Posted by Irresponsibility
Generic ex-American Idoler Adam Lambert is — oooh! Shock! Horror! — g-a-y. And when he performed at the American Music Awards he (Shock! Horror!) kissed a man as part of his routine. Homophobia is easily America’s favourite phobia, which is depressing but predictable. It far more irritating when prudish newspaper columnists gussy up their same-sex disgust as concern for public morality — as does a Guardian blogger, writing:
My issue, however, isn’t with the kiss but with the way Lambert has chosen to present his sexuality, particularly in his lyrics. Lambert’s idea of sex is imbued with aggression.
Oh shit. Stop the presses. Music where sex is imbued with aggression? That’s just terrible. Never seen or heard such a thing before. Why the kinky lyrics, like: “”I told you I’m a hold ya down until you’re amazed”? If only modern pop stars were more like those lovely Beatles (“You better run for your life if you can, little girl…Catch you with another man/That’s the end’a little girl”)
Or the Rolling Stones (“Scarred old slave driver know he’s doin alright/Hear him whip the women just around midnight/Ah brown sugar how come you taste so good”)
Or cheeky rockers Guns’n'Roses (“You’re a very sexy girl/That’s very hard to please… I, I wanna hear you scream“)
During his performance Lambert “simulated oral sex” and “cavorted in bondage gear”, prompting the blogger to primly note: “it became clear why an early morning programme would be wary of giving Lambert airtime”. Yikes. She has a point huh? Thank god Madonna, Britney, Christina, Rihanna, et al would never do such a thing.
The hand-wringing is not about sex, aggression, or leather chaps, it’s about our gawd-given right to not be reminded that sometimes boys don’t like girls, they like other boys. Heterosexuals are such delicate creatures.
Posted by Irresponsibility
As the First World frets about how to fight the Christmas flab the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports: “In 2008 the number of undernourished people in the world increased by 40 million“.
Not, as you might think, because of climate change, crop failure, too many pesticides, too little GM, or plain too little food. Globally the world enjoyed a “record harvest”. The problem is politics — and greed.
Hunger, in most cases, is caused by lack of money rather than a shortage of food production, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
Hunger isn’t an unavoidable natural catastrophe. It is a form of global social control. Hungry people are ill-equipped to hope, work, organise, or claim their rights. They don’t threaten the status quo. Terribly convenient for us, not so great for them.
Posted by Irresponsibility
There is nothing middle class white people like more than an whiff of pagan barbarism. Hindus slaughtering animals as part of a once-every-five-years ritual propitiation of the goddess Gadhimai fits the bill nicely. “Frightened calves galloped around in vain as the men, wearing red bandanas and armbands, pursued them and chopped off their heads,” the Guardian reports. Meanwhile the bloodthirsty hordes “Banned from entering the animal pen… scrambled up the three-metre walls to catch a glimpse of the carnage.”
The Guardian refers to this as “The world’s biggest animal sacrifice.” A curious claim given the UK slaughtered over 3 million animals in October 2009. That’s okay though, because we’re civilised people. If it were to appease the gods it would be weird. Eating the buggers is fine.
Posted by Irresponsibility
A Salem News column on value got me thinking about the problem with capitalism. Proponents argue, rightly, that people are more motivated in a system where individual effort results in tangible individual reward. In that respect capitalism is clear-eyed: human beings are basically selfish. Even the most magnanimous-seeming social structures (like the nomadic Native Americans described in Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society) evolve to sustain the individual. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for a friend precisely because our biological imperative is animal selfishness. Where capitalism goes awry is in thinking of reward in a purely material sense. It only understands individual betterment in property terms. The very idea that holding property is inherently more desirable than not holding property is classical-capitalist to the core.
This is not natural or inevitable. It is a product of a flawed value system that can and must be changed. People only believe that their individual worth is intrinsically linked to their bank balances because they’ve been taught to believe it. A better, more functional system – one which wouldn’t rely on over-production, mass consumerism and the boom-bust market cycle – would recognise what we currently consider the “intangible” rewards of endeavour as actual awards. Under the existing regime a first-rate mechanic’s successful car repair has no value until he gets paid for it. Likewise, a beautifully-cut dress is of no value unless some corporation purchases the design and mass-produces it for mass-consumption. A hand-written note has no value because no one is paid for its production. And so on. The majority of the things we really need, the things that raise our lives above the level of Hobbesian gloom, are ‘worthless’ under the current system. No wonder people are depressed.
