Men Like Joe

Life's rarely fair. Take the case of Mr. Daniel Ware: picked out of nowhere because a passerby shared a picture of his chez res on social media and before the ink is dry on his contract with The Sun he's standing in front of the media as the representative of an entire class. He hadn't asked to be judged and it would be wrong of anybody to try to understand his soul simply by looking at him.  So, let's not make this about Mr. Daniel Ware who, according to his neighbours, is simply a 'gentle giant'. I really don't want to talk about Mr. Ware. I really don't care about Mr. Ware.

Instead, let's talk about people who look like Mr. Ware. I'm sure you won't have to look very far.

In the early hours of yesterday, Emily Thornberry resigned from the shadow cabinet (or, according to some reports, she was sacked) because she had been resorting to stereotypes about the working classes. How dare she judge a man by the flag he waves... Or so the argument begins. There's nothing wrong with people who are proud of their country and, if a man (not Mr. Ware, just a man who looks like Mr. Ware) just happens to drive a white van, then he's one of many tens of thousands who take to our roads every day in vans painted white. Maybe they represent the national average in some obscure but meaningful way. Maybe, if you wanted to take a snapshot of Britain on the 21st November, 2014, you would come away with a portrait of a man who looks very much like Mr. Ware but, obviously, isn't Mr. Ware. Let's call this lookalike Joe Anybody. Joe looks just like Mr Ware and, lucky for us, has a very similar biography.

For example, Joe just happens to sport a skinhead and have that fold of flesh at the back of his head that always makes me think of Grossberger in Stir Crazy. It makes me think of violence and warehouses late at night. Unlike Grossberger, Joe also sports a few tattoos. But there are probably thousands of men who are like Joe: heavily tattooed and also supporters of West Ham United. And just because Joe supports West Ham and has a skin head, it would be wrong to mention that English football hooliganism began with West Ham's 'Bovver Boys' of the 1960s or that they were sympathisers of the National Front and characterised by their tattoos and skin heads.

Joe also reads The Sun but so do lots of men. They enjoy looking at the women with the big tits but lots of men enjoy looking at women with big tits. He deals in cars which is a legitimate business and great for the economy. The nation thrives because of wheeler dealers. And if he happens to enjoy climbing into a cage and beating other men up, he's not breaking any laws. He simply needs to relax after a head day's wheeling and dealing.

Critics of Emily Thornberry would say that none of this matters. And they're right because clearly, none of this has anything to do with the real person Mr. Daniel Ware. Her tweet about him was reductive and crude.

However, had Emily Thornberry tweeted a picture of the house belonging to our entirely imaginary friend Joe, would we think that her stereotype was at all inaccurate?

Maybe the very worst thing you can say about Joe is that if you were casting a role for a brutish modern thug with far right sympathies, he would land the role on £120 quid a day and everything he can eat from catering. Perhaps if you were interested in modern British culture, you might also say that Joe is an example of a current and deeply troubling phenomenon. Men like Joe are the epitome of the new moronic Britain. They are the stuff of our most moronic TV, usually hosted by our favourite Joe lookalike, Ross Kemp, and with titles involving the words 'hardest', 'meanest', and 'most dangerous'. They are familiar because they're loutish and loud, muscle bound and steroid thick. They are the cretins who smash bottles on our high streets on a Friday night. You want to indulge in cheap stereotypes, then how about muscle vests, medallions, sovereign rings, ethnic tattoos, names of their numerous kids trailing up their vein-thick necks. How about pitbulls and rottweilers, broken noses, gold teeth, four by fours, road rage, gang culture, drug wars, English nationalism, football terraces, racism, hatred, violence, lad culture, pornography, rape...

Or perhaps there's another story here. Perhaps we should be more worried at the way the media rushes to appoint a skin-head tattooed West Ham supporter who happens to be a cage fighter as the sole representative of the working classes.

Is this what we've come to as a nation?

The media are cowardly stepping around the story. We live in an age when it's so easy to cause offence. Yet nobody asks if it's right to cause offence. Maybe we need to go on the offensive against men like Joe because, if you met a man like Joe in the flesh, what would you really think?

And yet in asking this, I know I could be accused of being elitist and sneering towards the working classes. Perhaps I am but I think I have the right because I am pure bred working class. Men like Joe and Mr Ware are standing as proxy for me.

