we should remember that those victories are possible. Today of all days we should honour the memories and achievements of our radical foremothers by remembering that it's okay to dream big, that it's okay to demand change that smaller, more frightened people wouldn't even dare to envision, because it's been done before and we can do it again.

That energy of feminist politics, inspired by the example of courageous women from previous decades, is what gave me the courage to recover from anorexia. Choosing to say fuck everything I'd been told about how good little girls should be, choosing to start to live again at the point of collapse, is the hardest thing I will ever have to do in my life, far harder than the small task of changing the world. The energy of feminist politics reminds us that women are powerful, that we are vital, that our political concerns have relevance at the highest levels of government, and that if we stay brave, and stay clever, and remember how far we have come, there's nothing we can't do.

Thank you.

*****

You're not really allowed to say 'Socialist' in the House of Commons, but other than that the speech went down fairly well. I'll be talking more about this campaign as it progresses. Exciting times are ahead :)

Let it be known

Point one: I am going to be speaking at the Oxford Radical Forum this Sunday, along with Nina Power, Owen Hatherley, Richard Seymour and other Much Cleverer People. Programme here.

Point two: last night I went to a Chumbawamba gig. It was great, apart from the part where I got slapped in the face by a racist in a massive yellow flak jacket. Lots of screaming from wankered whitepeople to 'play whitewash!!' Band not impressed.

Point three: I am watching Geert Wilders on the news. He looks and talks like a badly-ageing, drunk Draco Malfoy.

Objectification: what if the world were different for a day?

Picture this. You open the newspaper one grey morning, and there in a bright pixel smear on the third page is a full-length photograph of a young man. The young man is almost naked; a flesh-coloured thong clings tightly to his hairless cock and balls; he looks over his shoulder at you, his jaw a perfect masculine square, his dark eyes smouldering. Everywhere, this young man is hard, smooth, impenetrable and yet submissive, wanting you to consume him. You turn the page.

There are more young men on each of the pages that follow, naked or scantily clothed, poreless, flawless, with broad shoulders and rock-hard arses and muscles that bunch and gleam under oiled skin. You are used to the sight of these young men; these days, they hardly even arouse you. Their glassy eyes follow you on public transport, on the internet, on television, in the fashion spreads of magazines.

Picture this. Every one of the men and boys whose images you see repeated thousands of times a day is impossibly perfect, hewn from some arcane piece of rock on the platonic plane. Not one of them is over thirty-three. In the shadow of their hard, robotic masculinity, the possibility of paunches and puppy fat and male-pattern balding is unthinkable . They rarely speak, and when they do speak, they ventriloquise; they implore you to look at them, to understand their silent semiotics of commercial masculinity; they threaten and seduce you in a boring parade of billboards, adverts, music videos.

These men don’t seem to be doing very much. Usually, they are moronically thrusting and jerking around cereal boxes, insurance packages, bottles of shampoo and soap. They seem to beg to be penetrated, but it is they who have invaded your body and brain, as if the images were trying to force themselves out through your skin. Some of them are known to you by name or sobriquet, as singers or actors, or as the sons or lovers of powerful women. They grimace beautifully as they drape their impossible bodies over stages and sets, showing off watches and shoes and beautiful clothing that hangs from their perfect torsos in artful folds and flutters in artificial winds. Their images cluster in everywhere , unseeing, bored, as if they can’t quite decide whether to fuck you or punch you.

You know that it’s not real, of course. You understand vaguely that the real men and boys who pose for these images are almost all on punishing diet and exercise programmes; cocaine and steroid abuse and compulsive weightlifting are endemic in the modelling and media industries.You know that in order to make your body resemble the bodies you see around you you would have to push it to its limits, to the exclusion of all else. And yet the idea occurs to you, almost daily, oozing out of every advertising surface. You see more images of perfect men, on a daily basis, than you meet ordinary men in real life. Your sense of reality, of what gender and beauty and power mean on a day-to-day basis, becomes warped. They are the real men, not you: if you don't look like them, you're not trying hard enough. Other men in your peer group clearly are trying, perhaps not hard enough, but hard enough that they don't seem invisible in this glossy, thrusting semiotic stream of plastic masculinity. So you try harder, too. You start to eat less, go to the gym more, maybe play around with taking some steroids - everyone's doing it, what harm can there be? And maybe you succeed, maybe you don't. At least you're trying. At least you're buying things. Isn't that the point?

