Women – do you realize you’re “gender traitors”?

“These women are gender traitors,” snarled the New York Times following the election of Kavanaugh. “They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job.”

I’ve been thinking again about that election of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last year. Not because I want to rake up old coals or claim he was innocent (for all I know he could well be a rapist – I’m not in the business of defending rightwing politicos).

No. I’m interested in Kavanaugh because of the reaction it provoked.

The article was by Alexis Grenell and attacked women for not siding with the Democrats against Kavanaugh. If they were women, it concluded, they had a “duty” to the left.

Duty? Women? It all sounds a bit nineteenth century to me. When did these people swear an oath of allegiance to their gender?

Attacking professional women for the crime of simply acting as free thinking individuals feels more than a little misogynist.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing. I remember being at a bar near the university; some PhD students I knew were sitting around and somehow the conversation had got round to sex. People were a little drunk. Perhaps the edge had been taken off.

And that was when Jana decided to speak.

Jana was a tall, shy Lithuanian woman who’d been chasing a set of post-grad funding opportunities around the globe. She’d spent a few years in the US and was currently in England – Manchester – for a while. She was working in a pub and had apparently met some local bloke who was “rough” (she didn’t specify how) and had a drinking problem.

“We’ve been together for two years,” she told us.

“Don’t you mind that?” asked one of the students. Middle class girls who do post-docs don’t generally go out with rough guys with drinking problems.

“Oh no,” Jana replied breezily. “I like a strong man.”

The temperature dropped by a couple of degrees.

“A strong man?” said the girl sitting next to me.

“Someone who dominates me,” said Jana.

There was pin-drop silence.

Now let me just repeat: I do not endorse her view. Not even slightly. I don’t think relationships should be based on power or inequality or “dominance” (what a horrible word). I’ve never sought any of this myself in my dealings with the opposite sex – frankly I find it hard to imagine myself “dominating” someone if I wanted to.

But here’s the thing. I also believe in the right of all human beings to their own beliefs and opinions.

Needless to say my friends were not going to let Jana’s comments go unchallenged. A heated – actually, appalled – debate ensued. How could she say that? Didn’t she know how sexist that was?

Now, it’s a free country, and my student friends had as much right to challenge Jana’s views as she did to express them. What bothered me was that they weren’t just challenging her views. They were questioning their very legitimacy.

And here’s the thing. They were doing so chiefly, it seemed to me, because she was a woman.

Jana was lying; Jana didn’t know her own mind; Jana had been brainwashed by the patriarchy. Running through it all was a general outraged incredulity that she could dare to express such a regressive opinion.  

Now, I’m not blaming my student friends. I think they were only reacting in the way most artsy liberals would have reacted.

But I really, really disliked their line of argument. To tell a woman that her opinions are the result of brainwashing by powerful men seems extraordinarily patronizing to me. No, worse, than that: dehumanizing.

For a start, I don’t think it should be a crime to admit a fetish for power. Or hard drinkers. In many parts of the Eastern bloc the comment wouldn’t even seem all that controversial. I remember girls I met telling me they wanted a guy with a tinted Merc – a “businessman”. If you want proof that strong male figures have a cache out there just look at Putin’s bear hunting selfies. (I didn’t do well romantically in Russia).  

Personally I think powerful men are massive pricks. Gym-bunnies, hunters, bear-trappers, Russian presidents – all pricks. But, you know: each to their own.

I hate to remind everyone, after all, but Kink is a major part of modern sexual activity. There’s a niche – but significant – number of people experimenting with various forms of roleplayed dominance and submission. Walking past Ann Summers will remind you. It’s not all one-way either. A good number of men also like to be tied up / hit / spanked.

So answer me this: why does a fetish for powerful partners suddenly become illegitimate the minute a woman expresses it?

The new left tends all too often to view people as defined by their class, gender or sexual orientation. They’re seen as products of some chain of hierarchy and “oppression” – and that on this basis they should act accordingly.

In this schema an American woman who supports Trump or Kavanaugh is a “traitor” – because she’s not a free-thinking human being, but rather a product of biology, femininity and patriarchy. In the identitarian mindset this seems to mean that she should espouse the “right” views. In other words, the left ones. The views that the liberal left approve of.

