Zoe Williams | ukwatch.net

Start Complaining

Tim Holmes — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:49:16 +0000

The Advertising Standards Authority has received nearly 200 complaints about the Heinz mayonnaise ad, which – assuming a higher final tally – should make it one of the five most offensive this year. Let me describe the controversial sales pitch. There are some kids, with a mum in a white apron, and a dad, but – ah ha! – when the dad goes to leave, it turns out the mum isn’t a mum, she’s a bloke from a New York deli. The dad gives the him-not-her a kiss goodbye. Smack on the lips, like some kind of gay, except it has nothing to do with being gay – it is a joke about the mayonnaise being so authentic it’s as if your mum has turned into a bloke from a New York deli.

Complaints have centred on the fact that one man kissing another could be construed as homosexuality, and oblige parents to explain to children what that is. Never mind that mayonnaise can’t be advertised between kids’ programmes because the fat and salt content is too high. So it doesn’t matter that the product is so injurious to health that the mere mention of it is thought too toxic for pre-watershed telly; and it doesn’t matter that both the stated and tacit messages of the advert are nothing to do with sexuality of any sort, it’s a straight “mayonnaise is nice” underpinned by the British-ad fascination with men dressed as women revealed as men (think Bounty – wipe not bar).

I don’t mind the existence of the odd humourless homophobe, but I’m interested by their sense of entitlement, considering what a marginal view they hold. They look around, see anti-discrimination legislation all about, see a gay wedding officiated by an actual bishop, and still think the ASA will be on their side.

It never occurs to me to lodge a complaint with the ASA and this is categorically not because I’m never offended. I’m constantly offended. I hate the preponderance of alternative indie music on the ad circuit, so that everything from a Samsung camera to a Toyota people carrier or an Orange chat plan is flogged with the voice of some sub-Joanna Newsome no mark. Not only is it cynical, this pretence that buying a big square car is the “alternative” choice, but it appropriates and tramples over the aural landscape of the outsider so that there’s nowhere for even an outsider to feel at home. It’s disgraceful; a genuine traducement of the purpose of art, which is to make us feel that we’re not alone.

On feminist grounds, I object to the Corsodyl advert; a camera travels pervily over the body of a young woman, lingering on her thighs, arse and breasts, before coming to a stop at her mouth, where she’s missing a tooth because of her poor oral hygiene. I guess it’s meant to be funny, though it’s hard to pin it down – is it a take-off of sexist 70s ads? I don’t think it’s even that self-aware. I think it’s an old-fashioned reversal-of-expectation gag. “Ah! The shock! Her breasts were so promising, and yet she has a mouth like a graveyard. While we’ve got your horrified attention, ladies, might we suggest this mouthwash?” What a nauseating comic backwater. Who would want to explain to their daughter why this kind of thing would never happen to a boy?

Ok, I am rustling up a bit of this outrage. I have to admit that Corsodyl does work, and my mouth would be an emptier place without it. But my objections would have no greater trouble – considerably less, I think – gathering adherents than would those of people who don’t like the kissing men. Why don’t lefties complain more? First, we assume watchdog bodies such as the ASA will be on the side of a very old-fashioned respectability, despite all evidence that mainstream culture is more evolved than that. Second, we are lazy bleeders. When an ad featuring men kissing is one of the most complained about, that matters: not as a reflection on the nation’s scattered homophobes breathing their last gasp, but as a sign that the rest of us don’t complain anything like enough.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

The gestation of stupidity

Tim Holmes — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:45:51 +0000

At the weekend, the Observer ran a story saying that women would soon be subject to US-style warnings against consuming any alcohol whatsoever while pregnant. I would normally counsel skipping over a story like this, but hell, you can’t just ignore things you don’t like.

To recap the current situation, America warns against any alcohol at all, in Britain the limit is one to two units, once or twice a week. Changes are being considered here after “growing fears over the rise of binge drinking among young women”. But the advice already expressly warns against having more than two drinks in one sitting, which nobody has yet sought to characterise a “binge”. It makes no sense – a binge drinker would be over safe limits whether the limit was “some” or “zero”. So women who drink in moderation during pregnancy are to see their behaviour pilloried as what? A way to move the culture of pregnancy towards abstinence? Why is it that, where pregnancy and female health are concerned, we are addressed in swaths, whereas gender neutral areas – drink driving, for instance – address their audience as individuals, taking individual responsibilities?

