About Barbie and being good

Oh what a brouhaha there is about the lack of love Barbie has received in terms of nominations for the upcoming Oscars. (In short, it got a nod in the Best Picture category, but its female director and female star were less happy. Ryan Gosling, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, spoke up for his spurned sisters but not to the extent of throwing his own chance away.)

For the record, I enjoyed the movie, especially its design (definitely one that has to be seen on the big screen) although it probably wouldn’t be in any of my best-of lists. Gerwig and Robbie are talented people but they’ve each done better things (Lady Bird and I, Tonya). That’s not what this is about, though, is it? Barbie, beneath the pink gleam, is a satire of sexism and patriarchy and masculinist assumptions and, so the logic goes, to deprive it of recognition is to condone all those bad things. 

Except that it really isn’t, is it? Films that are on the side of the angels aren’t inherently great films and yet the Oscar voters have long had a tendency to reward movies on the basis of their social values alone. The nadir of this came at the 78th awards, when the Best Picture gong went to Crash, a movie at once incoherent and simplistic, the script of which is pretty much the song ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’ stretched over two hours. To add to the fun, it edged out Brokeback Mountain, so even as the Academy patted itself on the back for acknowledging that Racism Is A Bad Thing, it was panicking in case anyone might think it considered homophobia not to be equally reprehensible. Barbie’s relatively slim pickings may be a sign that Hollywood is finally shaking its way out of such ethical quandaries.

Society as a whole isn’t there yet. Maybe the problem is that at the same time as we have become more confident, even to the point of sanctimony, in our moral and political opinions, we feel less able to make aesthetic judgements, to declare that one film (book, song, play, etc) better than another by virtue of imagination, craft and skill rather than just, well, virtue. To argue on purely artistic grounds that X is a better actor or director or composer or balloon sculptor than Y takes us too close to assumptions about class and education that feel too uncomfortable to express. (Incidentally, we are in similar territory when it comes to language. We are encouraged seize on instances of misgendering or outdated racial epithets, but suggesting that the phrase “would of” is in some way incorrect looks plain rude.)

It almost feels as if we’ve slipped back to the Victorian era, when finger-wagging critics dismissed the likes of Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, not for any inherent literary faults but because they were morally suspect. The specific criteria have changed (racism and misogyny and homophobia rather than fornication) but the priorities would be familiar to Hardy or the Brontës. We know what’s good, but not what’s good.

PS: My old mucker Clair, who used to hang around these parts as the Urban Woo, deals with the matter in characteristically brisk, no-nonsense fashion in The Independent.

PPS: Reductress, as it tends to, also gets it right:

About Atwood

A nugget I’d missed when first reading Margaret Atwood’s recent, rather controversial piece answering the preposterous charge that she’s a bad feminist:

The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

About Girlz Wetter

I’ve been sorting through a whole load of storage crates over the past few weeks, some of which have been undisturbed for 13 years or more. Inevitably some of the contents prompt a certain sting of nostalgia: in a few cases I can recall the precise circumstances in which I acquired a particular book or record, or wrote or drew something. But I’m also coming across things that push no buttons whatsoever, even if I feel they ought to.

One such example is this copy of the fanzine Girlz Wetter. Although maybe calling it a fanzine is to overstate its significance. It’s a single A4 sheet of pink paper, folded into a pamphlet tiny enough to fit in your wallet. There’s a review of a gig by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, an interview with Jef Steartfield of Plan A (me neither) and a rather NSFW 14-point “Guide to Being a Groupie”. And that’s your lot, as the back cover announces in no uncertain terms.

The thing is, I have no memory of how I came into possession of this piece. At first I assumed I must have got hold of it in about 1997/8, when I spent a lot of time on the Camden gig circuit: it was hidden amidst a pile of compilation CDs from that era, boasting tracks by the likes of Dweeb, Midget and The Bigger The God. But the Yeah Yeah Yeahs reference pitches it forwards, to 2001 at the earliest.