You begin to forget what real men look like. Older men, overweight men, plain men, scrawny men seem to shrink and fade as you look past them, unsure how to react to the freakish weight of their humanity. Images of men over thirty-five are such a rarity that when you glimpse real elderly men, they seem obscene, the lines and trappings of years a monstrous deformity. The few much-photographed men who have been permitted to age are known to have undergone extensive, brutal surgical procedures and to spend thousands of dollars a year ‘maintaining’ their appearance. Whatever their age, they all have full heads of hair -male-pattern balding becomes an obscenity, and the hair loss and implant industry is worth billions each year, as is the dangerous and murky skin-lightening industry, because these men aren't just all lean, perfect and young, they're also all white.

The small proportion of images of men from non-white backgrounds features young men who have typically Caucasian features, from height and straightness of hair to pale skin and blue eyes. Airbrushing helps here, too, bleaching faces, hardening the lines of lips and noses and erasing epicanthal folds. The pop-star Kanye West appears on a box of Rogaine looking suspiciously pale, but the firm denies altering his appearance, and the singer is contractually bound to shut his million-dollar mouth and keep on smiling.

Across the country, young boys are caught in this stream of images, and being young, they make the mistake of trying to swim. Young black and asian boys bleach their skin with illegal creams and dyes and turn up at hospital with third-degree burns; young boys of all backgrounds, some as young as five and six, are embarking on diet and exercise regimes to try to look more like their favourite male models, actors and porn stars. Boys of seventeen and eighteen are having surgery on their penises, their pectoral muscles and their faces to make them resemble the ideal. Fully half of teenage boys are on a diet, and some begin to take the process too far, cutting out snacks, then meals, then sustenance altogether. They pump iron for hours everyday, their infant muscles screaming with pain. By the time they arrive at university, one in ten of the best and brightest young boys are already racked by anorexia, bulimia, compulsive exercise and steroid abuse. They drop like flies, and you can do nothing to save them.

But there's more. Something strange is happening to many of the boys who have managed to continue to feed and nourish themselves, the boys you thought were safe. They spend hours in front of mirrors fretting about their appearance, applying make-up, spending money they don't have on clothes that might make them resemble the images they see everywhere around them, the images that everyone knows are false. They stop doing their work, abandon their studies, dumb down their intelligence, desperate to be accepted as that vital thing - handsome. They want you to notice them, they want to be allowed to exist in a culture which only allows them full purchase if they look great, gorgeous, glowing, up for it. They learn to erase their sexual identities. They learn to flirt, to give the impression of putting out, at every opportunity. They learn to be silent. They learn to stick their arses out when an important woman is in the room. They learn to smile.

These young men know that their chances of getting a decent job will be massively improved if they invest time, money and hours of pain and anxiety in their appearance and give an impression of sexual availability. These men want full, whole lives, they want what everyone wants - to be able to walk in the world as human subjects - but they understand that the culture of beauty fascism isn't going to change soon, and that means that they also have to be accepted as physical objects, and for that they need to prove their worth in the relentless economy of white, lean masculine beauty. The plea, on a fundamental level, is a plea to exist. These young men are crying out for truth and understanding, but in an economy built on lies, how can they be expected to fight the tide on their own?

What is the response of the government, of the media to this trend? They say nothing. These silly young boys don't know any better than to copy what they see. And anyway, women have to worry about what they look like too! Granted that it's the men, not the women, who are judged on the basis of their appearance in public life - but then, there are so few men in politics and in business that we're bound to look at them a bit funny, aren't we? It's all in good fun, isn't it?

And so government remains silent, as legions of young men drop out of the system, fail to fulfil their potential or grow up into miserable, half starved adults. It doesn't matter, not really. The men's groups kicking up their silly little boys' protests don't understand the logic of the market. Images of lusty young men sell products - that's all there is to it. Red blooded women like to look at hot young men - and that's evolution, that is, and evolution means never ever changing, and that's all there is to it. And after all, women find it easy to develop individual personalities, unconstrained by silly, masculine, frivolous worries about their bodies. What is it about young men that they can't do the same? Are they defective? They must be. Come on, let's talk about women's problems some more.

[Image via the excellent OddityCollector]

Young women aren't just sexual victims.

