Privacy

Over at The What & The Why, I'm talking about internet privacy and the Government's Investigatory Powers Bill.

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The St Vincent Tattoo and Other Erotic Thoughts

I suppose it's as seasonal as the migratory herring but I continue to find myself drifting away from The Guardian as my paper of choice. I still visit it every day for the cartoons, especially those by the incomparable Martin Rowson, but I'm increasingly clicking off it without any regard for of the articles. More often than I've realised until today, I find my mouse pointer moving towards the new link on my browser which takes me straight to The Independent.

One of the problems I continue to have with The Guardian is the amount of content written about (or often written by) sex workers. Not that there's anything wrong with sex workers who, I'm sure, are a friendly bunch of wayward souls, even when you get to know them on a non-profit basis. But unfortunately I'm one of those prickly snobs who prefers his prose written by trained (and preferably gifted) journalists. That's not to say that a high class call girl can't write a good paragraph about the global situation but they probably have ideas about the 'Russian position' that aren't for my breakfast table. It's like asking an economist to write a review of the latest sex toy and being surprised when they don't tell you about the size, shape and horsepower, but instead explain the market fluctuations in the global price of pink rubber.

My reticence about talking about these things might be simply my excessive English reserve. It might also be a generational thing, though I suspect it's more about my northern working class upbringing and the world of my youth. Sex was, in the words of Larkin, '[a] shame that started at sixteen / And spread to everything'. Somebody brought up in a middle class bohemian household might find the business neither quite so sordid nor quite so silly. And they might not find The Guardian's obsession with the sex trade so ultimately boring.

Take the headlines from today (I write this at the well-spanked end of Friday). The Guardianistas are getting heated about the 'face sitting protest at parliament'. Now, I'll admit here and now that I've never really fancied sitting on a person's face and can honestly say, with my hand on my naked heart, that being smothered by a woman's ample buttocks doesn't really appeal to me. I just can't imagine a scenario that might change my mind. In fact, let me indulge in a male vice for a moment, just for the sake of this blog... Let me remove the shackles from my usual English reserve and imagine a scenario by which The Guardian actually responds favourably to one of the cartoons I occasionally send them. Let's imagine the cartoon becomes an instant hit and it's spotted by my favourite blue-haired alternative diva of the moment, St Vincent, aka Annie Clark.



Sigh...

Fantasising on: Ms. Clark sees my cartoon and decides that it's perfect for her impressive right shank. She also thinks there's only one man who can ink it for her and that man's initials are Yours Truly.

'Dear Waywell,' she writes in an email. 'Sending you plane fare and costs to travel over here to Brooklyn to ink a tattoo on my upper leg. Very busy writing new album (Japanese spoons & brass bands) so haven't time to lie down. Can you work on your back as I write poems at my desk whilst sitting on my favourite comically wobbly stool as made for me by David Byrne? Yours. Annie.'

Now, obviously, I'd reply with an emphatic 'no' and explain why she shouldn't deface her perfect thigh with a tattoo. However, this is also the illogical stuff of an erotic dream so off to New York I go and I'm soon hard at work tattooing my cartoon onto one shapely upper right leg. However, mid cartoon, the tattoo gun leaps from my trembling hand, bounces off her Albanian banjo and hits the aforementioned comically wobbly stool made for her by David Byrne. Typical of Byrne, he's used cheap recycled wood and the stool breaks apart. With a pitch perfect scream (a la 'Digital Witness'), St Vincent begins to fall, her perfect posterior crashing down onto my face. What am I to do? How would I feel as I begin to struggle for air? Would I feel blessed by my current state or desperate to live so I might warn people about the dangers of tattooing cartoons on the underside of a favourite singer/songwriter/shredder?

Now this is far from scientific but, as I'm writing this, I am trying to detect any carnal stirrings from down below and I can honestly say that I can't feel a thing. It's as dead down there as a yard of Russell Brand's prose. Of course, it might be because the room is cold and my feet and legs are numb. Perhaps I simply damaged myself down there by blowing my school recorder too hard many moons ago. Yet the fact remains that the thought of my favourite screech rocker landing on my face does absolutely nothing for me and I still struggle to see what pleasure anybody could derive from such a strange practice.

Yet it's not just their current obsession with face sitting that turns me off The Guardian. Nor is it the articles with deliberately provocative headlines written by their odd looking dominatrix. Again, I'm sure there's a world for that sort of thing but the idea of being whipped into a frenzy by a plump woman in gimp mask doesn't sound like fun. I have better things to do with my evenings.

No, the reason I'm drifting away from The Guardian is because they seem to think they we should all be open about every aspect of our lives and, as we say here in the North, sod that for a game of soldiers (also 'a thing' down in sophisticated parts of London). Not only is a person's private life none of anybody's business but they should have the good sense not to bore me with the details. Since when do we all have to be open about our tastes, our private lives, our urges and desires? I sometimes realise I'm being vulgar when I express my lust for a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (the i7 model with a heap load of memory) but what would people think if I started to write out every lustful thought I have towards, for example, the blue-haired member of Pussy Riot. Have you heard the way she says 'blue chicken' at 1:07 in this video? Now tell me it doesn't drive you crazy despite your ice cold feet!

The Guardian still has some sharp writing talent yet I drift further away with every shock headline, deliberately provocative statement, and sexually explicit detail they publish. Their business still makes an annual loss despite their immensely popular website but the people who'll eventually make the paper a success aren't people like me. To become popular you need to embrace the mainstream and, apparently, the mainstream is comprised of face sitters. That wouldn't be so bad but alongside the real journalists with fire in their pens, The Guardian employ slow lane grifters who are good for nothing more than click bait. Bring the two together -- the sitters and the grifters -- and you have a newspaper that's left me far behind. Very far behind with my fantasies as private as they're also very very dull (stockings, Norwegians, frogsuits).

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.