What’s interesting about that is that by then it would already have been something of a throwback, as the early rumblings of blogging and social media started to encroach of the turf of print zines. And what’s more, it makes no attempt to perform even those limited gestures of social interaction that print can offer. There’s no information about who the author may be, not even a pseudonym; no contact details, not even a good old analogue PO Box; it’s just there, in your face, make of it what you will. It’s entirely devoid of context, whether in itself or in terms of my own memories. And there’s something rather magnificent about that. I’d be intrigued to know who created it, but at the same time, I quite like the state of ignorance in which I find myself.

Check out this picture of a famous actress not naked

I was a bit behind the curve when it came to the news that photographs of an underclothed Jennifer Lawrence, along with several other actresses in a similar condition, had suddenly appeared in the digital ether without said actresses’ bidding. The first I heard of it was when I was directed to an article by Clementine Ford that said that this was a bad thing (yup), that it was a gross violation of said women’s privacy (agreed) and that people who went out of that way to look at the pictures were complicit in the said violation (on board with that as well). I then remarked, under the social media post that had pointed me to the article, that, while I couldn’t fault the author’s logic, this was indeed the first time I’d been aware of said pics of Ms Lawrence, and that in a tiny way, the article was helping to fan the flames, by letting people know that they were out there to be gawped at, if one so wished. I was immediately shot down, apparently because I was attempting to shut down women’s voices in the argument. So presumably had the article been written by a man making the self-same points — with which, as I said, I agree — I’d have been in the clear. Whatever. In the event, I suddenly became so jaded with the direction in which certain strands of modern feminism seem to be progressing that I was almost tempted to search for said pics of J-Law in the rudey nude, just to be obnoxious, until I remembered that she’s apparently going out with Chris Martin out of lame, bedwetting beat combo Coldplay so I don’t fancy her any more.

But still, I agree with what Ms Ford was saying, regardless of her chromosomes. It’s all about having control over your own body, innit? If Jennifer Lawrence wishes to flash her various inny and/or outy bits to the world, she should be permitted and if she doesn’t, it must not happen without her permission. And if she wants to show a lot of her body in a bikini, or not very much of it in a burqa, that’s up to her, and the same goes for men, so there. And then I read another article about another actress.

It’s Keira Knightley this time, who is lauded in the Telegraph for striking a blow for small-breasted women by, well showing off her small breasts in a magazine article. And there may well be a debate about whether this is a wise thing to do, or a moral thing, or even whether the pictures are any good. But I hope nobody would disagree that they’re Ms Knightley’s own small breasts and it’s bloody well up to her to cover them or uncover them as she sees fit. Except, apparently, whoever makes these decisions at the Telegraph; since, alongside the article (by a woman, incidentally, not that it should matter, although apparently it does) saying what a good thing it is she bared her small breasts, the only pictures have said small breasts obscured by a strip of the dullest grey.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this is an outrage against Ms Knightley’s dignity on a par with what Ms Lawrence and her colleagues have suffered. Just because KK elects to get them out, the Telegraph isn’t obliged to show them. It just seems that once again, a woman’s decision to do what she wants with her body is being overruled.

Except that now I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say that.

PS: Further perspectives on the Lawrence thing from Fleet Street Fox and Anne Helen Petersen.

PPS: And this from the Daily Mash.

PPPS: Stuart Jeffries brings Slavoj Žižek to the party, as you do. (Žižek isn’t naked.)

PPPPS: And now it’s art.

Femen and Bucklesby: a tale of two stunts

A man who doesn’t exist, although a lot of people rather wish he had; and another man who does exist, a fact that has prompted even greater disappointment.

The man who does exist is Victor Svyatski, who appears to be the svengali behind the topless provocateurs of Femen. A new documentary presents him as an unlikely feminist, admitting he hand-picks activists on the basis of their looks, describing them as “bitches” and admitting to the possibility that he started the organisation to “get girls”. Indeed, he appears to be a repository of the sort of patriarchal attitudes that – we thought – Femen was intended to challenge:

These girls are weak... They don’t have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong. Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are qualities which it was essential to teach them.

