More Stars With Old Heads On Their Younger Bodies

[caption id="attachment_4260" align="alignright" width="271" class=" "] Tom Jones[/caption]

There's an inherent cruelty to this stunt. I'm aware of that and it does make me occasionally tut and hiss when one of these mashups come out and it doesn't look particularly flattering to the subject. I know this little game is meant to be (somewhat) funny but I'm not a naturally cruel guy and, I admit, I've made a couple of these that I just didn't think it worth showing because they were simply too cruel.

The difficulty is particularly acute on photographs of actresses and the fact that I feel bad about the results for actresses I've attempted this with (but haven't published) perhaps says something about my own perceptions of beauty. The gentlemen in most of these photographs don't look too bad. In fact, I think the last few blog posts back up something I've always said about generic Hollywood actors: that they generally look better as they get older. Of course, 'better' is subjective and perhaps what I mean to say is 'more interesting'. I preferred Clint Eastwood's movies when he got older. My favourite actor, Gene Hackman, got better the more he aged. Not that he was classic film star material to begin with but that is one of the reasons I'd always watch him. The same is true of Piece Brosnan, who made better films once he was too old to play James Bond. This also happened to Sean Connery, who made some truly great films once he turned grey. Liam Neeson is an example of a star who found real fame once he got older. Walter Matthau, another of my absolute favourite actors, was old the moment he was born but that was his appeal. If you're not watching a movie to admire the looks of the actor, then there's little or no point making you lead actor good looking. Dare I say even Brad Pitt will find more interesting roles now he's hit 50? Every day I wish Connery or Hackman would come out of retirement because I'm damn sure they'd still be more compelling to watch than half the actors I've had to endure in recent films.

What I think these experiments show is that Hollywood is stupidly obsessed with bland, tediously fresh-faced youth. I know Mel Gibson has done some dumb things in his life and I know there are many people out there that still won't accept his apologies. Yet the films he's made recently are, in my humble opinion, the best of his career. He is in that perfect zone that Clint Eastwood made his own as he got older. Give me Payback (1999), We Were Soldiers (2002), Edge of Darkness (2010), or the brilliant Get the Gringo (2012) over any of the Lethal Weapon movies or even, for that matter, Mad Max 1, 2, or 3.



The deeper truth, I think, is more troublesome. It's probably a trite thing to say and now doubt it has been said countless times before, but there's such a disparity between how we think of actors when they get older and actresses. I don't know who first pointed out that as some men get older they become more distinguished yet there isn't an equivalent for women. That, I think, is where feminism has been completely powerless in facing down that deep bias in our collectively psychology. It doesn't suggest that we are wrong in the way he think about aging actresses . It suggests, instead, we have the wrong attitude to actresses in their youth. Great acting ability means little compared to their looks. If we stopped trivialising young actresses, then we might have more respect for them as get older. Only then might we stop making them feel like they need the face lifts that turn nearly all of them into rictus mannequins of our celebrity sick times.

[caption id="attachment_4256" align="aligncenter" width="432"] Michael Caine[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_4253" align="aligncenter" width="428"] Mickey Rooney[/caption]



[caption id="attachment_4262" align="aligncenter" width="421"] Felicity Kendall[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_4248" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Mel Gibson again...[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_4254" align="aligncenter" width="684" class=" "] And Tom Cruise looks exactly the same...[/caption]

This is what a feminist looks like...

I hold no love for David Cameron except for this morning when I did feel like giving our old moon faced leader a big kiss on one of his sizable cheeks. Apparently, our PM has refused to don a t-shirt proclaiming 'this is what a feminist looks like'. It is, of course, the sensible thing to do, even if it doesn't seem politically shrewd. For a start, if he wore the shirt, it would still not be what a 'feminist looks like' because 'feminist', being an abstract noun, doesn't look like anything. Feminists don't look like Ed Miliband or Ed Balls. They don't even look like Benedict Cumberbatch, though that's something of a rarity these days given that everybody and everything looks like Benedict Cumberbatch who doesn't seem to capable of saying 'no' to a role. The snowman in this year's John Lewis Christmas ad? Benedict Cumberbatch. The model for next year's new Mini hatchback? Benedict Cumberbatch...

'This is what a feminist looks like' just makes as much as sense as saying 'this is what sexy looks like' when you don't have an idea what I think sexy looks like. Unless you're going to get Sigourney Weaver posing in an LFC top and thumbing Martin Rowson's newest collection of cartoons, then I really doubt if you know what sexy does look like. And that's a problem with using such a heavily loaded phrase. 'Feminism', to me, is a whole range of positive and negative meanings, experiences bound up in persons I variously liked, loved, admired, or despised. It also assumes that I have exactly the same thoughts about gender equality as you or Ed Milliband or the editor of Elle Magazine when there's a chance they're not.

