Before the left gets too precious about David Davis' reported comments on the 'brokeback coalition', we should give our sluggish short-term memories something of a workout. Erudite and edifying though schoolyard slurs of this kind may be, they are neither new nor exclusive to the right.
Remember Harriet Harman's cheeky suggestion, in her first speech as leader of the opposition, that “while the happy couple are enjoying the thrill of the rose garden, the in-laws are saying that they are just not right for each other”? Remember all those headlines about ‘a very civil partnership’ and ‘a man-date to govern’? Playground gay jokes have been employed across the political spectrum to cast aspersions on the new government from day one.
It’s a troubling trend, and not just because of the obvious problems with equating male homosexuality, even in jest, with something the press and politicians find unnatural, suspicious and uncomfortable. The conceit is dazzling in its banality, substituting genuine political analysis for sniggering dick-jokes: it’s carry-on commentating, and it manages to belittle all parties involved whilst failing to enlighten us one iota about the reasons for the fractures already emerging in the new government.
The discomfort underlying all the ‘Eton fag’ and ‘brokeback partnership’ catcalls is multiferous, but it’s hard not to get the impression that a coalition government is somehow not daddy enough for us: that political partnerships and electoral reform are somehow not manly enough for the tough, thrusting, winner-takes-all tradition of British politics. And as any thirteen-year-old boy can tell you, anything with the slightest hint of hetero-abnormality is gay, and gay is, like, completely rubbish. Obviously.
There is substantial historical precedent for homosexual inference as a form of satire: from Tacitus to the Earl of Rochester the suggestion has implied decadence, depravity and dodgy politics. In 1791, at the height of the French revolution, an anonymous French writer circulated the scandalous "Memoirs of Antonina: Displying the Private intrigues and Uncommon Passions...of Great Persons," a burlesque intended to mock the court of Louis XVI by implying that Marie Antoinette was an Indigo-Girls-listening, sandal-wearing, alfalfa-sprout-eating lesbian, or 'tribade' in the language of the day. 'Antonina' was genuinely subversive in a way that contemporary ‘brokeback coalition’ jokes are not, because at the time popular derision of the monarchy was a serious and dangerous undertaking. Nonetheless, it has always been easier to chuckle about the gays than to actually engage with the shortfalls of any particular government.
There is much to criticise about this coalition, not least the fact that ultimately, it’s the vulnerable, the difficult and the poor whom our new leaders are busy screwing, not each other. In this context, knob jokes are both offensive and unhelpful – although the particular notion of a ‘brokeback coalition’ is more apt that David Davis or John Redwood might realise.
The film ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is not, as has been intimated, the simple tale of a cosy gay relationship, but the story of a love affair between two men from deeply conservative backgrounds, plagued by insecurity and doubt and frightened of retribution from their communities. The movie ends in violence, disappointment and betrayal. Many members of the press and political class seem to be fostering a hope that this government will end the same way – but for those of us who happen to prefer gay sex to slashing the welfare state, the prospect of another four years of schoolyard homophobia is a grim one.
Showing posts with label I blame the meeja. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I blame the meeja. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
We are the fifth estate [cross-post from New Statesman]
Apologies for being scant in cross-posting and monitoring comments - I'm currently trying to work three jobs whilst living out of a suitcase and healing a broken heart, and it's all got a bit melodramatic. I'll be blogging about the budget tonight, once I can work out something more coherent to write than 'fuck', 800 times over. Anyone else feel like they've been kicked in the soul? Yeah, me too.
****
Remember hard copy? Your kids might not. This week it emerged that newspaper sales are plummeting in Britain, with only 33% of the population now claiming to be regular readers of analogue news. As more and more of us cherry-pick our media online, drawing little distinction between the mainstream press and the popular blogosphere, industry insiders are beginning to panic, predicting the violent death of quality commentary and investigative journalism at the multiferous hands of the internet.
On several baffling occasions in recent months, I have found myself at snooty media events where hosts introduce me and my colleagues as gingerly as ‘bloggers’, rather as if we were the grinning emissaries of a rogue state, ambassadors from a territory of violent cultural change which the authorities might soon see fit to brutally suppress but which, for now, must be appeased with canapés and party invitations. Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods.
