Much has been written recently on the malaise (if not quite death) of feminism. In 2006 Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs bemoaned the desire of women to become sex objects in a perverse re-reading of female power. Germaine Greer went on Celebrity Big Brother, and, in the popularity stakes, Girls Gone Wild would have won any contest. Last month, Natasha Walter’s new book Living Dolls arrived, restating the argument that feminism has decayed and that a new generation of women have chosen to ignore the years of struggle for women’s rights and the shattering of the glass ceiling. My generation has, apparently, blithely thrown it all away for the right to emulate a character from Sex and the City, and drive men wild with just the right tight dress.
Walter is a spokesperson (ahem) for that very group of women who feel betrayed by skimpily attired neophytes; who rage against the encroachment of raunch culture and the neglect of the fight for women’s advancement. While their reading of the situation may be narrow, there’s no doubt that something is stirring within that original women’s movement. It seems, amazingly, that many of those who first broke through the glass ceiling have hit another, impenetrable, barrier: the grey ceiling.
This is not just a feminist issue. People have been losing their jobs for no good reason other than their age for a long time in Britain. In Germany, lawyers and politicians continue to work until they choose to retire – gerontocracy rules. Yet, in this country, many corporations have compulsory retirement ages. This allows the young to be promoted, but it also robs companies of experienced and knowledgeable employees. And when it comes to high profile roles where image (gasp!) might play a factor, the first to go are always the women. First Moira Stewart and Arlene Phillips, and now Miriam O’Reilly – a presenter of Countryfile, a programme I admit I didn’t even know existed. All of these women work or worked for the BBC, a corporation committed to representing all of British life and culture… except when that life is female and over forty.
O’Reilly’s case is particularly interesting because she is the first to take the BBC to a London Employment Tribunal, alleging that she has been on the receiving end of discrimination and victimisation on the grounds of age and sex. O’Reilly has worked for the BBC for 25 years, including stints on Women’s Hour and File on 4, and is the recipient of several broadcasting awards: the British Environment Media Award for Best Environmental Story; the Foreign Press Award and the Royal Television Society Award for Best Documentary. When Countryfile was moved to a new primetime slot, O’Reilly and the other three female presenters (all over forty) were told to pack their bags. The male presenters were kept on.
It all comes down to image. Our television screens are full of greyly distinguished men, with Huw Edwards and Jeremy Paxman leading the pack of silver foxes. According to O’Reilly, the ideal BBC woman is “a size eight, unlined and with a taut neck. You cannot have a saggy chin and wrinkles under your eyes, like normal women”. Her last years at the Corporation were full of snide remarks about wrinkles being more visible in high-definition, and that she was a ‘rare breed’ still allowed to broadcast.
After the sacking of Arlene Phillips from the judging panel of Strictly Come Dancing, stories began to appear alleging that a culture of ageism was endemic at the BBC. O’Reilly was suspected of starting the stories, and her participation in almost all other BBC projects was quickly curtailed, with no explanation. A senior male executive telephoned to admit that, for the first time, he felt ashamed of the BBC.
There is definitely something wrong with the way we perceive older women. O’Reilly wrote a stirring defence of her choice to take the BBC on in the ‘FeMail’ section of the Daily Mail. Her story was interspersed with links to other stories in the same section: “Botox in a bottle: The £125 moisturiser that promises to freeze time… by mimicking the paralysing effects of snake venom”; “Time to look pale and interesting… whatever your age”; and last but not least, “Can a haircut make YOU look younger?”
When I’m asked if I am a feminist, I hesitate. It is as if admitting to that tendency presupposes a kind of militancy, which I think is outdated. Feminism should not be about getting ahead of men – it should be about equality. Miriam O’Reilly’s case demonstrates that such equality is still outside our grasp. So girls, it might be time to put down the five-inch heels – and support the women who fought for the opportunities that we now take for granted. Otherwise we risk a lot, and gain only a little.
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“Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers of my school notebooks.”