I would hate to label myself a 'feminist' because it's too narrow a definition, in the same way that I shrug my shoulders when people tell me they're against homophobia or female genital mutilation. I find myself thinking: good for you but wouldn't any right-minded person be against those things? It's not as though we're talking about grey areas such as genetic engineering in Brighton or fracking laboratory beagles. You wouldn't think of wearing a shirt saying 'this is what anti-murderist looks like' because people should already assume that you'd be against murder. It would be more appropriate to wear a shirt saying 'this is what somebody looks like when they like to state the bloody obvious in a pithy but fashionable way'.

Besides, to wear a shirt proclaiming any message marks you as a person who believes in the power of t-shirts emblazoned with messages and those are some of the scariest people out there. They're the people seen red faced on the front row of any mob; people who can't see past the rhetoric to the difficult reality. And that's always been the power of rhetoric in that it makes you admire the rhetoric rather than the reality. Plato banned certain types of poetry from his Republic because he recognised that people can be too easily motivated by fine words.  Plato, I think, would have also banned memes from his ideal city. There would be no ice-bucket challenge in Ancient Greece, unlike today when nearly every celebrity seems to have taken it, though a much smaller fraction than 100% of them could tell you who Lou Gehrig was and why ice has now become synonymous with his name.

Has any medium overwhelmed the simple message as much as the ice bucket challenge drowned out the message about the disease? The whole thing began to resemble the old schoolyard dare in which the gang give themselves over to the power of simple but powerful message. The message might be something as dumb as poking a lump of dog shit with your finger yet any reasonable person might say poking dog shit with your finger leaves you venerable to god knows what diseases.

'Do you want to make me blind?' you'd protest.

'Ah, you're frightened of dog shit!' would come the answer.

'No,' you reply, 'I just think the whole dog-shit poking scenario is more complicated than you're allowing.'

There aren't many issues which are morally more absolute than the stupidity of poking dog shit. 'I'm pro-breathing' would perhaps be one, alongside 'human rights not snow rights'. At the same time, whilst feminism is self-evidently wishes to say something positive, it is also more complicated than a man simply wearing a t-shirt proclaiming that he's a feminist. A t-shirt doesn't change the reality of the cabinet dominated by men. It doesn't make a convincing argument for positive discrimination (there really isn't one). Nor would it recognise that the problem no longer lies in our notions of gender but in the very definition of the word 'equality'. True equality is impossible since our differences are bound up in the very fabric of our DNA. Monty Python were perhaps the most profound when Stan told the People's Front of Judea that he wanted to have a baby.

Reg: You want to have babies?!?!

Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.

Reg: But ... you can't HAVE babies!

Stan: Don't you oppress me!

Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?

Perhaps we need a more enlightened view of our entire society, our notions of success and failure, intelligence, power, careers, ambition...  Many feminist writers have acknowledged that woman think differently to men and are as powerful but in sometimes different ways. Perhaps it's men who are wrongly obsessed with working their way up the greasy poles of industry or politics. Wearing a t-shirt that says 'this is what a feminist looks like' also says, 'this is what a man looks like who is so uncomfortable with the issue of gender equality that I have to wear this patronising t-shirt'. As far as I can see, it's fighting a battle which was won decades ago. Equality today is as much about gender as it is about race, class, education and the green economy.

So, please go and wear your slogans and read Russell Brand's books, filled with pith and fruity vinegar but not much else. It marks you out as a limited free thinker, a person who reduces the wonderfully complicated structure of the universe into abstract concepts that will ultimately fail. Today, and just for today, I'm on the side of the Prime Minister. Just don't ask me to express my support in the form of a t-shirt.

 

Vegetable Slicing and the Symbolic Castration of Ant & Dec

Men of the world unite! Either Ant or Dec has chopped off the top of his thumb and, oh, what a fine time it is to be a man, when the best among us has done what we all aspire to do: sing a song of manhood replete with sharp kitchen gadgets and a willful disregard for reading the instructions.

But you might have already grimaced over this story and know that it was actually Ant who suffered the injury whilst using a vegetable slicer to prepare dauphinoise potatoes for Dec. I only typed ‘Ant or Dec’ because I can’t honestly tell one receding hairline from another standing a foot to the right. In my mind, it’s the high-foreheaded hydra that’s one thumb down on the day and has only three thumbs remaining.