I was scouring the article for the new evidence that might explain this proposed change of policy. There it is in the fourth paragraph: “Campaigners insist that even the occasional glass can trigger foetal alcohol syndrome.” This is huge news, if true. Putting together the women who drink in moderation with those who don’t but accidentally did before they knew they had conceived, this, very conservatively, puts 50% of babies at risk of FAS. More to the point, it runs counter to the findings of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which are that “there is no conclusive evidence of adverse effects in either growth or IQ at levels below 120 grams (15 units) a week”.

Clearly, this isn’t the only contributory study to the government’s policy, which recommends no more than four units a week. But never mind that discrepancy for a second. Has the RCOG’s study been refuted? Does this stuff – the media hysteria or the apparently senseless government stringency – do any harm? The only body on record as thinking so is New Zealand’s equivalent to the RCOG, which found that “if one has in place a policy stating that no amount of alcohol is safe, then there is a great potential for unnecessary anxiety, guilt and requests for therapeutic abortion”. No one is more in favour of abortion than I, but not for this – not in the service of gutless government advice.

If you are pregnant, this isn’t the issue to take a stand over – you will look like a dipsomaniac, justifying your quest for more booze. Instead, concentrate on blue cheese – the stupidity of the advice on listeria is so amazing that I’ll have to save a lot of it for another day. Let it suffice to say this: you are advised to stay away from many cheeses to avoid the disease. This, despite the fact that, until last week, the only two outbreaks of dairy listeria in this country for the past 20 years had come from a lettuce and from butter.

Last week, however, a Kentish catering company had an outbreak amid its sandwiches. Who does it supply? Hospitals. Obviously. Where else, besides a school and an old people’s home, would you most likely get snacks that had been privatised to the point of deadliness? So, factoring in the midwifery crisis in the NHS, the 21% rise in maternal deaths over the past three years, and the 17,000 women who have suffered harm on labour wards, the most dangerous thing you can do for yourself or your foetus before, during and after its delivery, is to take it anywhere near a hospital.

To think this government has the brass neck to lecture women about their gestational behaviour. It is an outrage against women; against the relationship between the state and the individual; and, without wishing to be mawkish, against babies.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

Time to Speak Up

Tim Holmes — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:57:00 +0000

Today marks the 39th anniversary of abortion becoming legal in Britain. Yes, yes, there would have been an argument for waiting for the 40th, but I really think, in the current climate, that it needs to be celebrated as often as possible. On Halloween, mindful or not of this anniversary, the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries will be introducing her 10-minute-rule bill, proposing a reduction in the time limit on abortion in this country to 21 weeks (down from 24 weeks at present), and a “cooling-off period after the first point of contact with a medical practitioner about a termination” – so far as I can make out, she wishes to slow the abortion process down still further, and then penalise women who have left it too late. Her rationale? She just “has a feeling it’s right”. Honestly.

I remember the first time that I wrote about having had an abortion; it was in the mid-90s (the abortion, I mean. And the article, too). A survey had come out saying that one in four women had had availed themselves of termination services; I was surprised by how low that figure was, but it also made me think: if 25% of women have had abortions, then surely every one of us, male and female, has a friend or partner or family member, someone very close anyhow, who has had an abortion. Seriously, unless you are very cloistered or you are incredibly judgmental and uptight and nobody ever tells you anything, you will have been aware of an abortion at very close quarters, even if it was not your own.

So why does nobody talk about it, I pondered then, and do again now. Why are there never any abortion jokes? Why is it unthinkable to discuss it without prefacing everything with “of course, it’s terribly traumatic, no woman enters into this lightly”? I found it no more traumatic than any other operation I have ever had, no more psychologically scarring, way less painful than anything involving my teeth and considerably less annoying than anything I have had done on the NHS (whose “resources” in this area – which I will complain about later – meant I had to go private, which is entirely against my principles, but did make it very convenient).

Even writing that, I am furious – it is considered a given, an unarguable tenet of modern society, that you would feel ashamed of having a termination, that you would, in some cutesy, feminine, inarticulate way, feel “bad” about it. You are not allowed to talk about this operation unless it is to say how dirty it made you feel. We are all expected to have these moral objections and yet suffer the business anyway, in the name of pragmatism. Ethically, this is a far dodgier and more repugnant position than mine, which is that I am entirely pro-abortion because I do not consider it murder; if you do not consider this foetus human, then it becomes no more of an issue than getting a tumour removed. If I have any shame at all, it is because, when my health was at stake, I immediately opted out and went private, and I would have hoped before that happened that it would have taken more than an unwanted pregnancy. Never mind. The NHS doctor made me feel that if I had stayed in the system, I would be wasting resources that rightfully belonged to poorer, younger mothers. I was 25; if I had been the age I am now, I would not have taken any notice of her.