- Walter Benjamin, “Tiergarten”, Berlin Childhood around 1900
Over the last few weeks thousands upon thousands of people have been joining a facebook group called ‘Secret London’, and similar groups have been set up for other cities around the world. The point, apparently, is to tell absolutely everyone about those great places that aren’t already filled with tourists. The result, I can only assume, will be for all of those lovely little places to quickly become overcrowded and not-so-lovely little places, but that is only the beginning.
Already we live in a city that is fractured, or rather shattered by transport. If a place doesn’t have a tube station it barely exists in the consciousness of the average North Londoner. Where there’s a tube that will take you somewhere, most people will never walk. London is split into confined areas set around specified destinations, and through this already begins to lack identity as a city.
A few weeks ago, standing outside the Tate Britain, a couple of people asked me and a friend how to get to Liverpool street. We’re both Londoners and gave the answer that the best way would be to “go up the river for a couple of miles, perhaps there’s a bus that will take you along the Thames”, but this way of thinking about London, the geographical connection of places, seems rarer and rarer. It is as a result of a lack of this kind of thinking that people even feel they need groups about how to find cool places to go.
It might seem that I am simply arguing for a quaint old-fashionedness in an approach to a city, flâneurism even, but my point is more that the way that the city is split is of course not a result of the wills of the people who live in it. Maybe a better solution, instead of telling people where they can find a secret spot that is quite cool, would be to demand they challenge this edifice. To reclaim the city through a process of understanding that is so much challenged by the edifice of tube maps, transport systems, tourist information bureaux, city guides, etc. Without a doubt almost all of the secret places listed are random finds, so if we universalise this system of finding good places to go, we not only run the risk of losing our own secret places, but the entire way secret places may be found. And if the same principle is applied across all cities, that they become a mere collection of places rather than spaces, we may lose the entire reason why London is London.
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At the interval Mental Flatmate was a bit glum. ‘There’s not enough grime,’ he complained. ‘Prison’s all about knives and gangs, you know?’ He paused and stared silently at his beer for a full minute. ‘They haven’t got enough hate.’
Mental Flatmate reads the Daily Mail and gets intimidated by the school kids who hang around the end of our street smoking and looking cold. I don’t know where MF gets his knowledge of prison from, I’m fairly sure he’s never been in one, but he carries himself like a lag. He’s been wearing the same tracksuit top for months and he has one of those thousand mile stares that makes girls on the tube get up and move.
For anyone apart from Max Mosley, Rex Obano’s first play Slaves, performed at Theatre 503 – which includes full body cavity searches, onstage masturbation, semen gargling and stories of bullying in Wandsworth prison ― isn’t precisely what you’d call a first date play. So it had seemed sensible to take MF instead, but he was definitely restless. ‘I could be at home playing Worms. There’s a Friday league.’
Something in the second half however turned him round.
‘That was good.’
‘What was good about it?’
‘Solid.’
To be fair to MF my thoughts followed a similar trajectory. After forty minutes which didn’t quite balance its mixture of shock reportage, coming of age tale and ‘meditation on human bondage’ (the direction throughout was a touch stodgy) it really started to motor. The characters’ story arcs began to bind, tension increased, the audience craned forward because they cared.
A lot of this was down to a superb cast. Lead Adetomiwa Edum did well to bring credibility and sympathy to a character whose actions and outlook often seemed to lack consistency. He has bright future, though the surest sign of his talent was evident in his ability to keep up with three actors on the top of their game. Paul Bentall playing gruff guard White, David Burt as the superbly cynical prison governor and the terrifying Cornel S. John, as an aging murderer Reuben, all clearly relished a script which at its moments was simultaneously filthy, funny and moving. And crucially knowing.
Obano has clearly done his research. He knows how drugs get into prison, understands how guards are compromised and uses prison patois with a flair and confidence few first time playwrights could match. Yet his message is bleak and perhaps surprisingly for fringe theatre, arguably conservative.