This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne. Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done. Whilst the media establishment guards its borders with paranoid rigour, snobbishly distinguishing between 'bloggers' and 'journalists', people from the internet have already infiltrated the mainstream. Many influential writers now work across both camps, such as author, blogger and digital activist Cory Doctorow, who observed that the blogosphere need not threaten paid comment journalism:
“Commercially speaking, newspapers can make enough money from advertising to pay reasonable rates for opinion,” said Doctorow. “I know of at least one that does, and that's my site, BoingBoing, which reaches millions of readers every month. By operating efficiently, we can more than match the fees paid by the New York Times, for example, which always pays peanuts for op-eds because the glory of being published in the NYT is meant to be its own reward.
"After you take away the adverts, the personals, the filler and the pieces hacked together from press releases, the average paper contains about fifteen column inches of decent investigative journalism and commentary,” said Doctorow. “And the internet is more than capable of financing fifteen column inches a day.”
What the blogosphere threatens is not the survival of comment journalism itself: it threatens the monopoly of the media elite, holding the self-important fourth estate to a higher standard than bourgeois columnists and editors find comfortable. We are, in effect, a fifth estate, scrutinising the mainstream media and challenging its assumptions.
Doctorow is right to suggest that we are living through what Marx and Engels might term a “permanent technological revolution”. This weekend, in an incisive essay in The Guardian, John Naughton observed that being a consumer of media and journalism during the radical transformation of today's communications environment is a little
"like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us.”
One thing, however, is certain: journalism is changing forever. The notion of political commentary as a few-to-many exercise, produced by highly-paid elites and policed by big business, has been shattered beyond repair. The internet is a many-to-many medium, and those who write and comment here are not media insiders, nor are we the mob. We are something altogether new.
We are the fifth estate, and we are forging a path through the miasma of technological change towards more a honest, democratic model of commentary - alongside a lot of porn and some pictures of amusing cats. The media revolution is ongoing. Whatever comes next, the bloggers' battle-cry must be the permanent technological revolution.
Cory Doctorow's new novel about gaming and digital organisation, For The Win, is published by Harper Voyager. You can register here for this Saturday's Blog Nation
****
Remember hard copy? Your kids might not. This week it emerged that newspaper sales are plummeting in Britain, with only 33% of the population now claiming to be regular readers of analogue news. As more and more of us cherry-pick our media online, drawing little distinction between the mainstream press and the popular blogosphere, industry insiders are beginning to panic, predicting the violent death of quality commentary and investigative journalism at the multiferous hands of the internet.
On several baffling occasions in recent months, I have found myself at snooty media events where hosts introduce me and my colleagues as gingerly as ‘bloggers’, rather as if we were the grinning emissaries of a rogue state, ambassadors from a territory of violent cultural change which the authorities might soon see fit to brutally suppress but which, for now, must be appeased with canapés and party invitations. Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods.
This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne. Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done. Whilst the media establishment guards its borders with paranoid rigour, snobbishly distinguishing between 'bloggers' and 'journalists', people from the internet have already infiltrated the mainstream. Many influential writers now work across both camps, such as author, blogger and digital activist Cory Doctorow, who observed that the blogosphere need not threaten paid comment journalism:
“Commercially speaking, newspapers can make enough money from advertising to pay reasonable rates for opinion,” said Doctorow. “I know of at least one that does, and that's my site, BoingBoing, which reaches millions of readers every month. By operating efficiently, we can more than match the fees paid by the New York Times, for example, which always pays peanuts for op-eds because the glory of being published in the NYT is meant to be its own reward.
"After you take away the adverts, the personals, the filler and the pieces hacked together from press releases, the average paper contains about fifteen column inches of decent investigative journalism and commentary,” said Doctorow. “And the internet is more than capable of financing fifteen column inches a day.”