Nobody with any degree of political nous truly believed that Femen was an authentically grass-roots movement but the revelations about Svyatski seem to take astroturfing into a new dimension and risks discrediting the whole movement. Unless of course the film is part of some as-yet unspecified campaign of counter-intuitive publicity, in which Svyatski is in fact a helpless pawn of the bare-boobed campaigners. And in case I sound too puritan about the whole story, it’s no coincidence that I’ve put the Femen picture first in this post, acknowledging the fact that, when it comes to luring online traffic, nipples will always trump...

...a park bench, even one bearing a gloriously grumpy salute to the memory of Roger Bucklesby.

Although it soon became clear that Mr Bucklesby was a figment of a writer’s imagination. And yet that somehow makes the park bench thing even more endearing; whereas the fakery behind Femen disturbs us. I keep coming back to those words by TS Eliot: “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” And I think Eliot would have chuckled at Bucklesby but I’m not sure what he would have made of all those nipples.

Jimmy Savile: a few thoughts

No, this isn’t really about Jimmy Savile himself, or what he did, or what he’s alleged to have done. That’s all bad; it’s pretty clear that the man was a vicious abuser who used his charitable deeds as both cover and as a cynical, implicit bargaining tool; you don’t need me to tell you any of that. This is more about the responses and reactions to what we know.

First, about the rumours that were apparently circulating for decades about Savile’s behaviour, and the fact that nobody ever acted about them. Well, of course there were rumours, because Savile was a very famous person and there are always rumours about very famous people. Way back when I was completely outside the media loop, I heard rumours about Jimmy Savile; oddly, all of them revolved around his apparent fondness for acts of necrophilia, which he supposedly indulged under the cover of his voluntary work as a hospital porter; I don’t recall anything about child abuse. And I heard other rumours too, about all sorts of people, about the Queen Mother and Michael Portillo and Morrissey and Bobby Moore and Prince Edward and Bill Treacher and Jason Donovan and Patrick Moore and Kevin Keegan and Gerald Kaufman and Una Stubbs and any number of Radio One DJs. Some were accusations of serious criminal behaviour, some were about harmless quirks that, supposedly, the relevant parties preferred not to disclose. Anyone remember Scallywag magazine? The John Major story was pretty bland compared to some of the stuff they came up with.

I have no idea how many of these tales were wholly or partly true and I probably never will. I’m not suggesting that the accusations about Savile are fabricated, but if journalists followed up every celeb-related rumour that some bloke in the pub insisted was God’s honest truth, there would be a hell of a lot of libel suits knocking around, and even more dead-cert stories that turned out to be dead ends. You need more than urban myth or gut instinct. Yes, Savile was odd, eccentric, weird, creepy. People said dodgy things about him. He had strange hair. The same goes for Chris Jeffries, the entirely innocent Bristol landlord caught up in a murder investigation a couple of years ago. That didn’t end well for the papers concerned, did it?

But a big chunk of the press seems to be using the Savile saga as leverage to redeem itself after the whole phone-hacking/Leveson enquiry saga. Look what happens when celebrities get the upper hand, they bleat, when the fine upstanding spirit of British journalism is cowed by libel and privacy laws. Which is utter bollocks, frankly. If they were using their various scams and skulduggeries to expose real, serious, extensive wrongdoing rather than just dicking around below the surface of Hello-magazine banality, then we’d be impressed. It was in the public interest to know that Savile was abusing girls; it was not in the public interest to know that Charlotte Church might be having boyfriend trouble. Which one made the front pages?

Moreover, certain papers also see the scandal as a stick with which to wallop their eternal nemesis, the BBC. Yes, I don’t doubt that there was a culture at the BBC in the 60s and 70s and even into the 80s that by modern standards would seem pretty toxic and that some men were able to use their power and influence to take sexual advantage of people with less clout. Again, that was bad and wrong, and we need to know about it. But are we to understand that everybody employed by The Sun and The Mail and The Telegraph at the time was entirely without sin? Or that, had any equivalent rumours been knocking around about high-profile journalists and editors at those papers, there wouldn’t have been a temptation to either cover things up, or deliberately look the other way?