If she says things the left agree with, we celebrate her intelligence. If she doesn’t, we say she’s been brainwashed.

And it’s not just women who suffer from this kind of thinking. Just look at black conservatives who “dare” – the idea! – to vote Conservative. Or to challenge #Black Lives Matter or affirmative action. Or Muslim women who complain of sexism and misogyny and then find themselves getting rape and death threats from white liberals.

In 2015 Goldsmiths University Feminist Society eagerly joined in support of the Islamic Society to ban the feminist Maryam Namazie from speaking for being “dangerous”. Namazie’s crime is being an outspoken feminist Islamic apostate. Consider that for a moment: a society of feminists choosing to silence a woman for the crime of daring to speak out against a conservative religion run largely by men.

Once upon a time feminists were applauded for doing exactly that. Now we silence them. If this happened in Iran we’d call it oppression.

It’s not like this is even confined to minorities. The left is currently really fond of explaining Brexit – and the rise of populism in general – as the result of rightwing propaganda infecting the stupid, sheeplike brains of the “left behind” white working classes. Those poor dears! Little did they know that they didn’t actually have the power to form their own opinions. Media moguls, press billionaires, Putin bots, Cambridge Analytica: that’s what did it. In fact – given that these stupid working classes are just helpless unknowing victims of propaganda – perhaps we should think about stopping them voting at all?

Of course that would ever happen. Except – oh wait – it did.

But there are gaping paradoxes here. If rightwing women or working class Brexiteers are brainwashed, then what’s the magic pill that protected you from the same process? Reading the Guardian? Blogging for Buzzfeed? Does that make you automatically superior to these easily manipulated masses?

One of the victories of twentieth century feminism and civil rights was to make it clear that – no – women are every bit as capable of holding intelligent independent opinions as anyone else. This is a huge step forward for equality. So let me spell it out. A woman has a right to her views because you have a right to yours, and so do I. Even if she’s a rightwing woman. Or a black person who opposes Islam or #BLM. Or a working class person voting Brexit.

That’s what tolerance means: tolerating people whose views differ from yours. It’s not easy. But then why should we expect something like that to be easy?

"Orange is the New Black"? Rubbish. It's Scrubs with shower rape jokes

Growing up one of my favourite films was Trainspotting. Wit, snappy cutting, MTV aesthetic: it was heroin as pop video. ‘Just choose life...’ The blu-tacked face peered down from my bedroom wall. If there was anything I aspired to, back then, it was to become a drug addict.

It was a trend that persisted throughout the iconic films of the 1990s. Oldman in Leon, Keitel in Bad Leuitenant, Thurman in Pulp Fiction: charismatic stars taking drugs in designer colours to cool soundtracks. Awesome! It was only later I began to wonder if it really appropriate to film narcotic addiction like you’d shoot the titles for a Blur video. Legalise them or not, drugs do change lives, especially young ones. Had Trainspotting done for drugs what Tarantino did for guns? In other words, should coke and heroin abuse really be made to look cool?

Which brings me onto Orange is the New Black, which has been airing for a while here. It’s the witty gritty tale of a woman imprisoned for a brief contact with a drug dealing girlfriend a decade ago, and it has some good points: it has a bisexual lead, which is good to see; it’s wittily and snappily written, fluidly filmed; it’s entertaining pizza television.  

So what’s wrong? And how’s it any different from the rest of the focus-grouped and test-screened U.S. sitcoms, which are generally pretty watchable in a time-wasting kind of way?

Here’s what’s wrong. A series about prison life – about damaged lives, violence, trafficking – doesn’t need to be fun. It doesn’t need to be sassy, or smug, or snarky. Sitcom values aren’t appropriate here. How funny is a colonic strip-search for prisoners who are actually forced to undergo them, rather than the attractive actresses pretending to for a few takes before they waft back to their trailer? Do we really need to raise a smile about starvation, racism, sexual abuse? Do we need this stuff enacted by a shiny cast of mostly beautiful people who help to make prison look kind of fun – Scrubs with shower jokes?