It’s a strange world where this story features so highly in the news. It’s probably why, as I gazed over the morning papers, I wondered why I continue with this sad pretence of blogging. The truth is that had I not written a piece about ‘Flappy Bird’ in the past week, traffic to this blog would be at an all-time low, with today setting a chilly record. Meanwhile, The Guardian promotes Jack Monroe like she’s the incarnate truth of blithe poverty; the happy-clappy survivalist and expert prepper for a country that’s just about getting by on one Ryvita a day and the occasional shapeless grape we find squashed beneath our empty freezer. That’s not to say I don’t like Jack Monroe, her backstory, or how she’s passionate about eating cheaply. It’s just that she’s so different to me that she constantly demonstrates how I’m doing everything wrong…

So, here goes. Aim for the mainstream, David. Aim for the mainstream…

How to cheaply feed a family of four with one thumb joint taken from popular TV presenter, Anthony ‘Ant’ McPartlin and some bloody-stained veg sliced unreasonably thin… First, take one TV presenter (£20 million a year, available at your local broadcaster), wash his thumbs, and apply one sharp blade to the top knuckle…

But I have to stop this sham right there. It would be fine if I could but I just can’t carry on and I’m increasingly tired of newspapers that can. It’s not just The Guardian that does it, of course. They all twist stories to fit their particular narratives. The Guardian just happens to have the best free web presence and politics I don’t totally object to, so I’m still drawn to reading it and feeling dismayed and utterly disappointed by the predictability of their content; how they try to link every celebrity story into a restatement of their perpetual themes of the surveillance society, poverty, gender politics… Especially gender politics…

Perhaps it’s just these jaded eyes but journalism seems to have become home to every third-rate academic willing to add another floor to the elaborate Babel that stretches skywards towards a feminist utopia that really isn’t up there. But perhaps a tower is far too phallic, no matter how much my metaphor might droop. Let’s make it a deep cave disappearing down towards some core dark truth.

Yet what surprises me the most is that I’ve never been entirely hostile to gender studies. I never thought it a paradigm shift to realise that gender is not absolute. Gender study is very prevalent in literary theory where it has become an often repeated observation that a writer such as D.H. Lawrence had a feminine sensibility. Once you accept that kind of distinction, the rest of it follows fairly easily. Even if I never thought much of Kristeva’s work (a writer who clearly hates to be understood), I’ve always quite liked Hélène Cixous’s way of making her point.

I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history.

If Freud could argue that we are defined by our childhoods, it seems only reasonable to conclude that the things we do, the words we choose to write, might also be influenced by our bodies, hormones, the very way we respond to the base urges of our gender.

The problem is that some places aren’t ready for the reconstituted male, men who agree with the broad arguments of feminism and simply wish to move on. We have to continue to play the role of the proxy bastards, out to keep women down and establish the patriarchal order. It’s not a part I wish to play but I’m doomed by my place in the patriarchy.

Last week’s Question Time was a perfect example. Tessa Jowell was on the panel with Dr David Starkey, George Galloway and others. They were debating whether the accused should be given anonymity in rape cases and Jowell was generally against it lest it discourage more women to come forward. It was a strange argument but typical of the ‘two wrongs do make a right’ logic that sometimes passes for progressive thinking. Rape has been under-reported for centuries and it’s only relatively recently that the law has taken the proper steps to recognise its severity. Yet should centuries of abuse, mainly by men, now justify a new kind of injustice that overlooks the rights of the individual if they just happen to be male? Even when acquitted, the accused are never cleared of the suspicion of guilt. Rape is a sentence that is handed down as soon as an allegation goes public. Does a belief in ‘innocent until proved guilty’ make me a typical man or simply somebody who believes in equality? Sometimes, in wanting justice to be blind, it feels like I’m not demanding the fashionable bias.

To me these things seem logical but perhaps logic isn’t as important playing the gender game where everything hinges on what we have between our legs. I expect articles in the papers this week explaining why Ant shouldn’t be mocked for losing his thumb, how it either reveals the emergency of a new masculine identity or reinforces the old stereotypes that says that men are useless around the kitchen. Brighter folk might even tell you that Ant didn’t chop off his thumb but symbolically took off the top inch of his penis. Perhaps they’re right. I really haven’t thought about it enough to disagree except to say if Ant was slicing vegetables with his penis, then he was asking for trouble. By now, I’m just confused. Perhaps his thumb is or really isn’t his dick and I don’t know my arse from my elbow. I nearly didn’t blog today and tomorrow I might not even bother.

Some Heartfelt Thoughts About Cheryl Cole’s Horrendous Bottom

There aren’t many blogs that have stayed in my blogroll from the very beginning but Bryan Appleyard’s ‘Thought Experiments’ is one. It’s always certain to get my brain working in ways that are helpfully tangential to things I’m already thinking about. Today, for instance, the reinvigorated Bryan is talking about ‘people who care’ and, naturally, that immediately made me think about the bottoms of attractive young women in their mid-twenties.