Again – bollocks. The BBC was a product of its time, as was (and is) every other institution. It looks wrong now, but it was wrong everywhere, not just in the studios of Top of the Pops or Radio One. Low-level sexual assault could be passed off as horseplay and if anyone complained, it was evidence of a sense-of-humour failure or lesbianism or the time of the month. And once you allow that, the tolerance level for bad behaviour rises incrementally, until you get vulnerable girls being molested in dressing rooms.

But that wouldn’t be tolerated now. And this is the ultimate, sanctimonious hypocrisy of those currently laying into the BBC. A modern-day Savile would be stopped in his tracks because women and children would be empowered to speak up. He wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt just because he was rich and popular and male. And do you know what caused this turnaround? Not the fearless investigation of plucky newspaper journalists, that’s for sure. No, it was the changes in attitude wrought by feminism and by so-called political correctness, gone mad or otherwise; the very social forces still roundly condemned on a regular basis in The Sun and The Mail and The Telegraph. As it happens.

PS: In the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan goes deeper and further back.

Barbed

There is a Facebook campaign afoot to encourage Mattel to bring out a bald Barbie, to offer encouragement to girls who have lost their hair because of cancer treatment. While I can’t argue with the core motivation at work here – making sick children feel a bit happier – I do have a few qualms about what appears to be the endgame. Rather than toe-poking the whole ghastly Barbie aesthetic into the prehistoric swamp where it properly belongs, these well-meaning agitators just seek to shift the parameters a little: it is as important as ever to be a beewootiful puhwincess, it seems, but you can still achieve that goal even if you’re as hairless as a porn star’s undercarriage and throwing up every few hours.

Moreover, the campaigners have apparently missed the chance to offer a sense of empowerment to the children on whose behalf they claim to act. Want a bald Barbie? Get a normal Barbie; cut its hair off. And the same goes for those who prefer their anatomically unfeasible homunculi to be black or amputees or multiply pierced; do it yourself. Many was the happy hour I spent inflicting ghastly tortures on my Doctor Who doll, including a doomed attempt to create a functioning iron maiden from Lego. Are kids today really so incapable of such acts of creative destruction? Answers, if there are any, to be carved into the severed head of Action Man and sent to the usual address.

News in briefs

One stereotype I’ve never understood is the idea that feminists are dour and humourless. Most of the feminists I’ve known (and by that I mean women who actively characterise themselves as such, as distinct from women who believe in equality and empowerment and reproductive rights and so on, but don’t actually use the word, for whatever reason) have been very funny people. Especially the lesbians, they’re hilarious, and foul-mouthed too.

Granted, it’s usually a somewhat dark, gallowsy brand of funny, with a deep seam of absurdism, all the better to prick the pretensions of the patriarchy. And maybe that’s the problem; the people who find them humourless are probably the same people who characterise Morrissey or Harold Pinter as depressing. Arseholes, in other words.

Anyway, there’s a splendid manifestation of funny feminism going on in India at the moment. A group has formed to protest against the actions of a particularly repellent religious group called Sri Rama Sen, members of which were caught on camera beating up women who’d committed the outrageous sin of going to a bar for a drink. But instead of staging a grumpy demo, or writing angry letters to the press, the ladies, bless ’em, have formed a Facebook group called the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women, and plan to give pink underwear to Sri Rama Sen members this coming Valentine’s day. The underwear thing is an allusion to the characterisation of extreme Hindu bigots as "chaddi wallahs", or shorts wearers. (Wodehouse fans will, I trust, immediately note parallels with the asinine wannabe Führer Roderick Spode and his black-shorted minions/morons.)

Sorry, there’s no punchline to this one, except that it brings a smile to my face to think that on Saturday, hundreds of reactionary bigots are going to have to explain to their wives why these pink thongs have started popping through the letterbox. In the meantime, if you can, do join the Facebook group to express your support, because, let’s face it, sexist violence isn’t funny, but pants bloody well are.

PS: More info here. You know, if this turns out to be some kind of marketing wheeze by, I dunno, Agent Provocateur or something, I’m going to be bloody angry.

Pen envy?

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