And boy, is Orange twee. It’s aggressively twee. It's like being waterboarded with caramel smoothies. Cool, gentle, new-age, indie boyfriend? Check. Cool, gentle, new-age, indie soundtrack? Check. Cool, cute scenes of lying around in bed checking photos and Netflix on Apple tablets? Check, check, check. It's awful. Orange is fodder for the iPad bourgeoisie. 

The thing is, I can take twee. I can: I just need it to be quarantined. I need twee to be kept in its own little Twee-hole, cute and pink and curly – and I need it to stay there. When twee embraces social commentary (black people! human rights! prisoner abuse! #WeReallyDoCare) it feels tonally jarring – like a segment on child suicide in Nuts! magazine. I get that this is the kind of class slumming the show is gently mocking – we’re as complicit as the lead character in finding out what prison’s “really” like – but... Well, no. Sorry. Orange is TV wanting to have its cupcake and eat it, to be both thoughtful social commentary and iPod froth at the same time. I don’t buy it.

I’ve been briefly imprisoned myself (only a few hours, for a mistaken arrest, but boy – those few hours really mark you) and had DNA swabs in my mouth and all the other routine invasions of the body modern policing rests on, and let me tell you there’s nothing funny about it. And I was only in there for about three hours. Orange is the New Black is a smart, smug, sassy, snarky, sarky piece of moving wallpaper, but it won’t be going up on my wall. Which makes me also wonder how many prisoners’ll actually get the chance to watch it. Or if they'd want to.

Book review: All the Places I’ve Ever Lived by David Gaffney

The doctor stares down at my skin.

“You don’t know how it happened?”

I shake my head. “I don’t remember anything.”

“You say you were reading something.”

I try and remember.

“There was this book...”

She sighs. 

“Do you remember the name on the spine?" 

Silence. 

"Was it... David Gaffney?”

I look up.

“There’s been an outbreak,” she explains. “Early-stage Gaffney-exposure. We’re trying to keep an eye on it. Feral themes cloaked in prosaic absurdity, witty period pop-references, slippery plotting: it’s burying beneath peoples’ mental defences and planting itself in their subconscious.” The doctor stands up and walks over to the calendar, then picks up a rectractable biro. “We think it might be spreading.”

I swallow. My skin is burning.

“Doctor,” I say, “am I going to be okay?”

She turns back and looks me up and down. She clicks the biro, twice.

“Of course. Just sit tight. A couple of men from the Ministry will want to talk to you.”

“What men?”

She turns and scribbles something on a pad. “Nothing to worry about.”

My eyes narrow. The calendar on the wall...

“Doctor,” I say. “What year is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I...”

She looks me hard between the eyes.

“It’s 1976,” she says. “Now don’t you worry. Lie back and close your eyes and everything will be okay.”

- Dale Lately

All the Places I’ve Ever Lived by David Gaffney is out now on Urbane Books 

Trump a fascist? Well he certainly has a neo-Nazi fanbase...

It’s reckoning time. A few weeks in and even those of us who thought it couldn’t be bad – well, it can. It is. How could it be any worse? Flagrant racism, bumbling autocracy, Twitter diplomacy – and God Knows What to come.

Is Trump a fascist? Perhaps that depends on your definition of fascism. If you count it to mean “bigoted autocrat with a fondness for executive rule” then he is. If you count it to mean mass exterminations and martial law well then, no, not really. Although it’s still early days.

But a fascist fan base – well, that’s much clearer. We all know that Trump was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, something that’s pretty disturbing in itself. But it goes deeper than that. The Alt-Right communities that spurred his success online have certainly got roots in neo-Nazi thought – less “alt” right than “far” right.

They may have ways of hiding it, though. And here’s how.

Take the idea of “human biodiversity” floated by some prominent bloggers. At first it sounds like a term from the left: an inclusive approach to human difference, perhaps? But human biodiversity is really just a new way of dressing up eugenic racism – an unpleasant bit of pseudo-science aimed at dividing and “classifying” humanity into clear, well-defined groups based on skin colour, population difference and racial hierarchy. (Or “racism in a lab coat”, as the Baffler magazine put it).

Because Twitter and the like have hate speech policies in action, many online hatemongerers found a novel way to spread their ideas: using three parentheses on either side of a name to indicate someone of Jewish origin. This social media answer to the “Juden” Nazis used to paint on the doors of Jewish families ultimately proved, like Trump’s words, largely unpoliceable (there is nothing obviously offensive about parentheses, to either human or algorithm – so they’re nearly impossible to remove systematically from the platform).