But let me be clear. I don't mean that I'm working class in some kind of exotic way. I don't 'identify' with the working classes because that's a cool thing to do. I'm pretty well educated but I don't have a middle class upbringing. I'm not suddenly finding a kitsch appeal in the working classes. I see myself as working class because I am working class. I am born of working class parents. My grandparents were all working class and one of them was a Lithuanian (or possibly Russian, there remains some confusion) immigrant whose parents fled the Bolshevik revolution. I live in a working class town, surrounded by working class people and everybody I meet each and every day is working class. And what might sound strange is that not all of them are inarticulate or lazy or socialist or angry or loud or violent or tasteless or dumb or any of the stereotypes that are routinely thrown our way. Not all of us keep the brown sauce on the dining room table or wear slippers to the corner shop or eat fish and chips every night before taking our teeth out in order to suck on a bottle of Newkie Brown. Not all of us have tattoos or skinheads or gold chains or enjoy cage fighting. Of course, there are some that do a few of these things and there are people I see every day who obviously do a great many of these things. However, the majority of the people I know would simply look at Joe and give the sniff we all give to men of that type. They're the type we know only so well because the rarely whispered secret is that nobody hates the working classes more than the working classes. We know our ranks. We know our archetypes. We know the bad types.

They're found in every neighbourhood and in every neighbourhood they express the same thoughts and feelings and communicate in the very same loud boorish ways. You don't need a degree in sociology to identify them and you don't need extensive research to reach the conclusion that the type is neither typical nor average. I live next door to a fine example of the breed. I hear the anger, the shouting, the arguments that spill out into the street. I see the money they have, the success they find in a world that rewards their type. There's another up the road who looks the same, walks the same, and has exactly the same political outlook, the same hugely expensive 4x4. I could walk you to the homes of a dozen of their type and never lose sight of my own doorstep. In fact, from where I write this, I look out over a gym that is a second home to dozens upon dozens of men who all look like Joe. The town is filled with men who look like that. But are they typical? Can they represent us in any meaningful way?

This is what ultimately galls me about the coverage this story has been given this morning in the media. The most insulting part of this story isn't the shadow minister's tweet. It's the Labour leadership and, in turn, the newspapers who would defend men like Joe and hold him up as something good and noble. The insult to the working classes is to say that we're all somehow like that. And how bloody dare anybody equate me to a bald tattooed West Ham supporting white van driving cage fighter who drapes himself in the flag of St George.

Maybe -- just maybe -- Emily Thornberry's tweet was succinct and meaningful. Maybe stereotypes exist not because they're a lazy way of thinking about the world but because they're a handy way to spot the modern archetypes that exist in the real world. Maybe Emily Thornberry's tweet said something profound about England on the 21st November, 2014, a nation that abandoned boxing because it was simply too tame and took up cage fighting which is as repellent as it is bloody and brutal. The ultimate insult to the working classes is that we're not having a debate about tattoos, and muscles, and the culture of macho violence and, ultimately, the kind of men who wave the flag. What does it say about British politics when a political party is happy to damage itself and disown its own over a slightly misguided tweet, simply in order to reach out to that kind of man?

My Penis Writes...

I was going to write something else this morning but found myself absorbed in writing this response to yet another miserable man-hating article by Suzanne Moore over at The Guardian. In many respects, I still prefer The Guardian to other newspapers but lately it has been testing my patience and I do find myself reading it less than I used to. Its feminist agenda has become quite virulent over the summer and probably needs to be pruned back to let in a little daylight and some rational thought. 

Another day and another nasty man-baiting article on the front page of The Guardian… Congratulations, you rich London middle class liberals. I find myself reading your newspaper less each day. Your tedious feminist agenda might be attracting the audience demographic you crave but you’re losing the one you already have. Perhaps your new North American readership loves this new direction. Yee haw! I’m just from the North of England, where this newspaper once originated, and you are increasingly less relevant to my life. Up here, having a penis doesn’t seem that significant even when we are sticking them in toasters or forgetting to wash them. We have other fun games to play such as dealing with government cuts (remember them?) and the increasingly brazen divide between the north and the south.