Out of torpor, lack of imagination or simple blindness, we soldier on. Some people tackle the business of making a living from what they love. It is a good impulse, but still a basically backward approach to the problem. Rather than turning what we love into money, we should order love and money correctly in the hierarchy of human needs. It is a Utopian task, but not impossible. (Anyway, what the fuck is the point of undertaking non-Utopian tasks? Why waste your energy fighting for something less-than-wonderful?) All it takes is to define, the thing itself as having value. It is a simple matter of semantics; an act of will. Our current socio-economic system was built on words and desire; it can be as-easily rebuilt. We must reassign value.
In this brave new world the smooth-running engine, the well-crafted phrase and the graceful sweep of a gown are inherently worthwhile. The financial consideration in rewarding the person who accomplished these tasks should be incidental and unimportant. If possible, dispensed with altogether. Then the reward for individual effort becomes the thing itself. The satisfaction of creation, the feeling of agency. It is wrong that a master craftsperson can achieve something unique and beautiful, yet feel worthless because no-one has deigned to assign a cash value to their creativity. Under a properly-run system of “capitalism” the capital accrued is personal satisfaction.
Forget the “need” for money. Correctly run, society can function in socialist-capitalist harmony. People, rewarded by the social importance placed in their creativity, will produce according to the idealised model of capitalism, that is always seeking to improve their product. Meanwhile, the government, need no longer expend energy on bullying its citizens into consumerist slavery, can devote itself to administering a social system that provides for the well-being and security of the state without interfering excessively in the private lives of citizens. Without the artificial socio-economic divisions driven by greedheads, people’s basic needs could be met with far less expense and effort than they are currently. Banning private home ownership would instantly eliminate the ruinous pressure to ‘get on the property ladder’. Long-term lease arrangements, rather than outright ownership, should be standard practice for anything that currently requires heavy credit to finance (e.g. cars and houses). Critically, all education, including higher-level, must be free and accessible. People must have ample opportunity to discover and develop their unique talents – otherwise the system doesn’t work. This means changing child-rearing arrangements and redefining ‘adulthood’ in non-economic terms. It means tearing up the current education system and breaking its cast-iron links to the industrial economy. It means rooting out our snobbery about various forms of creativity and replacing it with an all-inclusive ideal. It means understanding that a rubbish collector is as essential to society as an actor; a cleaner as valuable a person as a mechanical engineer. From that plane of wisdom, progress is possible.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Catching the 5AM flight from Amsterdam to Ibiza is painful enough without the inflight film being a Sandra Bullock/Ryan Reynolds rom-com. In ‘The Proposal’ Sandra plays a hard-nosed publisher, who happens to be Canadian and facing deportation, who bullies her assistant, Ryan, into marrying her. An opportunity, you might think, to bust open a few wedding cliches, or blow a raspberry at the sanctification of marriage.
Alas. Clearly market research showed that 90% of the world is remains actively stupid and is quite happy having gender stereotypes shoved down their craw in the name of light entertainment. Thus we learn, in the course of the film that ball-breaker Bullock is an orphan, who can’t swim, and cries when someone calls her a “witch”, hasn’t had sex in 18 months (frigid!) and not-so-secretly yearns for a manly man to sweep her off her feet.
Luckily her hunky assistant, Reynolds (who is so desirable in a cookie-cutter Abercrombie & Fitch model kinda way shop girls and exes fall at his feet like helpless petals drifting from a wilting rose) is on hand to be her faux-groom when she suddenly has to get hitched or be deported to Canada. The joke is that at first she thinks he’s just a big pushover. Because when she says “jump” he asks, “how high.” Turns out – ho ho! – she is wrong. He is a M-A-N. And he wants some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Before agreeing to the sham wedding he makes her get on her knees in the middle of the street (nothing suggestive about that) and then proceeds to blackmail her into giving him a promotion and publishing his pet project. Okay, okay, but she’s a bitchy bitch and deserves her come-uppance, right?
If only it ended there. They trundle off to Alaska to break the news to his family and throw the nosy immigration officials off the trail. When they get there it turns out that lowly assistant boy is the scion of Sitka aristocracy. They own the town. Literally. “You didn’t tell me you were the Alaskan Kennedys!” she flutters, dismayed. Now the appropriate socio-economic power structure has been established the erstwhile queen bee can hurry along the path to her transformation into milksop bride. Her phone gets stolen by an eagle, he cooly orders a replacement while she wails. She falls off a power boat and he sweeps her from the sea in suitably heroic fashion. She proves utterly useless at everything from carrying luggage to using an internet cafe. Turns out she’s not so tough after all, and he is.