This “closed captioning for the Jew-blind” as one white supremacist gleefully put it, successfully “outed” a number of online journalists in targeted hate campaigns which sought to mock Jews or expose supposed Jewish collusion in controlling media or politics. It served as a flagging device for other anti-Semites, and led some writers to experience death threats, anti-Semitic cartoons, home phone calls and delightful memes (like the photo of the gates of Auschwitz with the “Arbeit Macht Frei” slogan replaced by “Machen Amerika Great.”)

The offenders have since developed their dark “netiquette” further with a kind of Turing replacement-code where innocuous words – “googles,” “skypes,” or “yahoos” for example – stand in for racial slurs. The result are tweets like “Chain the googles / Gas the yahoos” or “If welfare state is a given it must go towards our own who needs. No Skypes, googles, or yahoos.”

Such obvious race-hate is an ugly thing to encounter anywhere, but it’s far more frightening when the techniques it employs are adopted by those seeking political power. Trump is well-known for his attacks on opponents, but what’s less well observed is the underhand meanings implicit in some of those attacks. He tweeted a meme about “Crooked Hillary” which featured her face and the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”. This slogan appeared in a little coloured star which at first sight looks like standard desktop publishing style. The star, though, was the Star of David, and a giant pile of atop a giant pile of money: the insinuation is not so very subtle.

Elsewhere he talked repeatedly of “global special interests”, another dog-whistle term that sounds conveniently vague to the outsider but is all too specific for those in the know (as Will Drabold put it in Mic, “Donald Trump says "global special interests." Anti-Semites in the alt-right hear "Jews."”).  Always keen to attribute his sources, he once even openly retweeted something from WhiteGenocideTM, a user fond of white nationalism and neo-Nazi imagery, in an unintentionally surreal message that manages to mix petty jibing with a nod to the swastika brigade:

@WhiteGenocideTM: @realDonaldTrump Poor Jeb. I could've sworn I saw him outside Trump Tower the other day!  

It got over nine thousand Likes.

The extent, the potential, the possibilities are still unknown to us. But someone who can retweet someone calling themselves White Genocide is either exceedingly stupid or at least sympathetic to fascists. Right now it looks like both could be possible.

UK seeks extradition of dangerous extremist

Sources close to Whitehall have suggested that the government will be seeking extradition of a man with dangerous extremist views.

Although he has lived in the UK for some time, the extremist bears a foreign surname, claims ancestry among migrant populations, and has worked for decades alongside various other extremists in Europe to destabilise British society.

He cannot be named.

Reports suggest that the extremist’s dangerous rhetoric has caused deep divisions in society and may be responsible for the loss of thousands of jobs, a rise in violent crime and the possible collapse of the entire economy.

“ISIS themselves couldn’t have done a better job of wrecking the nation,” one source close to Westminster said.

"Arsehole," he added.

Rumours suggest the extremist will be strongly encouraged to seek refuge elsewhere, and may be able to find work in America.

“We’re not racists, we just think there’s a place for a sensible discussion about emigration,” said a spokesperson from the Home Office. “Specifically, this man’s emigration.”

Who’d have thought it? Sneering at people doesn't win them over

Like many people, I spent the morning after Trump’s election on Facebook.

Yes, I know. Lazy. But I had a reason. I want to understand the echo chambers that are shaping our views. How else to connect? How else to commiserate with people I knew about the imminent end of the world? Lots of my friends are writers and comics; by mid-morning I was starting to feel that Armageddon might not be so bad if at least we retained our sense of humour.

But one comment stuck in my mind. It was from a British stand-up, posted sometime in the early hours after the result was declared, and it was this.

“One useful statistic to come out of this election is that at least 57 million Americans are assholes.”

I should say that it wasn’t representative of the guy’s output. I haven’t seen his stand-up but I’ve followed his Facebook posts – fast, frequent and hugely popular – for a while. Most of the time they’re extremely witty and inventive. 

But this one?