What the blogosphere threatens is not the survival of comment journalism itself: it threatens the monopoly of the media elite, holding the self-important fourth estate to a higher standard than bourgeois columnists and editors find comfortable. We are, in effect, a fifth estate, scrutinising the mainstream media and challenging its assumptions.
Last month, when Danny Dyer appeared to advise a reader of Zoo magazine to cut his girlfriend's face, the feminist arm of the fifth estate responded angrily, prompted a retraction and apology from Zoo and successfully organised a donation drive to raised more money for women’s refuge charities than the discredited Dyer’s violently misogynist film Pimp made in its first week of release. That’s the type of power that scares the wits out of the dinosaurs in analogue media.
Every day, the British blogosphere becomes less amateurish and more relevant. This weekend the popular forum Liberal Conspiracy will host Blog Nation, an event bringing together bloggers, journalists and politicians on the left to determine how the internet can build progressive campaigns to fight public sector cuts. “We have a strong community that can do activism and provide niche information that escapes mainstream newspapers,” said Liberal Conspiracy editor Sunny Hundal. “We want to use the net to get the left to think more about strategy and action - and get people to work together, better!”
Doctorow is right to suggest that we are living through what Marx and Engels might term a “permanent technological revolution”. This weekend, in an incisive essay in The Guardian, John Naughton observed that being a consumer of media and journalism during the radical transformation of today's communications environment is a little
"like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us.”
One thing, however, is certain: journalism is changing forever. The notion of political commentary as a few-to-many exercise, produced by highly-paid elites and policed by big business, has been shattered beyond repair. The internet is a many-to-many medium, and those who write and comment here are not media insiders, nor are we the mob. We are something altogether new.
We are the fifth estate, and we are forging a path through the miasma of technological change towards more a honest, democratic model of commentary - alongside a lot of porn and some pictures of amusing cats. The media revolution is ongoing. Whatever comes next, the bloggers' battle-cry must be the permanent technological revolution.
Cory Doctorow's new novel about gaming and digital organisation, For The Win, is published by Harper Voyager. You can register here for this Saturday's Blog Nation
Friday, 6 November 2009
Have you no shame?
I was struck by this article, in which American journalist Penelope Trunk defends her decision, despite an unanticipated global barrage of hate mail, to post the following to her Twitter feed:
"I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin."
That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read. Personal, factual, shoving the meaty political details of women's everyday life right up in your face. Plus, it quite delightfully manages to combine in 32 words most of the big taboos of modern misogynist thought: women bleeding in the boardroom. Women being candid about the parts of our physical lives which aren't to do with fucking but also matter to us. Women's bodies being, in fact, more than just tools for baby-making and delivering sexual pleasure to men. Women being outspoken and proud about reproductive self-determination. Women reacting to the termi,nation of unwanted pregnancy not with horrific, life-stomping mental breakdown but with what most of us actually feel: relief. The radical truths that women, with their bleeding, messy cunts, can hold high-powered jobs, make decisions about our own bodies, own our own moral compasses and face pain and humiliation with our heads held high.
Still, Ms Trunk was somewhat surprised at the vehemence of the uproar that followed. "Television, blogs and newspapers around the world reported what I had written. People posted critcisms on my blog. My boyfriend's extended family called to make sure he was dumping me... I was even interviewed on CNN where the news anchor asked me, "Young lady, do you have no shame?""
To which the obvious retort is: why, was she expected to? Was she expected to be ashamed? Of what? Of suffering through a miscarriage? Of not wanting a third child? Of doing both of these things whilst having the temerity to have, gods forbid, a job?
Shame about our bodies and our choices is inculcated in women from birth. We like to think that, because you can turn on MTV or open a newspaper on any given day and look at scantily-clad ladies gyrating appealingly for the camera, we live in a sexually open society. We do not. And there are certain aspects of bio-female experience - miscarriage, for example - which are still horrendously taboo, about which we are still expected to feel shame - moral shame, physical shame, political shame. We are expected to shut up about it, get on with it in private, clear up our own mess and not ask for any help or understanding, because we are women, and shame is our birthright.