Something terrible is happening to young women. Despite the dazzling gains made for bourgeois white women by reformist feminism, we're....well, we're turning into sluts. Look around you: the streets are littered with half-naked young hussies vomiting their A-levels into spillovers with their skirts hoiked round their waists. At the merest flash of a web-camera, young ladies from nice homes will flash their tits for Nuts magazine. Feminism means we can do anything we want, but all we brazen little tarts seem to want are boob-jobs, brazilians and drooling attention. We don't know any better, you see.

Conservatives and a small number of high-profile feminists are unanimous in their assertion that contemporary culture has made desperate sexual victims of all women under thirty. In the UK, the reception of this week's Home Office report into the 'sexualisation of children' has been gleefully priggish, with Conservative leader David Cameron telling the BBC that 'We've all read stories about padded bras and Lolita beds...children are growing up too fast and missing out on childhood.' Oh David, with your nice hair and your nice wife and your house in Knightsbridge, only you can save Broken Britain from the march of the underage slags.

Press rehashings of the Home Office Report and of Natasha Walter's new book, 'Living Dolls', are stuffed with horror stories of young girls' wanton, soulless sexual promiscuity. Pre-teens who should be drinking ginger pop and going on picnics are wearing thongs and listening to Lily Allen. Just one glance at MTV and 54% of working-class teenage girls, according to fabricated Tory statistics, are pregnant. Even toddlers are now born with the Playboy Bunny image tattooed onto their eyeballs. Their fault, the salacious little strumpets, for daring to look at the future.

Walter is a thoughtful and empathic feminist, and her concern for young women is genuine. Her book (to which, in the interests of full disclosure, I contributed) is far more forgiving to young women who blandly objectify themselves or work in the sex trade than several stern, moralising editorials and reviews might lead one to believe. Dr Papadopoulous, likewise, reminds readers of the Home Office report that it is normal for children to experiment with their sexuality. And yet the automatic conflation of all sexual images and ideas with misogyny by media outlets reporting these pieces of research is evidence of a dangerous trend in contemporary thought: the idea that women and girls need to be protected from any and all sexual images and tropes for the good of our moral health. The notion that young women have no sexual agency of their own: we can only ever be 'sexualised'.

Young women and girls are blamed for their concessions to misogynist, 'pornified' sexual culture even as we are told that we're so thick we can't help but be complicit. Apparently, there is no middle ground between being an independent, dynamic young thing who makes joyful millions selling her body and the subsequent book-deal, and a cringing, broken victim of porn culture crying tears of shame into her cleavage. Elements of this binary thinking reinforce a stereotype which is just as damaging to young women as the 'happy hooker' fantasy beloved by bourgeois filmmakers. As the furore over 'raunch culture' escalates, all this baby-boomer moral hand-wringing is beginning to sound less like radicalism and more like priggishness. It's sounding less like genuine concern, and more like good old-fashioned slut-shaming.

I'm not arguing that raunch culture does not hurt young women. It hurts us deeply. It encourages us to lessen, cheapen and diminish ourselves, to think of ourselves as vehicles for the sexual appreciation of men who still hold economic sway over our lives. It makes us understand that what we look like is as important or more important than what we do, whether we're lap-dancers, librarians or lazy-ass freelance journalists like me. It warps our understanding of power, intimacy and desire and urges us to starve and torture our bodies and neglect our intelligence. It sells us a fake, plasticised image of empowerment that, for most of us, is deeply disempowering - as many wealthy and powerful middle-aged men and women have recently observed.

I am not asking for us to pretend that raunch culture is unproblematic, or that it's uncomplicatedly fun to be a Southend lap dancer. I am asking for honesty. I am asking for an analysis that is more rigorous, more grounded in an understanding of the gendered basis of capital, an analysis that is less focused on recalcitrant sexual morality. I am asking for an analysis that addresses itself to young men, who also consume and are affected by the brutally identikit heterosexual consensus. Most importantly, I want a consensus that actually gives a voice to young women, not just those who work as strippers or glamour models, but all young women and girls growing up in a culture steeped in this grinding, monotonous, deodorised sexual dialectic.

Recommendations that sexual images in advertising and music videos should be censored or age-restricted and the associated notion that all sexual messages are inherently damaging to women assume that our current plasticised, heteronormative, restricted social vision of female sexuality is in some way normal. It's far from normal. Our sexual culture isn't the logical conclusion of social libertinism: it's specific, it's deeply weird and it isn't, actually, all that permissive. Commentators, including feminist thinkers, are making the dangerously recalcitrant assumption that any sexually explicit culture is automatically misogynist, and that rather than working to challenge the sexual consensus, we should simply prevent women and children from coming into contact with it.

