Since I'm probably going to return to feminism as a topic several times, a quick statement of values.
Feminist isn't an impressive, radical or even interesting position to take, it's just something you should be.
Like polite.
We've had tens of thousands of years of male-dominated society, and women got the vote less than a hundred years ago. To claim anything other than that the remnants of those thousands of years are still with us and that there is still a lot of work to be done is not just wrong, it is not to be entertained by thinking people.
Everything else, as they say, is commentary.
Thursday, 31 October 2013
The Feminist Friend Zone
The most insulting thing anyone has ever suggested about me is that I might be a Nice Guy (tm). I didn't know what it meant at the time, and had to go look it up. For those of you in a similar situation, a good explanation is here. Once I had perused the various feminist blogs identifying the behaviour of Nice Guys (tm) I was struck with two overwhelming thoughts: Firstly, a great swell of rage that the kind of guy even existed who felt that sex with their female friends was a right the universe had granted them, and secondly, an abject and all-consuming horror that I might come across as one of them. It took me a little bit of self-examination to feel comfortable with myself again, and turn the horror into righteous and sincerely-taken offence.
Here's how this came about. I am what might once have been called "hopeless with women", a phrase that to me evokes the same usage as "hopeless with horses" or "hopeless at Bagatelle", as if women are an aristocratic pastime to be discussed over cigars and brandy at the Club. What it actually means is that I don't really get the flirting thing, never really know how to point out that I'm sexually available, and am 5'4" with the face of an eight-year-old and so never come across as particularly sexually threatening anyway. All of which is fine, and puts me in a category with a lot of vaguely geeky males who drew the short straw in being born into a bullshit patriarchal society that expects men to "make the move" like predators roaming the Serengeti for prey. It's just one of those things. But this one night, when I was chatting to one of my more feminist female friends on walk home from a social occasion about quite why I was so hopeless, she suggested that the reason I might spend all my time in the "friend zone" is because I think I'm a Nice Guy. And once I finally got what she actually meant, I was, as I say, horrified.
Now, as a rule I find putting people into neat pigeonholes that the blogosphere has come up with to be dehumanising and simplistic, but there's no getting away from the fact that there are plenty of guys who do spend an awful lot of time wondering why they aren't getting any and blaming it on their Niceness as compared to all the Bastards that women in their silly, easily dominated way tend to go for. They blame it on the Friend Zone, the mighty weapon of women everywhere that prevents you from getting into her pants via a sophisticated social force-field of friendliness. And yeah, I recognise that, at least a bit. There have been plenty of times when I've decided I'd definitely like to try and make a move on someone I'm friendly with, only to realise that's not a great plan, because, well, that particular sexy ship has sailed and we now are quite comfortable as friends. So my friend got it part right.
The reason that I ended up being toweringly offended by the accusation, however, is that there is a very, very key difference between me and the standard fedora-wearing internet Nice Guy. I don't think I'm owed sex. I really, honestly don't. The notion that I might end up resenting one of my female friends because I had assumed that part of the friendship contract we signed included the odd one-night-stand whenever I was feeling blueballed is horrible. It's also enough to make me feel goddamn offended when someone suggests I would be such a twenty-four carat arsehole.
Yet I can forgive my confidant her assumption of my utter moral turpitude in as far as there are no internet-generated categories for Nice-Guy-who-is-incompetent-with-flirtation-but-doesn't-blame-it-on-the-womenfolk. And I'm sure I can't be the only one. The thing is, so much of the internet discussion around the Friend Zone has focussed on its use as a concept by entitled arseholes. This has led to plenty of feminists denying that it's a thing at all. But I think it is.
The key question here is whether you think sex is a right (a clue: it isn't). As long as you don't think that, you don't quite deserve the scorn and opprobrium heaped on you by the antagonists of the Friend Zone and the Nice Guy. Isn't there a space for the guy who makes friends with a woman, realises he fancies her but has firmly found himself beyond the point where he should have made something clear to her, and whose response is not "Waaaahh" but "Oh, shit"?