And to think I used to send my articles to The Guardian with the hope of publication. Oh, such typical naïve penis-led optimism! It never happened so I thought my comic prose might be at fault. Now I see it was my comic penis. There it limply hangs, ready to be ridiculed because obviously that’s all I am, all I amount to. You say The Sun demeans women by publishing Page 3 but, if I’m honest, I can’t see much difference to the way you routinely demean those of us damned by the meat. Whatever abilities I bring to this world mean nothing because of this precious piece of nothing between my thighs. My entire being is routinely reduced to the worst stereotype. Yesterday Polly Toynbee implied that because I’m a man, I’m part of that misogynistic culture that apparently pervades our country. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I have no right to reply. I’m just another of those slobbering would-be rapists, Twitter abusers, craven women haters in that big solid ball of ugliness you’ve created and labelled ‘men’.

So, thank you Guardian. You’ve put me off reading anything else here today. And thank you Suzanne Moore. You’ve earned your monthly stipend by again lowering the standards of a once great newspaper and proving that in an already shallow world there is always room for a little more crass vulgarity.

I would say more but I must stop typing. My penis is getting very sore from hitting all these keys.

I’m Not Charles Saatchi

There is no defence. There are no words that excuse the actions of any coward who puts his hands around a woman’s throat or commits violence upon her person. The morality of that begins at wrong and quickly scales up to that form of the prosecutable where you start to think about throwing away the key.

The fact that I have to write that as my opening gives you an idea of how paranoid we’ve become of the buzzards that hang in the high glare of the sun, ready to swoop down and pick the soft belly meat from anybody foolish enough to stand apart from the herd. Words have to be chosen carefully in these hot days lest they give a hint that we might not be thinking the right thing or making a point which isn’t part of the day’s narrative. It is a way of living life devoted to Newspeak, what Orwell warned us would ‘narrow the range of thought’:

In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

So, I choose my words carefully because I want to write about the media response to the photographs of Charles Saatchi grabbing his wife, Nigella Lawson, around the throat. I want to talk about stories that create their own reality, where the facts are few and gaps invite speculation. From that, I want to make a distinction between justifiable debates about domestic abuse and the media’s response to individual cases.

Because, make no mistake, we are already slapping our sandals in the shallow waters of inference (‘if they did this, they must do that’) where we think that we know our celebrities (‘they are nice on TV so they must be nice in private’) and we delude ourselves with deductive fallacies (Person A hurts person B; Person A is a man; therefore all men would hurt Person B). Yet the way I pose that makes even me feel edgy. It sounds like I’m already setting up a defence for Saatchi when I’m not going to defend him for one miserable buttoned-up-collar of an inch. I’m simply trying to make a distinction between facts and journalistic narrative.

Take for instance Roy Greenslade who wrote an apology in today’s Guardian. He’d previously responded to the photographs by trying to keep a degree of journalistic detachment, concerned as he was, with ‘rushing to judgement’.

Sometimes one is too close to a story, and this is the irony: I was clearly over-compensating for the fact that I have been a friend of Nigella's ever since we were colleagues on the Sunday Times more than 20 years ago.

In order to be scrupulously fair about the incident, showing no favour to a friend, I went way in the wrong direction.

That’s very noble of him except I see nothing wrong with his staying loyal to his journalistic instincts. His apology feels like it was just an easier thing to do than making his serious point at length. Yet it’s not even the reliable self-aware journalists like Greenslade that should be making us cautious. We need to be wary of the dead-eyed sharks that already circle the reef having recognised a familiar taste of blood in the water.

This story is too big not to attract the man-eaters in search of easy meat. After all, this is about a beautiful best-selling author and TV chef, the daughter of a Tory Chancellor, who married an advertising troll decades older than herself and who, himself, rose to fame by marketing the Conservative Party before using his millions to turn the debate about contemporary art from aesthetics and into one about corporate greed. She’s young and he’s old, she cooks healthy food and he enjoys bad food and smokes incessantly. She is buxomly lovely and sexy and he is gnarled, crabby and difficult. The whole thing is set up for morbid soap opera morality and anybody who dares utter a hesitant or complex word will ultimately, like Greenslade, be forced to issue an apology.