One line of thought followed through the play runs counter to our usual view of self-knowledge: that if it is not an unqualified good, it is at least consoling. Instead Obano’s prisoners and guards, trapped in uneasy alliances and denied privacy, come to see themselves only as limited, cynical, shabby. If there is a difference between guards and prisoners, it seems to be that the guards know these limitations and accordingly wall in their own fantasies in ways the prisoners can’t or won’t. Edun’s naive young officer learns by trial and error―by accumulating bruises―how to avoid deeper wounds. He learns he’s closer to his fellow white officers than the black prisoners he’s been sent to ‘connect with’.
By contrast the prisoners’ greatest collective vice is a kind of vaulting ambition: prison a deserved purgatory. Anger at the system, at racial inequality, at a country which proclaims ‘Britons never will be slaves’, even at blind circumstance― are all ‘revealed’ as displaced rage against themselves. Against their failure to take control. Punishment matters as much, if not more than rehabilitation, and the worst punishment is knowing you deserve it, and you’re too weak to change.
This is a good first play and look forward to seeing Obano’s future work.
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The proposed equality bill has generated much debate – in particular the question of whether churches should be banned from discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation. Yet what strikes me is the sheer hypocrisy of these measures, from a government which has actively institutionalised such discrimination.
Under laws that went into force last year, the new Independent Safeguarding Authority has the power to ban people from working with children, or to throw them out of their jobs if they are already doing so. People can be banned from working with children simply on the grounds of ‘unsuitability’, regardless of whether they have broken the law. Over on the ISA’s website you will find the list of criteria that case-officers use to decide whether somebody is unsuitable. Under the guidelines, people can potentially be banned from working with kids on the basis that they have an interest in violent porn, even if the material they possess doesn’t reach the threshold for criminal prosecution. Apparently, while discrimination against gay people should be illegal, discrimination against the BDSM community is not only fine but necessary.
Equally officers are expected consider whether the subject displays signs of a “concerning paraphilia”. This is a phrase so vague that it should frighten any freedom loving person. A “paraphilia” refers to any form of sexual desire that departs from the “normal” . What makes a particular paraphilia “concerning” is anybody’s guess. The important thing is that 40 years ago homosexuality could reasonably have been placed under this category. Most people DID find it concerning. Such a guideline potentially rules out anybody whose tastes are odds with prevailing social and sexual norms. Thus, while the government harps on about equality, it continues to support an institution which can ruin people’s lives on account of nothing more than their sexual orientation.
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Mandelson made me chuckle today. A couple of hours after shareholders approved Kraft’stakeover of Cadbury’s he met with Kraft’s CEO. Speaking to the BBC about the meeting he expressed his “dissapointment” that Kraft had failed to give him specific commitments about keeping jobs in Britain, and told of his determination to get firmer, more specific commitments over the coming months. This strikes me as rather similar to a man pouring chilli powder into his soup and then expressing his “disspointment” that it is too spicy. As the man who has always pushed the door open to private enterprise, and who has extolled its virtues, surely he should understand a little about about how it works – namely that kraft have no reason to give a flying fuck about his quaint desire to stop too many brits losing their jobs. Mandelson made his bed. Sadly it will be the poorest and most vulnerable sections of British society who have to lie in it.
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I did something different this Saturday. I stood in a freezing park in London and took a deliberate overdose of tablets in the company of some of the UK’s most well known scientists.
No I haven’t joined some kind of doomsday cult. In fact, none of us were ever at any risk. We were overdosing on homeopathic remedies…
For those of you who don’t know what homeopathic remedies are (I know I didn’t understand it until recently) I suggest looking at this website. Homeopathy means taking a (usually scary sounding) active ingredient like Nux Vom (Strychnine), Belladona(Deadly Nightshade) or Arnica and diluting it to 30C – in other words until there is 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1% active ingredient in each tablet. To put this in perspective, there is probably about as much of Julius Caesar in the tap water of Rome than there is active ingredient in these tablets. However, homeopaths claim that water retains a memory of the substance, which has a therapeutic effect. They then mix this water ‘solution’ with sugar and lactose and it retails for £4.99. A packet of sweetener costs £1.