We live in a society where we are routinely expected to adopt positions we might not instinctively support. ‘Caring’ is one example. Even though it makes me sound hammer callous about the truly poor, I’ll be honest and admit that I never really cared all that deeply about ‘feeding the world’. I never went to any ‘Live Aid’ concert but I bet that many who did and bought the t-shirt weren’t actually all that interested in famine or food economics. They furrowed their brows and spoke in platitudes but, deep down, where all our bestial motivations snout around for brushed chrome phones and comfortable underwear, they were just there to see Bowie and Jagger perform.

That isn’t to say that I’m insensitive to suffering but growing up surround by media hype about films, bands, and national celebrations, it tended to make it difficult to recognise the actual reality of the world or to understand the true levels of hardship. I doubt if I’m alone. Once something exceeds the brain’s ability to comprehend scale, it’s as if the brain retreats to failsafe positions: ‘surely the government should do something’ or ‘isn’t it terrible…’ It is bystander apathy on a global scale and totally understandable because to fully commit yourself to the cause would mean changing your life, altering your routine, and sacrificing your comfort.

It’s just one example of the casual hypocrisy we’re taught to exercise between our schooldays and the Pearly Gates. We say we want to see businesses run ethically but the capitalist fat slides thick and heavy though our veins. What we really care about is the price of the new iPhone or the quality of our socks. It’s like people who declare that Michael McIntyre is funny. They don’t really think that but the BBC has filled them with a conviction as solid as slimed drivel nailed to a door.

The worst example of this quasi-doublethink is ‘political correctness’ which often applies a thin veneer of tolerance over more deeply held forms of intolerance, prejudice, and conviction.

I was reading an article in The Guardian yesterday about the horrendous Cheryl Cole’s bottom. On the horrendous Cheryl Cole’s bottom, the horrendous Cheryl Cole has had a large horrendous tattoo of flowers inked by some American artist who probably has a side line in wallpaper design. Jane Martinson, the writer of the piece, suggested the tattoo might be read as a feminist statement, as if to say: ‘men might think I’m ruining a very attractive bottom but I’m showing that my bottom belongs to me, the horrendous Cheryl Cole, and I can do with it what I like.’

The implication in both the article and comments that followed was that I’m not allowed to think that the horrendous Cheryl Cole had a rather nice bottom or that she has now ruined it forever. That would be an example of my being sexist and patriarchal about bottoms that are none of my concern.

It’s a hard slap to take. Even before I read this article I would often find myself wandering around in life and occasionally looking at an attractive female bottom before an inner voice would start to shout Guardian propaganda at me. There I was on the train into Manchester just a week ago, leaning slightly into the aisle to admire the rear of the departing guard (female), when the voice of my inner Toynbee began to bark and I fell ruined back into my seat. I live wracked with all kinds of guilt about my attraction to female bottoms, which I swear isn’t abnormal. There’s nothing illicit about these bottoms, which are usually in their mid-twenties and fully clothed, possibly in tight denim. Think Jacqueline Bisset in ‘The Deep’ or Emmanuelle Seigner in ‘Frantic’ and you’ll know what I mean…

Yet it's this discrepancy between thoughtless actions and thoughtful reflection that makes hypocrites of so many of us. It is partially why political rhetoric is so shallow in this country. There are too many things we cannot say, cannot admit, and are prevented from addressing. Politicians are forced to issue the most jabberingly stupid of statements on subjects which demand more nuanced debate. They lie to us, not because they are deceitful, but because we as a collective have allowed these lies to take on the appearance of moral truths in the hope that at some point everybody will begin to believe them.

For instance, it’s increasingly hard to insult Clare Balding these days lest people intuit that you’re insulting her sexuality. But Clare Balding isn’t annoying because she’s a lesbian. To say that 'she’s an annoying lesbian' should register exactly the same as if one has said that 'she’s an annoying commentator'. You wouldn’t interpret the latter to mean that commentators are inherently annoying and in a proper liberal society that should be also true of the former. The prejudice exists the moment you infer anything else about the statement.

Language mirrors thought, not always as succinctly as we wish, but in a way that we can usually presume it has a basis in a person wishing to communicate what they think. What advocates of political correctness fail to acknowledge is that merely changing the language does not change the underlying thoughts. To pretend that it can is, at best, hypocritical, and at worst, creating a generation of men who feel deeply conflicted about the horrendous Cheryl Cole’s bottom and its hardy perennials. And, as much as I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear this: I don't like them. I really don't...