And this brings me to my final point. Isn't the Friend Zone in that form going to be more of a problem for male feminists than anyone else? After all, as a feminist (or, to use the term I prefer, A Decent Person) you go into every new relationship with a female acquaintance looking at them not as a potential penis-receptacle but as a person, hopefully. And the moment you actually start fancying them should with luck come a little further down the line once you know them as a person. And then, because we live in a ridiculous society that has trained us to see Real Men as dick-swinging gorillas making sexual advances the moment they even make eye contact with a vagina-owner they like the look of, you might be a bit stuck for ideas.
Yes, there are plenty of things you can do to make it clear to someone you've known for a while that you're suddenly into them. That's a topic for another post. But for the moment, consider this. Not knowing what those things are does not make you a misogynist Nice Guy. It is perfectly possible to be a feminist guy who reads Jezebel, signs all the petitions against Page 3 and knows what the Smurfette Principle is and still be clueless as to how to actually get someone to fancy you. Tarring every resident of the Friend Zone with the same brush is not fair. More categories, please, internet, it's what you're good at.
Here's how this came about. I am what might once have been called "hopeless with women", a phrase that to me evokes the same usage as "hopeless with horses" or "hopeless at Bagatelle", as if women are an aristocratic pastime to be discussed over cigars and brandy at the Club. What it actually means is that I don't really get the flirting thing, never really know how to point out that I'm sexually available, and am 5'4" with the face of an eight-year-old and so never come across as particularly sexually threatening anyway. All of which is fine, and puts me in a category with a lot of vaguely geeky males who drew the short straw in being born into a bullshit patriarchal society that expects men to "make the move" like predators roaming the Serengeti for prey. It's just one of those things. But this one night, when I was chatting to one of my more feminist female friends on walk home from a social occasion about quite why I was so hopeless, she suggested that the reason I might spend all my time in the "friend zone" is because I think I'm a Nice Guy. And once I finally got what she actually meant, I was, as I say, horrified.
Now, as a rule I find putting people into neat pigeonholes that the blogosphere has come up with to be dehumanising and simplistic, but there's no getting away from the fact that there are plenty of guys who do spend an awful lot of time wondering why they aren't getting any and blaming it on their Niceness as compared to all the Bastards that women in their silly, easily dominated way tend to go for. They blame it on the Friend Zone, the mighty weapon of women everywhere that prevents you from getting into her pants via a sophisticated social force-field of friendliness. And yeah, I recognise that, at least a bit. There have been plenty of times when I've decided I'd definitely like to try and make a move on someone I'm friendly with, only to realise that's not a great plan, because, well, that particular sexy ship has sailed and we now are quite comfortable as friends. So my friend got it part right.
The reason that I ended up being toweringly offended by the accusation, however, is that there is a very, very key difference between me and the standard fedora-wearing internet Nice Guy. I don't think I'm owed sex. I really, honestly don't. The notion that I might end up resenting one of my female friends because I had assumed that part of the friendship contract we signed included the odd one-night-stand whenever I was feeling blueballed is horrible. It's also enough to make me feel goddamn offended when someone suggests I would be such a twenty-four carat arsehole.
Yet I can forgive my confidant her assumption of my utter moral turpitude in as far as there are no internet-generated categories for Nice-Guy-who-is-incompetent-with-flirtation-but-doesn't-blame-it-on-the-womenfolk. And I'm sure I can't be the only one. The thing is, so much of the internet discussion around the Friend Zone has focussed on its use as a concept by entitled arseholes. This has led to plenty of feminists denying that it's a thing at all. But I think it is.