Well, fuck that, and fuck the thousands of busybodies who saw fit to try and foist upon Penelope Trunk the shame that she so bravely and publicly refused to own. This is not about privacy, or modesty, but about shame, and what we are and aren't expected to feel shameful about.
Hundreds of thousands of women use the internet to discuss their sexual exploits in detail and are not condemned. Belle De Jour talks about her experiences as a middle-class sex worker, and there has been no witch-hunt over her lack of 'shame' - indeed, books and a TV series have been made about her life. Penelope Trunk posted about experiencing the pain of miscarriage at work and the emotions that that stirred in her in the same way that she posts about her life on a farm in Winsconsin, her upcoming marriage, her work as a journalist and mother. All of these things are part of her life; why should she feel shameful about them?
Down with shame. Down with ignorance, secrecy and silence, down with female experience being lived in fear and embarrassment, and down with shame. Penelope Trunk should be considered a feminist hero for her contribution to telling women's truths without apology or embarrassment, as John Stuart Mill advocated in The Subjection of Women:
"The knowledge which men can acquire of women ...is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
"And that time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them may tell anything whic men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear".
For anyone who still thinks that Penelope Trunk is unfittingly 'shameless', immoral or simply self-promoting, I'd ask you to consider that George Orwell was talking about women as well as men when he said that "if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
"I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin."
That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read. Personal, factual, shoving the meaty political details of women's everyday life right up in your face. Plus, it quite delightfully manages to combine in 32 words most of the big taboos of modern misogynist thought: women bleeding in the boardroom. Women being candid about the parts of our physical lives which aren't to do with fucking but also matter to us. Women's bodies being, in fact, more than just tools for baby-making and delivering sexual pleasure to men. Women being outspoken and proud about reproductive self-determination. Women reacting to the termi,nation of unwanted pregnancy not with horrific, life-stomping mental breakdown but with what most of us actually feel: relief. The radical truths that women, with their bleeding, messy cunts, can hold high-powered jobs, make decisions about our own bodies, own our own moral compasses and face pain and humiliation with our heads held high.
Still, Ms Trunk was somewhat surprised at the vehemence of the uproar that followed. "Television, blogs and newspapers around the world reported what I had written. People posted critcisms on my blog. My boyfriend's extended family called to make sure he was dumping me... I was even interviewed on CNN where the news anchor asked me, "Young lady, do you have no shame?""
To which the obvious retort is: why, was she expected to? Was she expected to be ashamed? Of what? Of suffering through a miscarriage? Of not wanting a third child? Of doing both of these things whilst having the temerity to have, gods forbid, a job?
Shame about our bodies and our choices is inculcated in women from birth. We like to think that, because you can turn on MTV or open a newspaper on any given day and look at scantily-clad ladies gyrating appealingly for the camera, we live in a sexually open society. We do not. And there are certain aspects of bio-female experience - miscarriage, for example - which are still horrendously taboo, about which we are still expected to feel shame - moral shame, physical shame, political shame. We are expected to shut up about it, get on with it in private, clear up our own mess and not ask for any help or understanding, because we are women, and shame is our birthright.
Well, fuck that, and fuck the thousands of busybodies who saw fit to try and foist upon Penelope Trunk the shame that she so bravely and publicly refused to own. This is not about privacy, or modesty, but about shame, and what we are and aren't expected to feel shameful about.
Hundreds of thousands of women use the internet to discuss their sexual exploits in detail and are not condemned. Belle De Jour talks about her experiences as a middle-class sex worker, and there has been no witch-hunt over her lack of 'shame' - indeed, books and a TV series have been made about her life. Penelope Trunk posted about experiencing the pain of miscarriage at work and the emotions that that stirred in her in the same way that she posts about her life on a farm in Winsconsin, her upcoming marriage, her work as a journalist and mother. All of these things are part of her life; why should she feel shameful about them?
Down with shame. Down with ignorance, secrecy and silence, down with female experience being lived in fear and embarrassment, and down with shame. Penelope Trunk should be considered a feminist hero for her contribution to telling women's truths without apology or embarrassment, as John Stuart Mill advocated in The Subjection of Women:
"The knowledge which men can acquire of women ...is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
"And that time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them may tell anything whic men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear".