This is worth revisiting. The prevailing attitude these days seems to be that abortion is state-sanctioned murder and we put up with it because if we didn’t, women would have them in back alleys anyway. It is the lesser of two evils, therefore, and as such, must be cloaked in silence, since whichever way you look at it, it still has an evil at its core. This line has taken hold because it is the least controversial way of supporting the right: so an MP standing up and saying “Women need this right, because otherwise they will put their health at risk having illegal terminations” will not find the pro-life lobby instantly rearing up against them, petitioning their constituents with what a murderer he or she is. If, however, an MP were to stand up and say “I am pro-choice because I do not consider this to be murder. I do not consider it to be evil. I do not consider a foetus which a woman has a one in three chance of involuntarily rejecting anyway to be a viable life unless she deems it so. I do not buy this craven sentimentality about the unborn, this pseudo-spiritual cleanliness we ascribe to it. In fact, it makes me sick”, then votes will be lost. In other words, there are no votes to be won supporting abortion in an ideologically honest way, and lots to be lost. The taboo started in Westminster, I believe; not everything starts in the Daily Mail.

Back to this article. I got a lot of weirdos sending me pictures of tiny bloodied babies’ fingers, Photoshopped on to a pair of abortionist’s rubber gloves, with captions along the lines of “Just a collection of cells? Tell that to the baby”. Those were pretty lurid, but also amusingly put together. What irked me more, though, was all the traffic from the “voices of reason” saying words to the effect of “Why do you have to push everything? We all value the right to abortion, we’re all glad it exists. Why on earth would you want to fight for the right to be able to joke about it? When it’s not even funny?” But I was not saying abortions are, in and of themselves, hilarious. I was asking why they never crop up in jokes. Cancer does, cheese does, shagging and gonorrhoea and disabilities and dogs and flowers and terrible, terrible diseases, and all other foodstuffs, and all other genres of people … There are taboos in political rhetoric, yes, tonnes of them, but in comedy, even in very mainstream comedy, there are almost no taboos. You could make a joke about September 11 before you could make a joke about abortion. And this is not irrelevant, it is not as if the right is inviolable, and the joking is a side issue. If you allow a taboo to hold, you leave all the cultural space open to anti-abortionists.

Ten years on, we can see the results of this. Culturally, there is an even greater silence around abortion, and an even greater refusal to discuss it except in terms of its terrible psychological toll on women. Research in both Britain and America repeatedly shows this not to be the case – that abortion, unlike bringing to term an unwanted pregnancy, does not increase the risk of depression; and furthermore, that the uptake on the compulsorily offered post-abortion counselling is staggeringly low (in some areas it is just 1%). And even she is probably just being polite.

Meanwhile there is an increasing foetus fetishisation in mainstream media – all this “miracle of life” stuff, with six-day-old embryos bouncing around, looking deliciously as if they are playing football with the placenta. It is hard to take this any more seriously than you would those pictures of baby bats in socks (non-readers of the Daily Mail will at this stage start to wonder what on earth I am on about) but, operating in this chamber of cultural silence where mature commentary about women’s rights, health and beliefs vis-a-vis abortion simply is not happening, it is not a huge leap of the imagination to think that these dancing-foetus babies are jeopardising the gynaecological freedoms of the next generation.

Noises from parliament are ineffectual but nevertheless damaging. It has become de rigueur not to criticise the right to abortion, but rather to attack the time limit. During the tedious Tory leadership election, there was briefly some ham-fisted tub-thumping by Liam Fox (who wanted the time limit reduced to 12 weeks), but since then there have been cross-party rumblings, with early-day motions and other unhelpful motions made by Labour MPs Geraldine Smith and Claire Curtis-Thomas, as well as Liberals (notably Evan Harris).

There is a huge amount of evidence for the disingenuousness of this strategy. Firstly, anyone with a serious interest in reducing the (already terribly small) number of late-term abortions would make it their priority to improve provision of pre-12 week terminations on the NHS. They would roll out the pre-nine-week abortion pill as something nurses could administer without doctors; they would, of course, overturn the ludicrously old-fashioned system of having two doctors on hand to ratify every abortion; they would lobby against the tacit but anecdotally widespread NHS policy of not even bothering providing pre-12-week abortions, on the basis that anyone who is in that much of a rush could go private.