The key question here is whether you think sex is a right (a clue: it isn't). As long as you don't think that, you don't quite deserve the scorn and opprobrium heaped on you by the antagonists of the Friend Zone and the Nice Guy. Isn't there a space for the guy who makes friends with a woman, realises he fancies her but has firmly found himself beyond the point where he should have made something clear to her, and whose response is not "Waaaahh" but "Oh, shit"?
And this brings me to my final point. Isn't the Friend Zone in that form going to be more of a problem for male feminists than anyone else? After all, as a feminist (or, to use the term I prefer, A Decent Person) you go into every new relationship with a female acquaintance looking at them not as a potential penis-receptacle but as a person, hopefully. And the moment you actually start fancying them should with luck come a little further down the line once you know them as a person. And then, because we live in a ridiculous society that has trained us to see Real Men as dick-swinging gorillas making sexual advances the moment they even make eye contact with a vagina-owner they like the look of, you might be a bit stuck for ideas.
Yes, there are plenty of things you can do to make it clear to someone you've known for a while that you're suddenly into them. That's a topic for another post. But for the moment, consider this. Not knowing what those things are does not make you a misogynist Nice Guy. It is perfectly possible to be a feminist guy who reads Jezebel, signs all the petitions against Page 3 and knows what the Smurfette Principle is and still be clueless as to how to actually get someone to fancy you. Tarring every resident of the Friend Zone with the same brush is not fair. More categories, please, internet, it's what you're good at.
No really, I am. I'm lovely. Honest.
Wednesday, 30 October 2013
On Christianity
I can add another denomination to my fairly short list of "Types of Christian I Wouldn't Mind Being If The Big Fella Came Down Tomorrow". To Quakerism and the Rowan Williams sit-down-and-have-some-tea type of Anglicanism I now add Unitarianism, the first service of which I attended the other day in the First Parish Church of Lincoln, Massachusetts.
A quick word on the former two. I first attended a meeting of the Friends a couple of years ago, in a cultural exchange with a Christian friend of mine in which I promised to go to her Charismatic service if she went with me to a service of my choice. Since Cambridge at the time at least lacked an atheist church, I went for the next best thing, and took her to a Quaker meeting. For those of you who've never been (I seriously recommend you go), the "service" consists of half an hour or more of sitting in silence with your eyes closed. There's much more to be said about this encounter, but suffice to say that 30 minutes of undirected meditation was enough to make me almost uncontrollably happy. My poor Christian friend probably thought I had been touched with the Holy Spirit, the way my teacup was trembling afterwards; instead it was the simple joy at feeling clean and wholesome in the way only a good hard extended look into your own mind can make you. I have been back since and never cease to gain a great deal from those meetings.
As for the Church of England, well, I could never entirely love a church based on a divorce, a power grab and a great deal of propping up of an established class system. But my affection for it remains strong, partly because it is so woven into the rural English idyll that forms a part of my childhood, and partly because right now it does come across as a pretty decent attempt to do religion properly. Unlike the hyper-competitive American capitalist brand of Protestantism, the staid complacence of modern Anglicanism has led it to do the right thing almost because it can't think what else it wants to do with itself. When Justin Welby promised to compete the payday loans companies out of business, I couldn't help thinking as a proud secularist that here was something the CofE could do that perhaps no one else could. I would probably even work for an organisation that did stuff like that.
Which brings me to Unitarianism. Yes, Lincoln, Massachusetts is the bluest of blue America. Yes, the fact that I'm sure half of the congregation were probably Harvard or MIT academics might have had something to do with the enlightened service. But what a service it was. The affirmations of the congregation were in the language of human brotherhood and human dignity (and it is that word, dignity, which I consider to be the very cornerstone of humanism, and the bedrock of my personal morality). The sermon was given on this occasion by a guest, Arnold Weinstein of Brown University, and he talked about Kafka and Sophocles and how we make humans into animals without even noticing it.