For anyone who still thinks that Penelope Trunk is unfittingly 'shameless', immoral or simply self-promoting, I'd ask you to consider that George Orwell was talking about women as well as men when he said that "if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Me, the Patriarchy and my Big Red Pen.
I'm back from the Feminism in London conference, where there were tears, standing ovations, rants, arguments (one between me and a nutty racist apologist in front of about a hundred bloody people) and where, in Bea Campbell's words, 'a good old think' was had by all. My brain is buzzing far too much to give the event the full write-up it deserves, so that'll have to wait. Meanwhile, here's what I did on the way home.Defacing sexist tube adverts is something that's been pioneered by the Feminist groups I'm involved with in London over the past couple of years, but somehow I never seem to have had a pen, or a sticker, or the nerve, at the right time. At the conference they were giving out free permanent markers, so I shoved a couple in my pockets. The last session on prostitution, rape and objectification made me chokingly angry, and as I walked back to the station the anger was still there. Anger on behalf of the women I spoke to who have been raped, abused and silenced, anger that my sisters and I still have to live in a world where rape goes unpunished and child abuse goes unspoken and women starve themselves to death in their thousands in order to take up less space, where girls are brought up to hate their bodies and service men and be quiet and say sorry and fuck when we're asked to and shut up when we're told to unless we want to be thought of as crazy fucking bitches stupid cunts whores slags, certainly not fit enough for Rod Liddle to shag after a few drinks ha fucking ha ha.
And on this journey home, with all this rage and frustration boiling in my head, it just so happened that I saw one too many adverts trying to sell me painful, expensive surgery to increase my 'confidence'. 'All it needs is a little nip-tuck', the advert promised, next to a photograph of a woman with unreal breasts bulging out of a skimpy top and her head thrown back in a gormless grin like someone had shot her with a tranquilizer dart.
And I thought, hey, screw you. I've got a big red pen.
So I took my big red pen, apologising to the people I stepped past like the ridiculously English person I am, crossed out the slogan, and wrote 'This is not normal - fight sexism!' in big red capitals across the advert.
God, it felt good. It felt good, and it felt naughty - naughtier than shoplifting did as a kid, and the rush was bigger and better and braver. It felt so transgressive. Everyone was staring at me. I was invading sacred advertising space! I was breaking two of our biggest taboos - one, you NEVER mention that there might be something more important to a woman than looking whatever is currently considered 'sexy'; two, you NEVER talk back to the adverts. Never. Not allowed.
Thrilled, I got off the tube carriage and climbed onto the next one along, where I did exactly the same thing on two more adverts. I continued in this manner, with commuters muttering and tutting and one elderly lady giving me a big thumbs-up, until a bloke in his thirties sitting opposite me beckoned me over - crooked his finger and beckoned - and said - 'Come on, what's the problem, isn't it the woman's free choice? Can't she do what she wants with her money?'
I said: 'Of course she can. Just as I can do what I want with my big red pen. She's free to pay people to mutilate her and I'm free to attack people for trying to persuade me that I should do the same, or that my baby sisters should, or my friends. That is MY free choice, and MY free speech. And by the way, the woman in the picture doesn't really look like that, see that little halo around her boobs? Photoshop.'
We screeched into the station, and I jumped off and onto the next carriage with a rush of blood and bile to my head, feeling suddenly powerful.
Because today I know something for sure about the free choice of the theoretical woman the apologists talk about, that theoretical woman who's glad she spent her money on cosmetic surgery rather than education or her financial future, that theoretical woman who just looooves to look good more than anything, that theoretical happy hooker without a care in the world, I know something about the theoretical choices of those theoretical women conveniently put forward by every patriarchal apologist I meet - I know that my choices are just as important as theirs. I know that the choices of the former prostitutes with PTSD who I met today and the choices of the thousands of feminists I know and the choices of the millions of women who would really like to feel safer and stronger in their bodies and lives, that those choices are just as important as any choice we might make to cut ourselves up to look sexy. And you know, I can live with challenging that choice.