Censorship should never be an alternative to challenging the roots of patriarchy. Instead of slapping a blanket ban on pictures of tits, we need to look harder at the economic basis for sexual exploitation and at the reasons why many women make the choice to comply with raunch culture. Today's young women are neither soulless slags nor tragic victims: we are real people with real desires and real agency, trying to negotiate our personal and sexual identities in a culture whose socio-economic misogyny runs far deeper than conservative commentators would have us believe.

Generation Y, gender and ethics: shortest post evAr.

This is my contribution to the Guardian ethics series, which is out today. 'Talk about ethics and young people in 250 words' was the brief. I'm reproducing it here because it's only appearing in - *shudder* - hard copy.

***

British notions of morality used to be founded on rigidly gendered Judeo-Christian notions of social decency. Even for non-believers, living a worthy and decent life until very recently meant performing your public and private gender role to the best of your ability - especially for women, whose morality and ethics were expressly predicated on sexual control. The dismantling of this antiquated ethical system is extremely welcome, but the lack of any coherent effort to replace those received ethical codes has done a great deal of damage to young people.

The notion that being a good person is more important than being a good man or a good woman still lacks currency, whilst traditional gendered avenues of gaining a sense of moral worth are rapidly disintegrating. Young people desperately want to be good, but for many young women, being good still means being passive, conventionally attractive and sexually submissive. Young men are anxious to be modern, but are still expected to grow up to be tough, patriarchal breadwinners, business owners and fighters, even though such roles are practically defunct.

The forms of gendered social control that remain tend to be exaggerated in a desperate, almost pantomimic way from the playground onwards, whether that be aggression, gang membership and misogynist sexual posturing or self-objectification, sexual self-policing and obsessive personal grooming. A new ethical conversation is vital if we are to prevent a return to the painfully rigid gender norms of an older, more brutal age.

Checking in: a rare meta-post.

Hello, the blog. I'm sorry that the past month has mostly been cross-posts and reposts. This has been a particularly hectic week, since after the Cif piece and this Evening Standard Article everyone seems to want a slice of me. Which is very flattering and quite exciting, and I'm trying hard to remember that it won't last, because things like this don't ever last if you're socially awkward, politically unorthodox and a bit personally weird.

Right now, I'm beyond sleep. On top of my regular work for One In Four, I've been so busy and so tired I haven't even had time to get angry about things, which is unnerving. And it's given me some insight into how writers can get carried away with their own self-importance, to the extent that they lose touch, first with the reality of their emotions and then with the rest of the world. As I explained in the 'Penny for your Privilege' rant, even if you're coming from a relatively privileged position it's such a cunting slog to make it as a professional writer these days that by the time you even start to get there, the sense of numbing relief threatens to overwhelm what you were actually trying to do with your writing in the first place.

Despite having some parental financial help, I've been dirt poor for three years, living in filthy tumbledown houseshares, trying to support other people in similar situations through the knock-on effects of disillusionment, low wages, hard work and under-employment. And that inspired a lot of properly angry, impassioned writing, but it also came very close to breaking me entirely. Looking back, I've been sicker and more miserable than I have wanted to acknowledge, and this week, after two higher-profile articles, I've had a giddy sense of what could happen if I just sold out a little bit more. After eating frozen pizza in cold, rat-infested inner-city houses for months on end, the idea of a nice fluffy column, a warm clean flat of my own and enough money to buy new stompy boots is deliciously inviting. And that's how it happens. That's how they get to you. That's how they get you to write what they want rather than what you think, make you write what their advertisers need rather than what needs saying.

I've not yet had any sort of phenomenal crashing success, but it's been enough to distract me briefly from sitting down, thinking properly and writing proper polemic for the sheer joyful process of writing it and engaging with the responses. I've even caught myself wondering if I shouldn't delete some of the stupider old posts so that this blog looks better to people who might pay me money. And that urge to self-censor (not to mention all the great comments that would be lost in the process) is ugly, and it's terrifying, and frankly I'm setting that impulse down here because if I acknowledge it in public I probably won't act on it.