57 million Americans. You blink at it, in the same way you gasp at something in Family Guy, Onion, Louie, in a “Did they actually say that...?” kind of way. But aside from any issues of offence, what’s really interesting here is the assumptions that post reveals. I think they’re important. In fact I think they might even partly explain why we’re contemplating a Nightmare in the Oval Office.

The comedian in question (I’m not going to name him) is a fairly typical British comic, part of the left-leaning comic boom that exploded since the 2000s with a mission to deconstruct misogyny and xenophobia, refute the men’s movement, challenge the ideas of UKIP or the American Alt Right. Fine. I’ll admit that’s partly why I find him funny, since I share those views. But a post like this – though it might have been made on no sleep in the heat of the moment, when much anger is habitually spilled – suggests a slightly darker side to this progressive mindset.

Here’s what it reveals.

First, it assumes it’s okay to talk about America in the way that someone like Donald Trump talks about Islam. Would my comedian use the same language to talk about India or Brazil? I think not – and for good reason. It reflects a generation of the British left that grew up being taught to mock America after the invasion of Iraq, who speak in an aggressive, secular, anti-US Imperialism tone, with an assumption that anybody is fair game if they don’t agree with you.  

But the second point is much more interesting.

57 million Americans are assholes because they don’t agree with this comic. Really? All of them? That’s nearly the population of Great Britain. And why exactly? Because they dared to differ from him in their views on race or gender or climate change and show it in the ballot box.

Is this the level to which civil discourse has descended?  

I know I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s too important to let alone. There’s a huge problem on the left with sneering at people who aren’t deemed “virtuous” enough in Millennial liberal terms – those we like to call racists, misogynists, homophobes, and so on. It reflects a simplistic binary mindset – a world of good and evil, them and us, fools and sages, with ourselves cast (of course) on the side of Luke Skywalker.

Now, I don’t like Trump. I think xenophobia was a huge part of his attraction. But this kind of sneering doesn’t just cause offence. It helps to cause alienation and anger. And that anger makes people vote for right wing populist causes. Like Brexit. Like Trump.

Every time the electorate fails to vote liberal we get much head-scratching at the fact that the working classes who used to vote left now vote right. I think there are many, complex reasons for that. But couldn’t a part of it be because they’re sick of being branded as bigots?

Much of Facebook has become a sneering machine aimed at people who fail to display enough liberal virtue; many of these people, like Brexit or Trump voters, are working class. The result is a sort of mass stealth snobbery. I’ve seen people referred to as scum, trash, dickheads; I’ve heard them referred to in ways that would be declared hate speech if it came from the right.

And here’s the ironic thing: while witty, erudite, left-leaning pundits like my friend are flawless in defending the rights of minorities (and a good thing too), they also overlook a huge, glaring, economic minority, one that sits within their own midst – the millions of displaced people in the ex-industrial areas, the north of England, the Welsh valleys, the US rust belt. The laid-off. The jobless. The despised. The places that voted for Brexit and Trump.

I live in one such area. I brush up every day to people whose opinions differ radically from my own on things like migration, sexual orientation, feminism. I don’t count close friends among them. But neither do I want to brand them as assholes for the crime of not agreeing with me. Rather I’d like to try and talk to them. Understand them. Perhaps, you know, maybe even put my point of view across. 

Take yourself away from the safety net of social media, and you realise it’s possible to try and understand people whose opinions you don’t share without resulting to abuse. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild recently moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, a town of 75,000 all but ruined by the petrochemical industry in an attempt to understand the roots of Trumpism. How did Hochschild do this? By talking to people. Yes, people who liked the Tea Party. Or Sarah Palin. Imagine!

I don’t want this essay to be misconstrued. I feel deeply uncomfortable around sexism, xenophobia and I feel quite sick at the thought of the four years to come. But I also believe that the left needs to start listening to these “left behind” people rather than screaming at them, patronizing them, or calling them assholes – or God knows what the next blow to the liberal dream will be. All the indicators suggest that this swing to the right is going to get substantially worse before it gets better; we may well be facing eight years of Trump, or at least another populist Republican. (The Right’s on the rise in continental Europe too; sound familiar?).

So let’s try and understand rather than condemn. We should be building bridges not burning them. To put it another way, if Trump called 57 million people assholes, would we let him get away with that?