By putting up adverts telling me that to feel confident I must look a certain way, for the purposes of which I must have surgery, the owners of these adverts are taking away MY choice to feel good about my body. But with my red pen and a little courage, today I took that choice back. And I feel more powerful, and more confident, than I have in a long time.
Monday, 27 July 2009
Media lies and the 'Me First' generation
Ooh, look. Here’s some probably-quite-new-fairly-meaningless statistics about youth, gender and mental health from which people with no knowledge of psychiatry and little conception of the complexities of mental health difficulties and young people’s lives can extrapolate almost anything they fancy. What fun. Let’s see how insensitively we can completely miss the point, shall we? That’s probably what I’d be thinking to myself were I an overpaid broadsheet grunt; as it is, I’m an angry blogger, and a youngish woman with mental health difficulties to boot, so all I can do is stand at the sidelines with my modicum of inside knowledge and carp at the immense cocking stupidity that’s been hashed out in the press over the past few days.
Let’s start with the earth-shivering ‘revelation’ that gets wheeled out every year or so: that feminism has failed to make women happier. It’s been standard Mail and Telegraph fodder for ages, but now the Graun have stepped in too, spinning Madeleine Bunting’s piece on how ‘consumerism’ is ‘damaging’ women for all it’s worth. Bunting’s moderate article is drawn from the more thumpingly derivative conclusions of smug pop-psychologist Oliver James, whose job is to travel around the world being surprised that people as rich as he is aren’t happy. He, too, is deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of young women, given that recent studies have shown that – shocker – some 15-year-old-girls aren’t very happy and also like a drink. He deplores the fact that “Victoria Beckham [is]consistently the girl they most want to be during this era”. Yes, that’s right. Because as far as Mr James is concerned, Victoria Beckham – 35 years old, world-famous model, fashion designer, businesswoman, former singer and mother to three children – is still nothing more than a “girl”.
James, like Bunting, is simply appalled that women and girls aren’t happy. After all, what more could we want? Haven’t we got the vote now, and the right to work almost as good jobs for almost as much money as men whilst still carrying out 80% of unpaid cleaning and caring duties? Haven’t we got the right to behave however the hell we like as long as we’re not old, or ugly, or overweight, or lesbians, or left wing, or non-white, or happily unmarried, or disabled, or poor? If we’re not all gurning beatifically now, surely that means that we were wrong all along? Shouldn’t we get back to the kitchen and find husbands to bear cookies and bake children for, if we’ll be happier that way?
If you hadn’t guessed, I find all this gawping media speculation about women’s mental health disgusting, if far from surprising: down the centuries, casting aspersions on our mental health has been the number one way to keep women in check and limit our choices, from lobotomies for ‘nymphomania’ in the 19th century, to forced hysterectomies for hospital inpatients in the 1970s, to today’s handwringing over the mental health of women who choose to have abortions, as if women weren’t mature enough to take that risk.
Our choices are pathologised and moralised and muddled together with the very sensitive, completely separate subject of mental health difficulty in ways that are achingly archaic and damaging. Not to mention demeaning, because as well as leaping to the assumption that ‘Women’s Liberation’ has actually achieved its aims, the attitude presumes that what women want – politically and personally – is to be ‘happy’. Who said we want to be happy? I thought we wanted to be free, to be fulfilled, to have the power to make our own choices and to lead our own lives, to be happy or miserable on our own terms. The suffragettes didn't fling themselves under the hooves of royal horses for 'happiness'. They had much more important things to fight for.
Ah well. At least the same sort of crass, derivative statistic-bending media hypocrisy isn't being applied to the mental health of young men as well this week. O hai, Anne Perkins.
New statistics from Childline show that the proportion of boys calling the helpline to seek support for abuse, bullying and other distressing situations has doubled, from one in five to one in three. Rather than something to be applauded - suggesting that the millions of hours poured in by teachers, care workers and child psychologists trying to make boys more comfortable with seeking help have not been wasted - Anne Perkins suggests that this is in fact a sign of the moral weakness of our generation, what she calls "the 'because I'm worth it' generation'" in her rather unfortunately titled article When self-love is out of control.