*[I confess that another part of the reason I've been neglecting this blog is that I've been getting a stream of really ugly, abusive comments in my inbox every day. I don't allow all the comments through, but I do read them all, including the trollish ones telling me I'm useless, spoilt, boring, fat, ugly and atrocious, that I can't write, that I don't deserve a job, and worse things, much worse. That hurts, personally and ideologically. Because I believe in the importance of blogging, and I believe that censorship is drastically unhelpful, especially online. And I know I should be a big tough writer and take it on the chin, but when I've been trying to force myself not to kick it in for three years, those sorts of comments are more damaging than I actually like to admit to anyone. Trolls are wily, and they are malicious, and they have a way of figuring out what the part of you that hates you wants you to hear and then aping it moronically in poorly-spelled diatribes that nonetheless manage to hit ever so slightly home. And that hurts. It turns blogging from something that's supposed to keep me honest, something that's meant to make sure I think in structures and form debates in ways that move on from the staid, restrictive, one-sided paradigms of fusty print, into something that makes me anxious and irritable, something that I resent prioritising.]*

I went for a drink recently with a well-known and accomplished lady columnist, who told me that although she'd started out writing diet blogs and gossip columns, which is a perfectly reasonable place to start, I wouldn't be able to. I would resent doing it, and it would show, and others I was working with would resent me for wanting something different. She told me that I would very likely stay poor for quite some time, and that eventually, maybe in my thirties, people would start paying me actual cash to write the things I care about. I think she's right, and I think that's okay. I have no interest in fluff writing and cheeky, packaged misogyny, and - when it comes down to it - I am a mediocre straight reporter at best. In fact, there's no part of my thought and writing that's straight. I've always been rubbish at pretending to be normal, and I refuse to be a mediocre, resentful square. I refuse it, and I will be keeping this post on my desktop to remind me why I refuse it, in the many long grey evenings when the consequences of that refusal come to bite me on the arse.

I think what I'm saying is: please be patient with me. I'm trying to negotiate an untested career path and keep on paying my rent in the process, and this blog is becoming a frantic slalom between my personal life and my professional writing. In return for your patience, I promise that whatever else happens, I will at every instance attempt not to be boring. Being boring should be punishable by network disconnection. Fuck my privilege, or lack of it: that's the baseline. If I'm boring, in this fucking exhilarating new online world, with its new rhetorical structures, its dazzling ephemeral paradigms and its endless pictures of slightly amusing cats, then I don't deserve to be in it.

Candy and lullabies: new column for Morning Star

I have an itch in my brain. It's called 'Fireflies', it's a twinkly, inoffensive little song by a band called Owl City, and it's been squatting in the radio charts earworming any poor sod who happened to hear it for some weeks now. The song is about falling asleep and dreaming about a variety of friendly invertebrates and, bar a few lyrical contortions, that's about it. Oh, and it's brilliant.

Listening to 'Fireflies' is like wandering through a magical petting zoo made of ambient sound. It's like your higher functions have been handed a glass of warm milk and tucked under a fuzzy blanket. It goes 'plinkety'. People downloaded it in their millions; it soared to the top of the charts in a happy haze of shiny beetleish bleeping, and stayed there for five weeks, and the only thing that managed to topple it from the number one slot was a bunch of dreary, anodine pop stars covering a dreary, anodine REM song in an effort to raise money for a high-profile humanitarian disaster that everyone had seen on the telly. Modern music is a big bag of candies: sweet, addictive and cloying, failing to nourish even as it congeals into a homogenised mass of sugar.

This season's fashion is another huge sleepy faceful of candyfloss. Sugary pastel colours, drapey sportswear, flowing, 'feminine' shapes, curves and softness everywhere, except on the models themselves - if Paris, New York and London fashion week are anything to go by, the brief trend for 'plus size' (size 10) models hasn't lasted the winter. Ruffles, flounces, florals and 'fairytale' styling were all over the catwalks, trends which will soon be filtering down to the high-street; the look is sugar-sweet and high femme, with advertising spreads already begging us to buy branded blush and lipsticks in a variety of candy colours. The escapism was overpowering. Unfortunately, the tragic suicide of designer Alexander McQueen right in the middle of Fashion Week, at the height of his career, belied the sickly fairytale logic of the shows: real life, even for the young and stunningly creative, has few happy endings.

Last weekend I went to see The Indelicates, one of the last real angry, clever, poetic bands, launch their new material. The upcoming album, 'Songs for Swinging Lovers,' is a white-hot work of nihilistic lyrical brilliance with its dark, dank roots in 90s grunge and Weimar cabaret. Be Afraid of Your Parents is a glorious parade of paranoid cadences, whilst Flesh is a jangling, brutal critique of contemporary pseudo-feminism: Hey doc, can you take my skin and melt it into plastic? Beauty isn’t truth, it’s just youth, and it’s adaptive, and it’s elastic. There is no place for this type of songwriting in modern culture, because there is no place for grim, searing originality in modern culture. Anyone who tries to give the lie to bland sex and plastic romance is probably doomed to commercial failure.