And God was barely mentioned. The hymns we sang were my favourite sort, not submission and unworthiness and dreary repetition of pleasantries, but the uplifting and ennobling hymns of the kind Wesley and Watts poured out in the 18th century. They approached the fighting spirit of my favourite hymn of all, Bunyan's To Be A Pilgrim, a song you can happily sing as a non-believer and not feel you're being disingenuous with a single word. These are hymns that talk about how wonderful it is to be alive, to be moving, to be doing good work. But they are not hymns that ever make me think of the nihilistic sado-masochism that characterises a great deal of Christianity, that which emphasises above all how grateful we must be, how sinful we are and above all the vast and unconquerable power of the Almighty Himself.
The problem with faith that actually tries to engage with God is that it tries to pin him down. In its rush to prostrate itself, it feels it must first identify exactly what it is we are prostrating ourselves in front of; exactly what he thinks of homosexuality, exactly the language that makes the Qu'ran the true Qu'ran. The three faiths I have mentioned do the opposite - they run as far away from God as possible. The Quakers abandon most doctrine in favour of the Inner Light, the Anglicans are famously so establishment they consider belief in God embarrassingly sincere, and the Unitarians, as Joelle Renstrom says in this rather lovely post, value their space. This seems about right to me - if God exists, he is so vast and unfathomable that we should keep our distance, and never be too sure we know what he's thinking.
There's an extraordinary Unitarian hymn called A Core of Silence which ends with the line: "The 'true religion' gathers up its text / 'In The Beginning Was The Word' / But I seek the quietness behind that start / And name it nothing, much less God". Most other Christians, would, I think be appalled at the reticence to recognise the Creator. But once you name something you limit it, and to me that in a nutshell is the great work, and the great mistake, of organised religion. But there are other things organised religion can achieve. On that morning, surrounded by that community, saying those words in honour the dignity of humanity, I felt gloriously happy. And I believed in something.
A quick word on the former two. I first attended a meeting of the Friends a couple of years ago, in a cultural exchange with a Christian friend of mine in which I promised to go to her Charismatic service if she went with me to a service of my choice. Since Cambridge at the time at least lacked an atheist church, I went for the next best thing, and took her to a Quaker meeting. For those of you who've never been (I seriously recommend you go), the "service" consists of half an hour or more of sitting in silence with your eyes closed. There's much more to be said about this encounter, but suffice to say that 30 minutes of undirected meditation was enough to make me almost uncontrollably happy. My poor Christian friend probably thought I had been touched with the Holy Spirit, the way my teacup was trembling afterwards; instead it was the simple joy at feeling clean and wholesome in the way only a good hard extended look into your own mind can make you. I have been back since and never cease to gain a great deal from those meetings.
As for the Church of England, well, I could never entirely love a church based on a divorce, a power grab and a great deal of propping up of an established class system. But my affection for it remains strong, partly because it is so woven into the rural English idyll that forms a part of my childhood, and partly because right now it does come across as a pretty decent attempt to do religion properly. Unlike the hyper-competitive American capitalist brand of Protestantism, the staid complacence of modern Anglicanism has led it to do the right thing almost because it can't think what else it wants to do with itself. When Justin Welby promised to compete the payday loans companies out of business, I couldn't help thinking as a proud secularist that here was something the CofE could do that perhaps no one else could. I would probably even work for an organisation that did stuff like that.
Which brings me to Unitarianism. Yes, Lincoln, Massachusetts is the bluest of blue America. Yes, the fact that I'm sure half of the congregation were probably Harvard or MIT academics might have had something to do with the enlightened service. But what a service it was. The affirmations of the congregation were in the language of human brotherhood and human dignity (and it is that word, dignity, which I consider to be the very cornerstone of humanism, and the bedrock of my personal morality). The sermon was given on this occasion by a guest, Arnold Weinstein of Brown University, and he talked about Kafka and Sophocles and how we make humans into animals without even noticing it.
Pretty much idyllic.
