A backlash book for boys

Remind me never to watch any programmes featuring Neil Oliver (a 'TV archaeologist', apparently), who was on Radio 5 yesterday afternoon spouting some of the most naive and reactionary garbage about gender roles that I've heard in a long time.

It seems Oliver has written a book called Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys, stuffed full of stories of the kind of male heroism that the author thinks we've lost and ought to recover. As in all such backlashes against contemporary trends, there's a tiny scintilla of truth in Oliver's argument that, in the creation of the 'new' man, we've discarded some of the things that were admirable about the 'old' version: a sense of duty, responsibility to others, etc. But in suggesting that we may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, Oliver seeks to re-import some pretty murky bathwater, such as the notion that boys and girls need clearly defined gender roles, that real men don't cry, and that staying home and looking after the kids is women's work. And he tends to come pretty unstuck once interviewers push him on the implications of his argument for gender equality.

Another problem with Oliver's tales of old-fashioned masculinity is that most of them derive from the age of empire, and in his historical and political naivety he fails to see how supposedly timeless values such as duty and self-sacrifice were actually bound up with ideas of conquest, exploitation and racial superiority. In fact, Oliver's attempt to recreate an outmoded colonial-era masculinity neatly combines the themes of two other recent books that also get my goat: The Dangerous Book for Boys, and that book whose title escape me but which I see every time I'm in Smiths, by a Dad who wanted a 'real' history book for his kids, full of kings, queens and dates of battles, etc.  Yes, I know the former is written in a post-modernish between-quotes sort of way. But there does seem to be a lot of nostalgia about for a pre-feminist, sweaty-armpits kind of masculinity with patriotic overtones.

Hearing Oliver interviewed reminded me that there are two books I'd really like to see (write?): a book for boys about growing up that is pro-feminist and honest about gender and sexuality, and a history book that tells the progressive story of Britain, i.e. with the likes of Tom Paine, the Chartists and suffragettes as its heroes, rather than Nelson, Wellington and Scott of the Antarctic.

Act of God? Blame the West

You'd think the Burmese cyclone would be one event that really couldn't be blamed on 'the West'. After all, this was an act of God/nature, made worse by the (in)action of a home-grown military junta, and in whose aftermath western nations have been queuing up to offer humanitarian aid.

But you'd be wrong. Over the past few days, the usual suspects have been going through ever more mind-boggling intellectual contortions, eager to find a way of attributing some responsibility for the disaster to western democracies. So labyrinthine are their arguments that it's difficult to work out if the likes of Simon Tisdall and Simon Jenkins are criticising western governments for not intervening more directly, or for wanting to intervene in the first place. 

There was a particularly gruesome example of this kind of hand-wringing, overlaid with sanctimonious religious guilt-tripping, on yesterday's 'Thought for the Day', in which Rev John Bell played the familiar anti-colonialist card in order to help us to 'understand' the Burmese government's reluctance to accept aid from the West. In Bell's twisted version of events, it wasn't so much the brutality of the regime that was to blame for the plight of the Burmese people, as the sanctions imposed on it by the West. And it was our 'cultural ignorance' that was the barrier to the country accepting western aid, not the cruelty or self-interest of the generals.

As always, commentators who adopt this invertedly-racist (because it denies agency to anyone but white westerners) line of thinking let themselves off the hook of actually proposing any solution to the problem. So - Simon, Simon, John - if you were the British or the US government, what would you do?

Thank goodness that some can see through these rhetorical posturings. Read Norm on Simon Tisdall's twisted logic here, and David Aaronovitch's characteristically forthright call for intervention here.

Update

Seems I wasn't the only one to find that 'Thought for the Day' repellent. Here's Norm on a 'rank piece of apologetics.'

 

Seven songs

Bob has tagged me for this 'Seven songs' thing that's going around (serves me right for targeting him for that sentences game). So this is what you have to do:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

Here we go then. Here are seven songs that are going round in my head these days, in no particular order (and sorry that, unlike Bob, I lack the technical know-how to provide links to audio clips):

Bruce Springsteen, 'Girls In Their Summer Clothes' . A characteristic mix of acute social observation and seasonal intensity, with just a hint of middle-aged masculine wistfulness with which I painfully identify.

Arild Andersen, Vassilis Tsabropoulos and John Marshall, 'Pavane'. A lovely jazz reworking of Ravel, arranged (and with some beautiful piano playing) by Tsabropoulos.

Moby, 'Ooh Yeah'. OK, it may be (brilliantly) annoying, but it's the first track on the free disc given away with last week's 'Sunday Times' and I can't get it out of my head.

Vanessa Carlton 'A Thousand Miles'. Because when you're a parent, the songs that live in your head are frequently those played by your children, and my daughter has just taught herself to play this on the piano (and the video, with Carlton and her baby grand travelling down what looks like the Pacific Coast Highway, is fun).

Mariza, 'Ha uma musica do povo'. Watching Mariza perform this song, with words by the great Fernando Pessoa, at the 'Concerto em Lisboa', always bring me out in goosebumps.