Cotton-candy pop culture isn’t nourishing, but it is addictive. In the depths of winter, in the depths of a recession that shows no sign of abating for those of us who are precariously employed or unemployed, with nothing to look forward to but climate change, Strictly Come Dancing and death, there's a part of me that doesn't want to be challenged.

There’s a part of me that doesn't want fire and rebellion and words and images that terrify and energise, that doesn’t want culture to be an acid-etched reflection of a nightmare future. I want the fairytale. I want sweeties, fluffy pastel frocks and pretty, vapid songs to lull me to a sleep full of fireflies and starshine. And that frightens me more than I care to admit. When the world is grey and uncaring, it’s far too easy to find oneself complicit in the chilling, soporific impulse that's slowly strangling contemporary creativity.

[written for Morning Star, 21.02.10]

Penny for your privilege?

I had an article published by the Guardian's Comment Is Free site today. I'm pleased with it, bar a tautology in the last line that just goes to show you should never edit by email and by committee. As ever, and as often happens when I write something moderately high-profile, I've had a slew of comments suggesting that I'm horrendously posh, only get to write because my daddy is some sort of media pundit (he isn't), have never met anyone who doesn't live in Hampstead, etc, etc. Now, I try not to respond to these sorts of comments, especially not on CiF. But this time I cracked. I cracked pretty hard. And I'm going to reproduce the crack right here, right now, in bold, for the benefit of anyone who wants to make this kind of comment in future.

***

Right, sit down and roll a fag, you guys. I'm going to do some explaining.

Your criticisms have some legitimacy. But it's more than a little unfair to apply them to me. I've worked my butt off for years to get to the not-very-dizzying heights of where I am now, done stints at small magazines and local papers, lived on less than ten grand a year since leaving university, and most of that is because - privileged Oxbridge graduate though I am - I have no personal contacts and no family links with the media.

There's a huge problem with Gogartyism in the media. I'm not part of it: frankly, I really, really wish I were. I own the privilege I do have, and it's my responsibility to try and raise awareness of the fact that it takes money and privilege as well as talent, guts and determination to get anywhere in journalism these days. But actually, my money and privilege are not such that I'm not seriously worried about the future.

I know people from university whose daddies, mummies and uncles work at big papers, who have walked in to jobs at the Times and the Independent. I was unable to afford the place I was offered on the MA in journalism offered by City University - a standard entry-point to the industry, costing 8,000 per year exclusive of living costs, with no time to work and support yourself - so I settled for a shitty little part-time NCTJ course, and that choice has seriously held me back compared to the people I know who could afford City. Booga-booga personal finger-pointing actually obscures many years of hard work, knockbacks and disappointments because I wasn't lucky enough to have a daddy who worked in the media or a massive personal fortune to draw upon.

And that says a great deal, you know. It says a great big deal that someone with my opportunities - middle-class parents, nice school, Oxford - still isn't privileged enough to walk into a feature-writing job without years of being knocked back and getting up again, a process that, let me assure you, is very much ongoing.

The media is riddled with hypocrisy. I'm not going to argue with you there. Making it in the media today is tough. However clever you are, however brilliant, you have to slog and slog and slog to get noticed, whore yourself out promoting your work, write things you don't want to write for no pay or almost no pay, work long, thankless hours at large papers for free and smile every time they tell you to re-organise their filing system because you know you're lucky even to be there, because you know that behind you there are twenty other people dying for the opportunity to be trodden on in the same way.

So you smile. You grit your teeth. You offer to do more, work more; you hone your technique, you try to write better and faster than anyone else, you hold down shitty shop jobs whilst you're waiting for your break, you despair, you want to give up. And every day, you have to watch people who are less clever and less talented than you getting better jobs, more exposure and more money because they're the ones with the contacts, because they're quiet, inoffensive and pretty (if you're a girl), or because they just got lucky.