Sufficient interest in late-term abortions to actually research them would, furthermore, show that the functional NHS time limit is not 24 weeks but 19, after which public health services become so foot-draggingly obstructive that women have to go private. Since the second scan during a pregnancy occurs at 20 weeks, sometimes later, and it is generally only at this point that many birth defects become clear, there would seem to be an active, perverse, unlegislated barrier to late-term abortions.

Furthermore, late-term abortions constitute the truly pitifully small proportion of 1.6%; that was in 2003, since when the trend has been downwards. The late-term argument always rests upon so-called “scientific advances”, which have made foetuses marvellously hardy, so that the laws of 1967 are blatantly out of date. We are like a crowd of Victorian idiots marvelling at some fairground quack who claims to cure constipation. The truth is that no significant scientific development in foetal viability has occurred since the late-term law was brought down from 28 to 24 weeks in 1990. In all respects, you are better off dealing with those politicians who openly admit their anti-abortion stance: such as the Tory MP Laurence Robertson, who, in May last year, used his windfall in the private member’s ballot to propose a blanket ban on all abortion. Robertson is not only a lot more honest than your Harrises and your Foxes, he also provides the useful service of reminding us that this right is still something we must be ready to fight for.

The other thing to remember, of course, is that the one thing we have in common with America (where, of course, the situation is much direr – see Suzanne Goldenberg’s report on page 12) is that this boils down to a class issue. In the US, while the Christian right campaigns feverishly against late-term abortions, there are women leaving it to 18 or 20 weeks because they literally cannot afford the operation or even the transport to get to it. In the US, abortion laws are effectively working only for middle-class women already. In Britain, while some care trusts offer a good abortion service pre-12 weeks, it is by no means nationwide, so a very large proportion of women are having to wait till after their three-month scan unless they can afford to go private. And yet, many women who count as late-term abortions, at 18 weeks or more, report that the reason their pregnancy got so advanced was because that at any point from 15 weeks, their GPs became obstructive and unhelpful. So really, the window for an abortion on the NHS can be as narrow as three weeks, and all it takes is some garden-variety inefficiency for that window to be shut altogether.

So it boils down to this: for those of us with the cash, abortion is still an inviolable right, and for those of us without it, things are a lot more sticky. Let’s not forget, this is exactly what the situation was before 1967. Not since the dawn of medical capability has it been impossible for a rich woman to get a termination. This battle was fought for all women; if, as middle-class women, we stand by and watch while the right is clawed away from the bottom up, and then if, in 50 years’ time, it has been rescinded altogether, it will be no more than we deserve.

Slang and Misogyny

Tim Holmes — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 14:28:44 +0000

There is a new language on the streets of London and other British cities, according to academic research: “Jafaican”, supposedly derived from Jamaican and African slang, is now way more prevalent than cockney. Despite the name, there is in reality no racial demarcation and a good deal more Ali G posturing here than genuine Jamaican roots, and the chief uniting feature of Jafaican speakers is age (very young).

But when you read the newspaper reports, you can smell the benign neutrality wafting off the page. “Listen here, chaps. When youngsters today say ‘jamming’, they mean hanging around! ‘Nang’ might not sound like a word to you and me, but it means good. ‘Sket’ is a loose woman, and ‘bitch’ continues to mean girlfriend – but sket seems to have replaced ‘ho’, which is now woefully out of date and used only by the rap community because it rhymes with so many things. ‘Babymamma’ has come and gone, to be overtaken by the old-fashioned sounding ‘wifey’.”

What all these words in fact have in common is that they define women by sexual function – denigrating them if they show any interest in sex themselves, ranging them according to their physical attributes and dismissing them once their physical peak has passed.

Now, vocabulary and slang are not incidental decorations to culture – they are at its core. While probably all the world’s languages contain pejorative words for women, the frequency with which they appear in our new, fun urban slang should give us pause. It should alert us to the fact that this is not a playful alternative to cockney, it is about the formalised subjugation of women.

It is incredibly unfashionable to object to language and ideas that denigrate women. I’m almost embarrassed; I feel like I’ve left the house wearing something fluorescent. First of all, this is considered to be synonymous with humourlessness, as if the hilarity that was the Loaded magazine revolution (Oh, its dazzlement! Its flights of fancy!) effectively tainted any serious discussion of sexism with myopic earnestness.