The problem with faith that actually tries to engage with God is that it tries to pin him down. In its rush to prostrate itself, it feels it must first identify exactly what it is we are prostrating ourselves in front of; exactly what he thinks of homosexuality, exactly the language that makes the Qu'ran the true Qu'ran. The three faiths I have mentioned do the opposite - they run as far away from God as possible. The Quakers abandon most doctrine in favour of the Inner Light, the Anglicans are famously so establishment they consider belief in God embarrassingly sincere, and the Unitarians, as Joelle Renstrom says in this rather lovely post, value their space. This seems about right to me - if God exists, he is so vast and unfathomable that we should keep our distance, and never be too sure we know what he's thinking.
There's an extraordinary Unitarian hymn called A Core of Silence which ends with the line: "The 'true religion' gathers up its text / 'In The Beginning Was The Word' / But I seek the quietness behind that start / And name it nothing, much less God". Most other Christians, would, I think be appalled at the reticence to recognise the Creator. But once you name something you limit it, and to me that in a nutshell is the great work, and the great mistake, of organised religion. But there are other things organised religion can achieve. On that morning, surrounded by that community, saying those words in honour the dignity of humanity, I felt gloriously happy. And I believed in something.
Some Girls Are Better Than Others
A moderate cheer for Some Girls, the BBC3 sitcom that's just wrapped up its second series. It's hardly been a critical smash, but I've been weirdly compelled by it, and the more I think about it the more it's worth celebrating. In fact, in a world of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, it's quite nice to to step back from the world of Albuquerque meth dealers and Westerosi power struggles and celebrate a mildly amusing half hour sitcom about teenage girls. Sometimes what the world needs is massive praise heaped on the things which are just slightly better than average. I say this, incidentally, as the guy who's been telling everyone for years that Rev is the greatest thing to have happened to television in a decade. More on that anon.
Firstly, there's the very simple fact that Some Girls actually features the rare TV sight of girls talking to each other, which wins it some Bechdel Test points, and that they occasionally venture into topics other than boys, which wins it a bunch more. Better than that, they're witty with each other in a pretty unassuming way. It would be very easy to create a sitcom that was terribly impressed with the fact that girls are being funny, basking in its own modernity and relevance. Instead the quartet - Viva, Holli, Saz and Amber - exchange pretty naff observations about their pretty ordinary lives and break precisely no boundaries or challenge anyone's sensibilities. The fact that they're pretty comfortable discussing sex seems to me to be a triumph - when the choice is between a Skins-esque depiction of teen sex as well, sexy (it usually isn't) and a Grange Hill Issue approach, I applaud a sitcom world where it's just not a very big issue. Who fancies who, yes, who got with who, yes, but the actual facts or danger or allure of sex - yawn. All of which seems a great step forward.
Then there's a decent set of characters - I love Dolly Wells' blunter-than-a-rock Kiwi stepmum/football coach, who got over her first heartbreak by "shooting my best friend's sheep and moving on." There's three-dimensional bit parts, with a nice-but-dim love interest in Rocky who is neither all that dim nor a cardboard cutout Nice Guy. The script has the remarkable feature of being rarely laugh-out-loud and yet tight and breezy enough that it's never boring, which is the ideal for a piece of quick BBC3 iPlayer time sinkage. But mainly, it's an undemanding piece of fluff with a good heart and good aspirations that normalises the idea that inner-city girls from ethnic minority backgrounds can be funny and cheerful and never really make a big thing of it. From such tiny, apparently insubstantial building blocks is progress made.
Firstly, there's the very simple fact that Some Girls actually features the rare TV sight of girls talking to each other, which wins it some Bechdel Test points, and that they occasionally venture into topics other than boys, which wins it a bunch more. Better than that, they're witty with each other in a pretty unassuming way. It would be very easy to create a sitcom that was terribly impressed with the fact that girls are being funny, basking in its own modernity and relevance. Instead the quartet - Viva, Holli, Saz and Amber - exchange pretty naff observations about their pretty ordinary lives and break precisely no boundaries or challenge anyone's sensibilities. The fact that they're pretty comfortable discussing sex seems to me to be a triumph - when the choice is between a Skins-esque depiction of teen sex as well, sexy (it usually isn't) and a Grange Hill Issue approach, I applaud a sitcom world where it's just not a very big issue. Who fancies who, yes, who got with who, yes, but the actual facts or danger or allure of sex - yawn. All of which seems a great step forward.