Perkins' analysis of what makes boys unhappy is no less sexist, patronising and hateful than James' summation of the "toxins" ruining the lives of the young girls whose periods, let's not forget, are according to Mr James dependent on how attentive their fathers are:
There is a long list of candidates: laddette culture, Wags as models…and a massive sense of relative deprivation – always feeling you deserve better than what you have got, be that your boyfriend, MP3 player or your body. This was the It Could Be You era, one stoked by the advent of reality television in which girls such as Jade Goody, who would never have had a chance in previous times, became rich and famous just for appearing on Big Brother.
It was James, Perkins and their ilk in the first place, gangs of privileged media pundits from older generations, who decided that we were the generation that ‘had it all’, rather than, say, the generation who were trying their damn hardest to remain human despite being saddled with the highest expectations and least support structures of any group of young people in living memory. Not that that’s news, of course. Every generation tries to embody in its young its worst fears for itself, and our narcissistic, materialistic, addicted, self-centred, phenomenally up-fucked parents’ generation pointing the finger at us and telling us we’re moral degenerates is hardly news.
In fact, we are one of the less socially mobile generations of the past century; the real ‘It Could Be You’ generation, the generation with the most genuine opportunities for kids from lower income families, is the generation now making these ridiculous pronouncements: Oliver James and Anne Perkins' generation. To recap:
1.We didn't signed up to the women's movement to get happy; we'd rather be miserable on our own terms than Oliver James' fantasy grinning bovine housewives
2.The mental health of women and girls cannot be morally measured, and to suggest otherwise is highly offensive
3.The mental health of men and boys has no cultural value: it is not a sign of weakness or even of increasing distress that more young men are seeking help. In fact, the Childline statistics are to be welcomed
4. Mental health is not a gender issue: your mental health is not related to, or a predicter of, how good a little boy or girl you are. External arbiters of gender are, in fact, something that implicates your mental health rather than the other way around. Mental health difficulty has no moral value, and it cannot be placed on a map of social or gender deviance: it's simply a problem that a lot of young people, as well as a lot of not-young people, are trying to deal with from day to day.
5. Columnists: take your jealous mitts out of your cloth ears and try, please, to understand that the generation you so readily dismiss as narcissistic and frivolous has problems of its own that you can't even begin to comprehend, mainly because so far you haven't bothered, unless you're Nick Cohen.
Here ends the lesson
Let’s start with the earth-shivering ‘revelation’ that gets wheeled out every year or so: that feminism has failed to make women happier. It’s been standard Mail and Telegraph fodder for ages, but now the Graun have stepped in too, spinning Madeleine Bunting’s piece on how ‘consumerism’ is ‘damaging’ women for all it’s worth. Bunting’s moderate article is drawn from the more thumpingly derivative conclusions of smug pop-psychologist Oliver James, whose job is to travel around the world being surprised that people as rich as he is aren’t happy. He, too, is deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of young women, given that recent studies have shown that – shocker – some 15-year-old-girls aren’t very happy and also like a drink. He deplores the fact that “Victoria Beckham [is]consistently the girl they most want to be during this era”. Yes, that’s right. Because as far as Mr James is concerned, Victoria Beckham – 35 years old, world-famous model, fashion designer, businesswoman, former singer and mother to three children – is still nothing more than a “girl”.
James, like Bunting, is simply appalled that women and girls aren’t happy. After all, what more could we want? Haven’t we got the vote now, and the right to work almost as good jobs for almost as much money as men whilst still carrying out 80% of unpaid cleaning and caring duties? Haven’t we got the right to behave however the hell we like as long as we’re not old, or ugly, or overweight, or lesbians, or left wing, or non-white, or happily unmarried, or disabled, or poor? If we’re not all gurning beatifically now, surely that means that we were wrong all along? Shouldn’t we get back to the kitchen and find husbands to bear cookies and bake children for, if we’ll be happier that way?