Although the tablets themselves are not dangerous, people sometimes take them instead of taking actual medication in the belief they will cure real illnesses – and that is potentially dangerous. So last Saturday, a group of scientists decided to stage a publicity stunt to draw attention to this.
It would have been easy for me as a journalist to just report on this story and let this bunch of sceptics take the ‘risk’. Except I am also a sceptic so I wanted to know for myself. And having had only 5 hours sleep the night before the stunt, I desperately needed some sugar…
So on Saturday morning I found myself getting out of bed at the ungodly hour favoured by a bunch of atheists to stand in the freezing cold outside Conway Hall in London. After deliberation I selected some Sepia (Cuttlefish ink) tablets for the job – they had an old school photographic appeal. The packaging said you should only take two. Presumably in case you are a diabetic.
Among my fellow overdosers were Simon Singh, Lib Dem MP Dr Evan Harris and the comedian Dave Gorman. There were also about 80 other protestors, some of whom had travelled across the country to take part in the stunt (and got up much earlier than me).
I had to film everyone taking their tablets first and then take mine afterwards. This was not a cunning plan to watch and see if anyone dropped dead before following suit – it’s just impossible to overdose and shoot good hand-held footage at the same time.
Watching a mass overdose ought to be spine chilling. It ought to make you think of KoolAid and Waco but unfortunately there is something undeniably comical about a whole load of people making the same action at the same time. It’s like synchronised swimming.
What was even more amusing was that, for the benefit of the hungry media, the protestors had to simulate the overdose a further 4 times so everyone could get good footage. If you can just imagine a bunch of press photographers shouting “Simon, could you just overdose again for me please?”…
Finally, the time came for me to take my own overdose. This was harder than I had hoped because while everyone else managed to take the end off their tubes and dispense all the tablets into their palm at once for dramatic effect, my tube malfunctioned. I was forced to dispense the tablets one by one into my hand like Pez – a frustratingly slow protest.
Eventually I managed to pop out a handful – enough for a serious attempt – and with my friend the mathematician and comedian Matt Parker holding the camera I knocked back the tablets – without a drink. I figured the tablets were diluted enough already without washing them down with water.
It’s now three days later and nothing has happened to me whatsoever. I feel no more or less healthy than I did prior to the overdose and I felt no more or less healthy immediately after the overdose either. It’s an unscientific form of research – and it was never meant to be anything but: it’s a publicity stunt. For the purpose of legality, I should say that I do not condone or encourage you to take an overdose of anything at all (however benign) – this was a personal decision to prove a point.
The NHS currently spends somewhere in the region of £4 million on homeopathy – money which could be funding life saving research into genuine non-placebo medicine. I hope this little protest did change some minds.
As a footnote to this story, after the event only one of my friends bothered to enquire after my health on Facebook. One sorry person. I would like to think this is because they were all really well informed on the subject of homeopathy and knew I was in no danger but I suspect the real reason was they were too busy watching Murray v Federer.
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Last week the historian Martin Gilbert brought attention to an article published a couple of months back by the Independent on Sunday. He expressed a certain amount of reasonable outrage over piece in which former ambassador Oliver Miles had questioned the impartiality of the enquiry panel. It is an article that starts off reasonably. Miles makes some reasonable attacks on the enquiry and considers some of the expressed opinions of those serving on it. Gilbert – who is serving on the enquiry – is quoted as having said that Bush and Blair “may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill”. But then the article takes an odd turn. Miles states that “Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism.” Leaving aside the second comment abut Gilbert, what the fuck has Freedman’s ethnic background got to do with it. Miles doesn’t elaborate particularly on the implications of this, but then he doesn’t need to. Oddly enough he doesn’t meditate on the ethnic backgrounds of any White Anglo-Saxon panel members. yet for some reason it is reasonable to draw inferences about somebody’s character or viewpoint from the fact they are Jewish.