Then there's a decent set of characters - I love Dolly Wells' blunter-than-a-rock Kiwi stepmum/football coach, who got over her first heartbreak by "shooting my best friend's sheep and moving on." There's three-dimensional bit parts, with a nice-but-dim love interest in Rocky who is neither all that dim nor a cardboard cutout Nice Guy. The script has the remarkable feature of being rarely laugh-out-loud and yet tight and breezy enough that it's never boring, which is the ideal for a piece of quick BBC3 iPlayer time sinkage. But mainly, it's an undemanding piece of fluff with a good heart and good aspirations that normalises the idea that inner-city girls from ethnic minority backgrounds can be funny and cheerful and never really make a big thing of it. From such tiny, apparently insubstantial building blocks is progress made.
In The Beginning
Hello, Internet. Nice to see you looking so well.
How are you getting on? Lovely.
Should this blog come to anything and some curious person should go looking for the very first post, this is it. In all its glory. Hello, my friend, I assume you have to much time on your hands. As, obviously, do I.
For the record, let this be the testament of my current intentions with this blogging enterprise:
None. I have no idea what I'm doing, no plan for a theme, a tone, a preoccupation, a gimmick, or anything more relevant or worth reading than the other twelve million blogs by recently graduated arts students with an excess of opinions and deficiency of people willing to let them to rant uninterrupted about whatever topic is in their head today over a pint of non-big-brand beer in the local non-chain pub.
But hey, if it keeps me writing, which I enjoy, and I can share it with my friends, which I also enjoy, then it seems a good way to while away an hour every now and then.
The domain name is "extracts from the riot act", part of a line from the film In The Loop. Hopefully that tells you all you need to know about my trademark style: trying to be softly spoken and moderate about things that in all honesty I would love to be screaming my head off about, but can't quite muster the conviction. The character speaking it, hapless fence-sitting minister Simon Foster, is on a Shepard Fairey-Obama-Hope-style poster on my wall with another inspiring quotation: "I'm on the verge of taking a stand". I hope this blog will provide a similarly noble guiding light to its readers in tackling injustice, ignorance, and oppression.
Let the games begin.
How are you getting on? Lovely.
Should this blog come to anything and some curious person should go looking for the very first post, this is it. In all its glory. Hello, my friend, I assume you have to much time on your hands. As, obviously, do I.
For the record, let this be the testament of my current intentions with this blogging enterprise:
None. I have no idea what I'm doing, no plan for a theme, a tone, a preoccupation, a gimmick, or anything more relevant or worth reading than the other twelve million blogs by recently graduated arts students with an excess of opinions and deficiency of people willing to let them to rant uninterrupted about whatever topic is in their head today over a pint of non-big-brand beer in the local non-chain pub.
But hey, if it keeps me writing, which I enjoy, and I can share it with my friends, which I also enjoy, then it seems a good way to while away an hour every now and then.
The domain name is "extracts from the riot act", part of a line from the film In The Loop. Hopefully that tells you all you need to know about my trademark style: trying to be softly spoken and moderate about things that in all honesty I would love to be screaming my head off about, but can't quite muster the conviction. The character speaking it, hapless fence-sitting minister Simon Foster, is on a Shepard Fairey-Obama-Hope-style poster on my wall with another inspiring quotation: "I'm on the verge of taking a stand". I hope this blog will provide a similarly noble guiding light to its readers in tackling injustice, ignorance, and oppression.
Let the games begin.
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