That’s partly the problem. This story has everything it takes to be the new big issue. Even if the story ends now that Saatchi has accepted a police caution, it’s a tale that will grow in the telling until journalistic fingers are bloody stumps no longer able to hammer out a byline. To some, the story will summarise life on this planet: the oppression of women by men, the violence inherent in capitalism. It can be made to be about avarice or class or bad teeth or smoking or even the right of the individual to intervene when they see wrong being done. ‘Surely, domestic violence is the grubby problem of the inarticulate and poorly educated,’ asks Anna Maxted rhetorically in the Telegraph, her point being that we are always surprised to discover when the rich and famous lead unhappy personal lives. Except it’s surely not at all surprising unless we have a ridiculously naïve notion of human nature, have never read any history, or believe only what’s fed to us in the press and the media.

Commentators are creatures of confidence and find their firmest footing on easy terrain. They tend to wear black and pose for a good photograph and this story will either fill them full of righteous anger or cloying sentiment, both of which are always easy to show off from the high moral bank. No doubt many were sitting crossed-legged on their beanbags late into the night, their Macbook Airs balanced on their laps, producing identical diatribes thoroughly exploiting the blatantly obvious whilst throwing in liberal examples of that sexism that dare not speak its name. Suzanne Moore at the Guardian has already asked this morning: ‘Was there a woman who saw those awful pictures of Nigella Lawson who didn't think "If he does this in public what does he do behind closed doors?"’

‘Was there a woman’! What about ‘was there a woman or man’? What difference does gender make to how we might view domestic assault? The implication is, of course, that men might think something different, perhaps ‘She was clearly asking for it!’ or ‘Go on, Charles, you show her who’s boss!’

Yet this slide into sectarianism should always be avoided when we’re trying to understand reality. Sectarianism of any kind makes life more difficult than it should otherwise be. We don’t know the reality of the private matters between Saatchi and Lawson but the evidence was damning enough for the police to become involved. That is where our facts end. The rest needs to be handled with sensitivity by people closer to the issue than front page headline writers and freelancers hastily concocting 800 words of specious reasoning for the morning edition. For the press, however, reality is often less important than the narrative that they can construct.

Too many in the media respond to complexity with broad strokes. In the case of Charles Saatchi, many of the messages are familiar and the subtexts even clearer: men are always mindless subjects to a violent heritage. We deserve to be chemically castrated or, if that’s not available, properly castrated. In fact, probably best to lop off our balls just to be certain... Every expression of masculine culture ultimately ends in oppression, violence, murder, genocide…

Except they are wrong in so far as it is every expression of human culture that can ultimately end in oppression, violence, murder, genocide. Evil is not exclusively a male trait or hobby. Consider this: we read about a rape and we are all rightly appalled. We read about female circumcision and we want governments to do something about an abhorrent custom that’s still practised around the world. Yet think about the last time you read headlines about a woman cutting off a man’s penis. Was the tone exploitative (probably), outraged (unlikely) or comic (undoubtedly). Read this at The Sun and explain why the husband is referred to as the ‘hubby’.

If abuse is the subject then the subject is abuse. If it proves that Charles Saatchi is an abusive bastard, it's because he's an abusive bastard. It's not inherently because he's a man. Why should the gender of the victim or assailant enter into it? Abuse is abuse. Intellectualising individual examples ultimately proves useless when that rot is capable of taking hold in the heart of every human being and every supposedly loving relationship. It should not be an opportunity to preach high-feminism or any other ideology as the eternal truth of the human condition. That’s why it was so refreshing to see how Sarah Ditum over at The New Statesman took one of the more considered positions, asking why nobody acted when they saw Saatchi grab Lawson. The answer is that all of us, press and readers alike, are too busy constructing our own narratives.

We gaze at reality through the screen of our mobile phones, turning it into TV so as to make ourselves passive observers incapable of action. We are taught to know our place, stay safe and let others deal with problems. Nobody acts, irrespective of whether we’re looking at the all-too-silent horror of domestic abuse or the public horror being perpetrated in Syria. Only when we stop thinking that we know all too well what is happening, labelling everything as ‘the same old story’, might we actually start to look and understand what is actually going on.

In science, you commit what’s called ‘confirmation bias’ when you choose the facts that most favour your hypothesis. The cowardly actions of Charles Saatchi appear to confirm one feminist hypothesis. But not all men are Charles Saatchi.

Possibly the only truth out there is that, men and women alike, we are all capable of being Charles Saatchi.