As far as Miles himself goes, this is not particularly surprising. I mean he is not the first foreign office tosser to express dodgy opinions. What is more dissapointing is that The Independent on Sunday would publish such cheap innuendo about an individuals ethnic background. Perhaps Rod Liddle will not be as out of place in the organisation as some would have you believe.
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As you may or may not have noticed, smoking is an issue fairly close to the hearts of some among The Third Estate’s bloggers. And as today brings news of proposals for even stricter restrictions on smoking in public places, you could be forgiven for expecting another angry denunciation of government policy on the issue. But, just this once, that’s not what you’re going to get. Now, admittedly as a (near-)non-smoker, I’m probably a bit less likely to view the right to smoke as a fundamental human freedom in any case, but take a close look at what the Department of Health is actually suggesting:
This next push offers a radical vision for a smokefree future. It sets out several key commitments:
Stopping young people being recruited as smokers by cracking down on cheap illicit cigarettes. Immediate investment in extra overseas officers will stop 200 million cigarettes entering the UK every year.
Every smoker will be able to get help from the NHS to suit them if they want to give up – new types of support will be available at times and in places that suit smokers.
The Government will carefully consider the case for plain packaging.
Stopping the sale of tobacco from vending machines – a significant source of tobacco for young people.
So, let’s consider these proposals one by one. A crackdown on cigarette smuggling? More tax money for the Treasury’s all-too-empty coffers as more cigarettes are bought legitimately? Sounds OK to me. Some smokers – well, OK, most smokers who are aware of the issue – are undeniably quite pissed off that taxes on tobacco bring in considerably more money than the NHS spends on treating smoking-related diseases, but I don’t see that they have much reason to complain, particularly if they argue against restrictions on smoking on the grounds of personal liberty (as is commonplace on this blog). No one’s coercing smokers into buying tobacco products, so raising taxes on them isn’t authoritarian. Sure, most smokers are to some extent addicted (so perhaps they can’t exactly be said to be choosing to buy tobacco), but if they want to spend less money then they have the option of free smoking cessation help from the NHS – help which, according to the second bullet point above, is becoming better-funded and more widely available under the new proposals. There’s no compulsion involved.
Banning branded packaging – if indeed the government decides to do this – doesn’t seem much of an affront to liberty either. I fail to see how distinctive designs on different brands of tobacco products enhance the freedoms of those who are buying those products and as such likewise fail to see how banning said designs restricts their freedom. It certainly restricts the freedoms of the tobacco companies to influence consumers through marketing and branding, but surprisingly enough I don’t really give a shit about that.
Stopping the sale of tobacco from vending machines is, again, not something I can really bring myself to care about. Unless you think the UK’s ban on alcohol in vending machines is a gross violation of our fundamental liberties (or that there’s some fundamental difference in how alcohol and tobacco should be treated as controlled substances), I really don’t see that there’s a great deal to make a fuss about.
As for the final point, there seems little reason why a campaign to dissuade people from exposing children to secondhand smoke should be seen as controversial, and a prohibition on smoking in the entrances to buildings is barely an extension of the previous smoking ban. The principle – that non-smokers shouldn’t be exposed to high levels of secondhand smoke – is exactly the same. Walking through a large group of smokers clustered round a doorway is pretty comparable to walking past a group of smokers indoors, and obviously unavoidable if you want to go into the building outside which said smokers are standing. Whether the previous smoking ban was right or wrong is a question on which I’m agnostic, but this is hardly a tougher restriction.
In short, smokers’ rights advocates might do well to rein in their outrage. Whether the government is right to care so much about the harms of smoking is certainly debatable, but if it is trivial then attacking these proposals as part of a war on personal liberty seems a little lacking in perspective.
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