Just in case anyone misses these oh-so-subtle messages there is some fantastic conflict between Reynolds and his overbearing dad, where the young ‘un gets to show off his father-slaying cojones. Grandma, the family matriarch, is half-senile and totally sentimental. But after a few days of being dragged to ropy bars and going on girly shopping expeditions Sandra cracks like the last egg in her rapidly withering 30-something ovaries, bawls at every opportunity and gives herself up for deportation rather than disappoint boywonder and his Kennedy-esque clan. The end bit involves Reynolds realising that now Bullock’s been fully inducted into brainless femininity he’s actually quite attracted to her and rushing off to save her from the nasty immigration agents.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Courtney
Everyone involved would agree it was a messy episode. Courtney was scheduled to do a photo-shoot and interview. Arrangements were protracted; grandiose. On the day, reports filtered back to the office. Courtney was late, Courtney was refusing to do this, or demanding that, timings were out the window, chaos in the door. The most salacious detail became a picture caption recording Courtney’s request her beautician wax her “box”. Ultimately, the interview never happened. The cover “shoot” was a series of candid snaps of Courtney Love naked in a black cab and writhing nude on a street somewhere in London, in the middle of the night. Her press officer, Barbara Charone (a fire-breathing legend in music circles) railed and Courtney called to howl imprecations, but it didn’t matter. Q had their shot and by god, they were going to use it.
Naïve and eager to get along, I nodded and chuckled at the appropriate points as the story of the shoot was bandied around the office. What a state. What a druggie. What a lunatic, my colleagues said aloud. What a slut. What a disgrace. What a blot on Kurt’s holy memory, came through plain enough between the lines. The Q staff, apart from the lesbian designer and I, were typical music journalists, e.g. well-educated middle-class boys whose dreams of rock glory landed them in front of broke-down iMacs in a badly ventilated office tower convenient to Marks & Spencer Oxford Street (good for lunches and the occasional bottle of inexpensive birthday champagne). Cynicism prevailed. I was faintly perturbed by the whole Courtney thing. Using the shots seemed, tasteless, at best. But what did she expect? You can’t hoover (presumably) a load of drugs, act crazy, take all your clothes off in front of a photographer and expect the magazine to not do anything. Right?
For a while I repeated the story because it advertised my intimacy with the inner-circle workings of rock journalism. Then I forgot about it. Not until the Britney “meltdown” did I began to reconsider Courtney’s place in my stock of anecdotes. Older, I was wise to the blatant misogyny of the media attacks on Britney. Surely it was different, though, I thought. Q was – we were – justified in our treatment of Courtney. After all, we hadn’t made her go nuts and take her clothes off. Had we? The skin-prickling realisation hit me: we were worse. I was so keen to appear hip, to prove I could be as cynical as the boys, to show I wasn’t like her, that I joined right in.
What did she expect? Probably to be treated like a human being. She was plainly in no state to undertake a promotional photo shoot. Someone, from her team, or ours, should have called it off long before it got to naked-in-the-cab.
Arguably, Q would have used the pictures if a male rock star had comported himself in a similar fashion. The interpretation, however, would have been different. Eye-watering, stomach-turning stories about men are their badges of honour; medals pinned to the battered black leather jackets we dream all rock stars wear. Ozzy Osborne drinking his own piss; Duff McKagan boozing till his pancreas exploded; Steven Tylor and Joe Perry of Aerosmith – aka the Toxic Twins – allegedly locking themselves in Perry’s honeymoon suite to do speedballs while his wedding reception went on without them. In my time at Q I heard all of these stories, and dozens like them, repeated with reverence. Proof of the protagonist’s rawk credentials. By comparison Courtney flashing some skin in a deserted intersection is downright pedestrian, yet it made her a scarlet woman. Unlike the frantic excesses of her male peers it was shameful. Courtney’s pale bare flesh against black asphalt didn’t make her wild, it made her a slag.