Todd Gustavsen Trio, 'Being There'. The kind of languid piano jazz that calms the soul and puts you in mind of long wine-filled summer evenings.

Barry Ryan, 'The Colour of My Love'. A wild card. I don't know if it's spring-time nostalgia, or the 40th anniversary of its release, but just lately I've been revisiting this poignant reminder of youth and first love.

I tag (with absolutely no compulsion involved) : Shuggy, Paul at Mars Hill, Lisa at Rullsenberg Rules, Daniel at The Stark Tenet, Tom, Peter and Paulie.

Obama's foreign policy not quite what the Left ordered

Jonathan Steele is full of praise for Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy and attributes it to the candidate having spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. witnessing at close quarters 'the cynical face of the US empire'. But he makes an exception in the case of Obama's declared support for Israel, as demonstrated in his condemnation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's view 'that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam'.

It's odd. Steele cites Obama's positions on Iraq and Iran as evidence of his independent judgement, but on Israel he regards him as having 'chosen to made large-scale compromises' and as the passive victim of the 'pro-Israel lobby'. Steele can't accept that Obama's position on all of these issues might result from the same progressive political instincts and values. While he claims to be excited about the prospect of 'a black person in the Oval Office,' Steele will only really be happy if that person falls in line with the tired agendas of the 'anti-imperialist' Left.

Ernie, Bert and Barack

This one's for my youngest brother, who I know occasionally looks in on this blog, and who used to be my excuse for watching 'Sesame Street' (via):

Faith and doubt in dialogue

This, from the Archbishop of Westminster, is an encouraging sign:

I would want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as the lives of those who believe...Believers need to recognise that they have something in common with those who do not believe. But it is no less true that unbelievers might benefit from recognising that there is something of the believer in every person. Believers and non-believers need to recognise and understand each other better, more accurately, more appreciatively.

That's Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, eschewing his usual acerbic criticism of 'aggressive secularism' and advocating constructive dialogue with atheists. As regular readers of this blog will know, one of the features of contemporary Christianity that most dismays me is its demonisation of secularism and its retreat into defensive solidarity with believers of other faiths, regardless of their fundamentalism, against the raging hordes of 'militant atheism'. So it's good to see the possibility of a rational conversation between belief and doubt being re-opened. Let's hope it's followed through, on both sides.

You can read the whole thing here.

Sex, race, class, politics

David Cameron has been trying to persuade northern English voters that he's no 'namby-pamby': with some success, it would seem. Meanwhile, in the US Democratic primary campaign, Barack Obama has been attempting to overcome the perception that he is something of a 'wimp'.

Much of the coverage of the primary campaign has inevitably focused on issues of gender and race - not surprising, given that Clinton and Obama are, respectively, the first serious female and non-white candidates for their party's nomination. But the discussion has tended to be quite simplistic and (dare I say, without turning off those of you whose antennae are trained to pick up the merest hint of academic post-modernism) essentialist: will men vote for a woman, can white voters be persuaded to support an African-American candidate, etc.

Less attention has been paid to the ways in which gender, in particular, has become a key factor in shaping public perceptions of both candidates, regardless of their actual identity. As the gender theorists say, masculinity and femininity are not so much fixed, biological attributes, as clusters of meaning that float around in the cultural atmosphere, and get tangled up with other sets of meanings.

The set of meanings that gender got tangled up with in Pennsylvania was class. So the fuss following Obama's 'bitter' speech, and more trivially his weak performance in the bowling alley, was simultaneously about him being not only elitist and 'out of touch' with the working class, but also somehow not a 'real' man.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton, who previously had no qualms about capitalising on her femininity by shedding tears in New Hampshire and complaining about the 'big boys' ganging up on her, overhauled her image in Pennsylvania and emerged as a keen hunter and hard drinker. In other words: not only as apparently more working-class than Obama - but also as somehow more masculine. (Incidentally, did the young Ms. Rodham ever dream, when she was working for a radical law firm in the '60s, that one day she'd be running for president - as the redneck candidate?)

We saw something similar happen in 2004, when Karl Rove's campaign to get George Bush re-elected managed to paint John Kerry as effete - once again, a term that has gender as well as class overtones - when contrasted with George W. the good old southern boy. This despite Kerry's war record and Bush's cosseted upbringing. 

And, as the campaign against Kerry showed, this particular cluster of meanings around masculinity and working-classness also contains a racial component. In Kerry's case, it was his French tastes that did for him, enabling Rove and his associates to portray the candidate not only as elitist and wimpish, but also as somehow alien and unAmerican. In the case of the Clinton/GOP attacks on Obama, I think the racial element is more insidious, since attacks on the masculinity of black men have long been part of the toolkit of racism. 

I wonder why it's become so important for modern political candidates in the US and UK, whether they're biologically male or female, to prove their masculinity to the public? And why, at a time when traditional, working-class masculinity is said to be increasingly redundant, is it such an outdated form of masculine toughness that has to be proven?  Finally, in a period of heightened awareness about gay rights, surely terms such as 'namby-pamby', 'wimp' and 'effete', which disparage public figures by making implicit suggestions about their sexuality, should be well and truly binned?