This is why young women do not now call themselves feminists, even when espousing views that come, explicitly, from the feminist movement. And sure, nobody wants to be the last person in the country who objects to being called “darling”; nobody wants to be the person who isn’t allowed to shave her legs, for reasons as opaque as her tights have to be. But there is a lot at stake here. If youth culture is increasingly sexually conservative and two-tiered in its judgments, and increasingly portrays one gender as the property of the other, this will ultimately tell in the way women are treated, personally and professionally, when today’s teenagers are in their prime.

You could argue that it’s telling already in the ever more misogynistic attitudes surrounding sexual violence. But whichever way you cut it, it isn’t funny; and the idea that we never objected to it because we didn’t want to sound like we didn’t understand irony would be less funny still.

And second, we seem to have no pride in the women’s movement, which – in the absence of any civil-rights movement or revolution – is probably the noblest public protest this country has seen. Why don’t we take more pride in the sophistication, as far as it goes, of our gender relations? Why, for that matter, is the Equal Opportunities Commission’s budget to be cut this month? Aren’t gender relations trendy enough?

Ultimately, if our culture had any respect for feminism, teenagers in Britain would not be talking about women like this. It has nothing to do with female standing in Jamaica or the Ali G land of myth – this is a trickle-down from a prissy, cowardly, milk-livered British mainstream.

No Respect in the House

Alex Doherty — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:19:35 +0000

It’s rare to come across a TV programme, indeed a cultural experience of any sort, that manages to bring together two points of view you absolutely hate, and pit them against each other. Rarer still for that programme to be Celebrity Big Brother, which normally contains no ideas at all, even by accident. These notions have alighted like ugly sparrows upon the head of George Galloway.
The first is this: that young people, in order to be “engaged” with politics, need to be spoken to in language they understand, via media they have a track record of taking an interest in. Post-internet, post-PlayStation, post-reality telly, traditional campaigning simply won’t reach them. This has become orthodoxy. More young people vote in Big Brother than in elections, ergo, politicians must appear on Big Brother. It’s daft. I’ve been to Sainsbury’s more often than I’ve been on a protest march; it doesn’t follow that I will only turn up to a march if someone along the route will sell me tomatoes on a two-for-one offer.

The second argument is very rarely openly framed, yet is visible in all kinds of political discourse. It is that anyone with passion, with a judgmental moral code, with an idea in his or her head beyond “let’s all stay calm, and make more money”, is inherently foolish; and that such an individual’s arguments are only valid if they are totally blameless from every conceivable angle, and in the unlikely event that they prove impossible to decimate with flimsy personal attack, can be laughed at for having anything so old-fashioned as a set of beliefs.
As soon as Celebrity Big Brother started, the Guardian tried to get hold of the Bethnal Green MP through constituency channels. A bit mischievous, this. A surgery had been held on Friday, and of course no MP returns a call in a day – I’m still waiting for Diana Johnson to email me back from November.

In any case, the idea was reinforced that “Gorgeous George” is all style and no substance and is in love with his firebrand image, and that any cause he associates himself with is just an excuse for his attention-seeking. But if this were an MP with a reputation for being jolly – Boris Johnson for instance – no such inquiry would have been made.

This makes it a mug’s game to be the person with the trenchant beliefs, since by modern standards you will never be worthy of them. Channel 4, while it denies having any agenda, manifestly intends to excise Galloway’s political views. Since day one, when it cut several of the contestants agreeing with the MP about the Iraq war, the Big Brother edited highlights have yet to show him saying anything about politics. And in E4’s round-the-clock version, the MP is repeatedly bleeped.

Is he going on about sex and using coarse language? Or is he being censored in a more serious way? Precisely because he claims to have principles, they are deemed worthy of less respect than those of someone who slept with Sven Goran Eriksson. And here is the real reason for the disenchantment with politics among 16- to 24-year-olds: idealists, who might inspire passion or loyalty, or even interest, are cut down for something totally trivial.

Galloway, though, is guilty of falling in with that standard line of “I want to connect with the millions of people – most of them young – who are turned off by conventional approaches. It’s the Gen X factor”. Not so – it doesn’t take blathering populism to hook them, but the very opposite: it takes conviction.

Galloway has conviction as well as Big Brother membership; he emerges from this business more sinned against than sinning. His detractors should be held accountable for political inertia in this country. Yes, the Big Brother machine does get a lot of votes. But let’s not become so confused by the word “vote” that we seriously believe 16-year-olds want to run the country this way.

zoe_williams@ntlworld.com