This realisation has made me reconsider my long-held acquiescence to the traditional view that Courtney Love is a nutter. The endless gossip column inches about her penchant for odd costuming, her yo-yoing weight, the occasional public tantrum, the self-justifying messages flung out on the world wide web. Oh, and she used to take her clothes off onstage, and once let a strange man suck her nipple. These are the crimes which make her target of a thousand media slings and arrows.
Look at it like this, though. She was a young woman, an artist, a mother, who had the unenviable task of trying to hold together her fragile, adored, junkie artist lover. Courtney gets a lot of shit for how she acted in the aftermath of Cobain’s suicide, but it was Kurt who took the easy way out by putting a shotgun in his mouth. The shock and grief would have floored anyone, and she had to live through it in public. To make it worse, suddenly he was a god. Only suttee would have satisfied his fans. She had the temerity to keep on living, to keep on being a woman, an artist, a mother. Compassion is notably absent from public response to her. The fashion press pillories her style choices, the moralists wring their hands about the fate of Francis Bean, the music press dismisses her as a harpy and coattail-hanger. Looking at some of the pictures of Courtney through the years – the wild hair, the immense eyes, the almost palpable waves of pain, fury, confusion – I think of Virginia Woolf’s comment: “When… one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils… then I think we are on the track of a suppressed poet… who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift ha[s] put her to.”
Courtney’s problem is, I suspect, that she is smart enough to know the game is rigged, and angry enough to play anyway. Women can’t be rock stars. The men who hold the key to the rock ‘n’ roll kingdom decided that a long time ago. Love gets it. She called her band Hole, and sang “They know how to break all the girls like you/And the rob the souls of the girls like you”. But what is a rock star to do? Buy a house in the suburbs? Wear a black veil? Knit? Anything Courtney could do to “redeem” her public image would be a betrayal of her passion and talent. It is an impossible choice imposed by the misogyny of the media and by fools like me, who subscribe to its cruel faux-morality.
Posted by Irresponsibility
“Higher education is becoming feminised,” a dinner companion said last week. A professor of sociology, he was discussing the preponderance of women students in his courses and his remark was, presumably, meant as a neutral statement of fact. But to at least two of the women at the table it didn’t sound like that. Nobody ever worries about education (or anything else) becoming “masculinised”. Because anything men do well, or take an interest in, is automatically assumed to be of worth. The reverse is not true.
One of us – also a professor – made the case that women are attracted to higher education and, in particular, to study abroad, because they have little to lose. They’re not “to the manor born” so they are more willing to move and take risks. The knock on effect, she pointed out, is professional insecurity because women are out doing and learning, rather than cultivating the cosy relationships needed to ensure plum posts. “You see a lot of very intelligent women with great CVs who can’t get jobs,” she said. Tacit punishment for neglecting to nurture ties within the old boys’ clubs women aren’t allowed into in the first place.
I was at the wrong end of the table to jump into the discussion, but its fragments have been stuck in my brain like burrs. There is more to it than either Jim’s simple statement, or Patricia’s interpretation of it suggests. Yes, statistically speaking, more women than ever are entering higher education – often far more than men in similar disciplines. Why? Because higher education remains one of the very few ways women can legitimately access freedom and power. The legitimate part of this equation makes it a double-edged sword. Girl-children are taught obedience. They learn fast and young their duty to please and seduce. Performing well at school is an easy way to win approval and the further they continue in education the more likely it is women will be performing for men’s approval. The ivory tower is still held by, principally, male academics. By the time a woman climbs that high she will, for survival’s sake, have internalised enough femininity to make her non-threatening.
Yes, women are entering higher education in ever-larger numbers. But they are entering at the behest of the men who keep a beady eye on the corridors of intellectual power. There is a method to the masculine hierarchy’s apparent madness in allowing this female invasion. Crude segregation has finally, belatedly, lost out (less than 40 years before I started my writing career there University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian newspaper didn’t allow women on staff). Women’s irritating ability to thrive within the formerly sacrosanct halls of academia means simply that academia, like every other profession in recorded history that has become “feminised”, is being devalued. The more women achieve intellectually the more men view intellectual achievement with suspicion. The more men cling to football and beer, and the more schoolboys taunt each other into idiot mischief because doing well in school is girly. This isn’t idle speculation. The humanities are already suspect because they attract large numbers of women while hard sciences and maths still have the lustre of masculinity.