If you hadn’t guessed, I find all this gawping media speculation about women’s mental health disgusting, if far from surprising: down the centuries, casting aspersions on our mental health has been the number one way to keep women in check and limit our choices, from lobotomies for ‘nymphomania’ in the 19th century, to forced hysterectomies for hospital inpatients in the 1970s, to today’s handwringing over the mental health of women who choose to have abortions, as if women weren’t mature enough to take that risk.
Our choices are pathologised and moralised and muddled together with the very sensitive, completely separate subject of mental health difficulty in ways that are achingly archaic and damaging. Not to mention demeaning, because as well as leaping to the assumption that ‘Women’s Liberation’ has actually achieved its aims, the attitude presumes that what women want – politically and personally – is to be ‘happy’. Who said we want to be happy? I thought we wanted to be free, to be fulfilled, to have the power to make our own choices and to lead our own lives, to be happy or miserable on our own terms. The suffragettes didn't fling themselves under the hooves of royal horses for 'happiness'. They had much more important things to fight for.
Ah well. At least the same sort of crass, derivative statistic-bending media hypocrisy isn't being applied to the mental health of young men as well this week. O hai, Anne Perkins.
New statistics from Childline show that the proportion of boys calling the helpline to seek support for abuse, bullying and other distressing situations has doubled, from one in five to one in three. Rather than something to be applauded - suggesting that the millions of hours poured in by teachers, care workers and child psychologists trying to make boys more comfortable with seeking help have not been wasted - Anne Perkins suggests that this is in fact a sign of the moral weakness of our generation, what she calls "the 'because I'm worth it' generation'" in her rather unfortunately titled article When self-love is out of control.
Perkins' analysis of what makes boys unhappy is no less sexist, patronising and hateful than James' summation of the "toxins" ruining the lives of the young girls whose periods, let's not forget, are according to Mr James dependent on how attentive their fathers are:
There is a long list of candidates: laddette culture, Wags as models…and a massive sense of relative deprivation – always feeling you deserve better than what you have got, be that your boyfriend, MP3 player or your body. This was the It Could Be You era, one stoked by the advent of reality television in which girls such as Jade Goody, who would never have had a chance in previous times, became rich and famous just for appearing on Big Brother.
It was James, Perkins and their ilk in the first place, gangs of privileged media pundits from older generations, who decided that we were the generation that ‘had it all’, rather than, say, the generation who were trying their damn hardest to remain human despite being saddled with the highest expectations and least support structures of any group of young people in living memory. Not that that’s news, of course. Every generation tries to embody in its young its worst fears for itself, and our narcissistic, materialistic, addicted, self-centred, phenomenally up-fucked parents’ generation pointing the finger at us and telling us we’re moral degenerates is hardly news.
In fact, we are one of the less socially mobile generations of the past century; the real ‘It Could Be You’ generation, the generation with the most genuine opportunities for kids from lower income families, is the generation now making these ridiculous pronouncements: Oliver James and Anne Perkins' generation. To recap:
1.We didn't signed up to the women's movement to get happy; we'd rather be miserable on our own terms than Oliver James' fantasy grinning bovine housewives
2.The mental health of women and girls cannot be morally measured, and to suggest otherwise is highly offensive
3.The mental health of men and boys has no cultural value: it is not a sign of weakness or even of increasing distress that more young men are seeking help. In fact, the Childline statistics are to be welcomed
4. Mental health is not a gender issue: your mental health is not related to, or a predicter of, how good a little boy or girl you are. External arbiters of gender are, in fact, something that implicates your mental health rather than the other way around. Mental health difficulty has no moral value, and it cannot be placed on a map of social or gender deviance: it's simply a problem that a lot of young people, as well as a lot of not-young people, are trying to deal with from day to day.
5. Columnists: take your jealous mitts out of your cloth ears and try, please, to understand that the generation you so readily dismiss as narcissistic and frivolous has problems of its own that you can't even begin to comprehend, mainly because so far you haven't bothered, unless you're Nick Cohen.
Here ends the lesson
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