And then when you do get there, if you get there, you will be dogged at every stage by people writing in comments threads telling you that you don't deserve the little bit of success you've had - because you're [[under 25/a man/a woman/oxbridge-educated/not posh enough/ugly/beautiful/white/black/Jewish/Muslim -check all that apply]]. People who haven't gone through all this, or who aren't as far along, will resent your success and will look for any and every opportunity to tear you down. Meanwhile, the people above you are holding the door to the next stage firmly shut. If you complain about this, you're bitter, or you're not hard enough to make it in journalism. So, you shut your mouth and carry on working, carry on writing, trying all the while not to give up and bow out to the people with real privilege, because whilst you're exhausted, whilst every part of you is screaming for the day off you haven't had since 2007, you don't want the bastards to win.

That's what you need to do to be a journalist these days. That's the minimum. That's the minimum, from a starting point of having an Oxford degree and some savings. And you tell me that my generation has it easy. For shame. I tell you what doesn't help you get a writing career off the ground, though: making snarky, ill-informed personal comments in blog threads. I've wasted hours on it, and it has helped me not one jot. You want to change the world? Stop making personal attacks and start making a difference.

Resignations, rivalry and the future of the left.

Radical politics, like romance, inevitably disappoints. It has become a cliché that liberal infighting gets in the way of liberal action, but this week has been a flashpoint for the British left, struggling to organise itself in the face of an upcoming election which may well bring greater gains for its enemies on the right and the far-right than the country has seen for a generation.

Fifty core members of provocative far-left group The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) resigned their membership yesterday in a dramatic public walkout that has sent shockwaves through the British left. The catalyst for the walkout was the resignation of party stalwart and recent Mayoral candidate Lindsey German after members attempted to block her appearance at a local Stop The War meeting, amid ferocious internal debates. "Such sectarian behaviour does enormous damage to the standing of the party in the movement, [and] fits into what is now a well-established pattern," conceded the fifty former SWP members in their joint resignation statement.

They are right: sectarianism has crippled progress on the left since the formation of Respect in 2004, and has prevented any genuine electoral alternative to the three central parties from forming. The SWP has been at the forefront of every attempt to scupper cohesion on the left over the past decade, gaining themselves a reputation for petty squabbling that, for many, overshadows their valuable work in opposing the Iraq war and propelling the anti-capitalist mobilisations of the start of the decade. It’s almost enough, in the words of singer-songwriter Frank Turner, to make one hang up one’s banner in disgust and head for the door.

The inertia that inevitably results from destructive leftist squabbles is heartbreaking for anyone who believes in progress, but there is something to be said for infighting - within reason. The nature of the left is multifarious. We are progressive not in spite of our differences, but because of them: we are progressive because we have the imagination to think beyond the good old days or the status quo, and sometimes that thinking will take us in different directions. However, radical politics, like romance, isn’t a thought or a feeling – it’s something that you do. The usefulness of the British Left will not be judged by the purity of our ideals, but by our actions, and by what we manage to achieve together for the benefit of ordinary people.

Lenin's maxim of "freedom of discussion but unity in action" is the founding principle of Democratic Centralism, the nominal organising principle of most liberal and left-wing parties, as well as several others. Unfortunately, sectarian groups like the SWP have historically been so scuppered by internal squabbles and personality politics that they haven't even managed to nail the first part. And that's no way to build a flat-pack cabinet, much less a coherent platform for the future of British progressive politics.

Factional splitting is hardly unheard of on the left, but yesterday's walkout offers genuine cause for hope. Most significantly, the mutineers acknowledged the need to prioritise agitation over irritation, saying that “the most glaring mistake has been the SWP’s refusal to engage with others in shaping a broad left response to the recession, clearly the most pressing task facing the left.

“Even valuable recent initiatives, like the Right to Work campaign, have minimised the involvement of Labour MPs, union leaders and others who have the capability to mobilise beyond the traditional left,” said the mutineers, who recognised the achievements of the SWP in their statement. Their call for unity in action could hardly be more urgent.

Were we living in a period of peace, stability and economic ease, without the pressing necessity of a response to climate change, the left could be forgiven for allowing itself the luxury of protracted ideological self-scrutiny – a pastime that has never overly troubled the British right. But we are cowering on the tracks of a cultural crisis, and there is a train bearing down upon us, and it is brutal, and relentless, and recalcitrant, and intolerant, and if we don’t hold it up it’s going to roll right over us. If we want to halt the approach of a grim Tory future riddled with fascist pressure groups, the left needs to prioritise action over solipsistic squabbling – because if we don’t, the far right will.