Better still, as men opt out of higher education – or certain parts of it – those remaining are treated with increasing reverence. As endangered species they are coddled, protected, solicited, and the media worries aloud about the damage to boys’ egos. Again: this isn’t fanciful, it’s fact. Primary and secondary education is already reverberating with bleating noises about boys “trailing” behind girls. Experts are convening to figure out why the poor, maligned male children aren’t in their rightful place of superiority. The misogynistic absurdity of this is clear in the fact that no one ever raised one tiny word of objection to girls being “left behind.” That’s the natural order of things. It’s only when boys or men are in danger of losing their footing on the towering pedestal of privilege that anyone starts a fuss. Nothing changes. As more women gain status through education men will simply reassign “status” to some other non-feminised field.
Posted by Irresponsibility
“I wanted a baby at any cost” is the headline to Claudine Farmer’s story in Grazia magazine. A prime example of the Victorian-throwback, middle-class British obsession with children as a form of emotional and spiritual fulfilment, Claudine and her husband ransomed five years of their life and remortgaged her home to pay for fertility treatments. Poor woman? Or total narcissist?
I’m inclined to think the latter. Look at this story from a sane person’s point of view: she and her husband spent £60,000 on multiple rounds of IVF (against much medical advice). The process drove her to see “a hypnotherapist and counsellor” after rational friends suggested she might be better off bowing out of the reproductive race gracefully (“I found their comments terribly unhelpful,” she sniffs). Eventually Claudine left her job to go to New York with her husband where she finally conceived after heavyweight medical intervention. “If I was sitting here now without my daughter… I would feel very, very bitter,” she says – ending the story on the same note it began: ME.
Underpinning the whole uterine shenanigans is a conviction that she is entitled not merely to be a mother but to be a biological mother. From a natural-selection standpoint the fact Claudine and her husband were unable to conceive without medical help would suggest they weren’t meant to. In the 21st century, however, privileged Westerners play god in the name personal fulfilment. Because we’re worth it. Nowhere in this saga does she mention adoption. Presumably her genes are so precious nothing would do but to introduce them into the world. After all, why give some brown brat a shot at the good life when you could squeeze out a lily-white child to perpetuate your legacy of stupefying selfishness?
Anyway, what’s done is done. Claudine and her hubby got lucky and got their extremely expensive baby. It doesn’t end there. Nobody asked baby if she wanted mummy and daddy to undergo years of invasive treatments and run up huge debts to acquire her (“I worry constantly about our financial situation”). What happens when trophy child misbehaves? What if she decides that she doesn’t want to be mummy’s reason for living? My hunch is things will get ugly. Nobody likes to feel obliged – not even children to parents. If the child is as big a narcissist as her parents she may feel perversely flattered at their sacrifices. More likely she’ll resent the emotional debt; the ever-present, guilt-inducing question: “How could you, after all I’ve done?”
Posted by Irresponsibility
¿Qué Fue Mal? asks Rolling Stone Spain on page 55 of in its Michael Jackson tribute edition. What went wrong? Predictably, they focus on the accusations of sexual abuse by “a boy of 13 years.” This, we are invited to believe, was the problem. How could anyone possibly recover their popularity, their dignity, their claim to the pop throne, after something as horrible as an allegation of fondling a minor? Paedophilia is up there with puppy-torture as the unforgivable sin of our enlightened age, right?
Lori Maddox, age 13
Uh-uh. Jackson was stitched up not for (alleged) kiddie-fiddling but because he did it wrong – as Rolling Stone generously illustrates under the headline Esto es una Orgía (This is an Orgy! pp72). This tribute to the “legends… excesses, perversions, fantasies” of rock ’n’ roll begins with every rock journalist’s favourite rape anecdote – the Led Zepplin red snapper story. A side-splitting account of how the gang got together and inserted a fish into the vagina of 14-year-old Lori Maddox, who, RS chirpily notes “had a threesome with Bowie and his first wife, Angela, when she was just 13.”
That’s okay though: “In love, age isn’t important, much less in sex, especially when you’re talking about groupies,” the article continues, doffing its cap to Chuck Berry “especialista en meter la pata con menores” it winks (“specialist in screwing kids”). Child-pornographer R. Kelly gets a pat on the back for his videotaped degradation of underage girls: “a worthy successor to grandpa Chuck,” RS leers.
Simple really. Raping children is fine, as long as they are female, and you call them “groupies”.
Posted by Irresponsibility
There is never a bad time for Civil Disobedience. Some fine words from Thoreau’s masterpiece over on Demockrazy.