[adapted from a talk I gave at Mutiny last week and cross-posted at The Samosa]

Feeling sinful?

[originally published at The Samosa, 13.02.10]

I have a confession to make: I am indifferent to chocolate in all its forms. This makes me abberant as a female, because everyone knows it’s been scientifically proven that all women love chocolate. The presence or promise of chocolate makes us go gooey inside: we melt, simper and attempt to fellate small sticks of foil-wrapped refined carbohydrate whilst a slurpy jazz soundtrack drones in the background.

On Valentine’s Day, the zenith of the candyman’s calendar, we women love chocolate harder and more urgently than usual. Unless a man buys us chocolate, we will weep tears of rejection into our pillows. Even women at the peak of their careers obligingly to confess to craving one thing above everything else: “I just love any excuse to eat chocolate, really…eating chocolate is my whole way of life,” said celebrated actress Anne Hathaway, promoting her forthcoming film, Valentines Day. Forget financial or professional gain; forget personal and emotional fulfilment;w hat every woman truly wants from life and love is a box of cut-price truffles.

“I think there’s a very real sense in which women are supposed to say ‘chocolate’ whenever someone asks them what they want,” writes Dr Nina Power in her recent book, One Dimensional Woman [London: Zero Books, 2009]. “It symbolises a naughty virginity that gets its kicks only from a widely-available mucky cloying substitute…the kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just loves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly cocoa solids.”

Chocolate is the one form of female desire that is positively sanctioned in the schema of corporate feminine identity. The sickly, sugary stuff is promoted as a legitimate excuse for the expression of pleasure, of selfishness, of lust. Chocolate is ‘sinful’ – but not really. It is explicitly associated with sex, and touted both as an aphrodisiac and as a direct replacement for sexual enjoyment. The inference can be subtle, as in the infamously phallic Flake advertisemets, or the Milk Tray narrative of a lusty adventurer risking life and limb to swoop into a lady’s bedroom with a box of mid-range caramel centres available in any garage. It can also be explicit: a recent survey, helpfully commissioned by Cadbury’s, claimed that 52% of women preferred eating chocolate to having sex. The reason? “Chocolate never disappoints”.

Cadbury’s International Science Director, Paul Hebblethwaite, offered the following rigorous analysis: "It's not just the endorphins -as it melts in the mouth at body temperature, chocolate's creamy texture and unique aroma hit all of the body's senses, heightening the sensuality of the experience." With a chocolate market worth £5billion in the UK alone, it’s surprising that we aren’t constantly dissolving in paroxysms of uncontrollable lust. My own sciencetastic experiments have drawn the conclusion that the brief sugar rush and tacky aftertaste of most commercial chocolate normally leaves one feeling merely a little bit full and a little bit sick.

Chocolate orthodoxy holds that the stuff is emotionally rather than bodily nutritious. Upsettingly large quantities of women self-define as 'chocoholics', and there are even support groups for women who have become physically and psychologically addicted to chocolate - an understandable phenomenon in a culture saturated with messages that chocolate is both a permitted conduit for the expression and acceptance of desire and that rare, precious thing - a way of being kind to yourself.

Being high-calorie, high-fat and almost entirely void of nutritive value, chocolate runs dangerously close to violating the other golden rule of commercial femininity – the imperative to get rid of one’s insulating fat layer at any and, indeed, every cost – but marketing executives have found a solution to this problem. Last Christmas, billboards across the land proclaimed Goodwill to all women : not only was consuming a KitKat Senses the ultimate in chaste, cheeky decadence, at only 165 calories a stick you, madam, could experience the corporate sanctioned female pleasure principle whilst continuing to take up as little space as humanly possible.

All of this heady indulgence comes with a cost. Whilst the Fairtrade movement is gaining currency, almost half the chocolate consumed in the West still comes from Ivory Coast, where child slavery and forced labour on cocoa farms is rife. It is estimated that in Ghana and Ivory coast there are 6.3 million children under 14 working in cocoa production, many of them victims of human trafficking working in brutal conditions. Go on, take a bite, you know you want to.

This Valentine's day, I have asked my boyfriend to exempt himself from the hordes of confused-looking men shambling through Thorntons in search of the key to women’s desires. I'd prefer a conversation to a box of chocolates: what I want from love and life is infinitely more complex and multifarious than a slice of dubiously-sourced, semiotically overloaded candies can provide. On the other hand, maybe I should just shut up and stick a Flake in it.