Sex and sexuality (and newspapers)

Today I've been ill and sat at home watching crass daytime TV. Daytime TV slurries the worst of the news together into one place in order to make it digestible and on the whole less important. A few things cropped up that got me thinking (and with little else to do than drink tea and hide under a duvet, I thought I'd spew onto a screen rather than into a toilet bowl).

Jan Moir (an odious turd of a woman who writes for the odious turd of a paper, The Daily Mail) has managed to chalk up 21000 complaints for her piece on Stephen Gately's death, along with several hate groups and opinion polls on facebook calling for everything from a retraction of the article to the firing of the author. What stuns me is not the response, as the article itself was blatantly homophobic, despite a few brief efforts by the paper to keep it all hush-hush by changing the headline a few days later. (Note that it changed from "There's nothing natural about Gateley's death" or some such to this) Her comments were not even thinly veiled. I don't intend to trawl through the article bit by bit, as the whole thing has been covered in more than one blog, TV show and pub conversation, but take this as an example:

"After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards".

Two major problems here: first, why not canasta? I mean, the only reason I wouldn't make that assumption is because no one plays canasta nowadays because this isn't the 1970s and it isn't assumed that every social event has to involve a series of incresingly ridiculous games as a way of making things lively. My assumption is not based upon the homophobic belief that any gay couple seen with another man must be in the process of organising a voluntary/forced spitroasting. Second, who gives as shite? If two constenting adults in a loving relationship wish to introduce a third party into their sex life (and this adult is also consenting) then go ahead.

Like I say, this is hardly the point of me writing this. Two things struck me: on the one hand, any form of retraction or firing actually doesn't go far enough (if you wish to see it through to the end). On the other hand, it shows quite a depressing evaluation not just of homosexuals, but of male sexuality in general. I'll take the second point first.

The assumption made throughout this article, and a lot of discussion on homosexuality, is that homosexuals (and I think this can be restricted to males) are predatory to the point of gender actually being a secondary issue. If they're willing to fuck an arse, then they're willing to fuck a dog or a child or a shoe or anything you leave lying around, clearly. The fact that this view is still widely held (and I mean widely in the sense that too many people believe this considering the century we live in) is a sad state of affairs. If we're honest, a lot of the arguments against gay adoption is the fact that there is, even on a subconscious level, the fear that gay people wouldn't just be unable to provide a stable home, but that they would actually be detrimental to a child. This would take the form of the brutally homophobic assertion that gay = paedophile, or the equally as homophobic (but some how more socially accepted) view that their child would grow up to be gay (almost doubly homophobic in the fact that it reduces homophobia to not only something contagious but also something we would wish to innoculate our children against).

One thing that alarms me is that the same assumptions are rarely (publicly) extended to female homosexuals. This is primarily a male issue: men will fuck anything, especially the gay ones. Think of the responses to the sexual abuse of children which have occured in the nursery down south. The outrage is not just because of the crimes, nor the setting, but the fact that at least one of the perpetrators was female. "You don't expect it do you? Not from a woman! I mean, a man would probably fuck a kid- but not a woman, she must be really ill. A man would only have to be a bit ill in order to do that, but a woman would have to be really sick". This is one of the sadder parts of feminism's legacy (the other being the molding of women into something distinctly male rather than finding comfort in their own femininity, as happened during the 1980s). The highly emotive (and highly insulting) claims made by de Beauvoir that the first penetration is always rape, the old maxim "every man is a potential rapist" and so on may have faded from popular discourse, but they remain in the background as a general staging for male sexuality. The man is a predator, the women is there to be violated unless she takes command (this ended, I think, in the near frigidity of 80s powerdressing and then the bawdy laddette lifestyle which continues today in the guise of Jordan and Jodie Marsh et al: a parody of masculine sexual desire and Barbie doll femininity all in one, somehow completely sexualised and yet totally without any organic function or unity).

This is quite upsetting, as a man. I've written in plenty of other blogs that I am a feminist, and yet I feel that feminism has let us down (in precisely the same way that I feel a strong connection with Marxism despite the fact that it needs a good kick up the arse). It hasn't emancipated women; it has made emancipation into a new form of conformity, just as capitalism finds new ways of enslaving workers and seizing capital itself, just as black emancipation led to the development of a hip-hop culture which drips itself in gold and diamonds that their own brothers and sisters are digging up several thousand miles away.

What am I getting at? The fact that the points highlighted by Moir reveal the bleak homophobia in society (but also the public's willingness to fight back) and the more painful attitudes towards sexuality we have in society. It's not just that men are seen as more capable of grotesque acts of sexual evil than women; it's the fact that women are seen as incapable of this. That isn't sexist towards men. That isn't an anti-feminist cry of "look, they try to make us all rapists". It's the tragic reversal of the situation: "Look women, even if you wanted to rape someone, you'd be too feeble". The horror of the female child abuser is then not one of a monster capable of evil alone ("how can a human do this?") but of someone who bursts out of their genetic predispositions like the monster in The Thing ("how can a woman do this?")

Second, how do we hold Moir and the Mail accountable? I think it has to be all or nothing. Let's be this honest with ourselves: to most of us, this is not news. Revealing that the Daily Mail is homophobic is like revealing that the Pope is Catholic. The point is that we accept it as a sort of bogeyman, so long as it promises not to say or do anything that oversteps a mark. You can compare it to Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson or Chubby Brown to some degree. These are three fringe characters who do/did sit on the fringes of society for quite a while and who couldn't have their views put onto national television. All three are racist, homophobic and misogynist, and unrepentantly so. The old line of "But they're only joking" is utter cock. Jim Davidson has openly admitted to his hatred of women; Chubby Brown was filmed explaining to a journalist that he would beat up a Muslim if he found them in his house; Bernard Manning famously claimed that "no paki" was ever at the D-Day landings on the Mrs Merton show. This wasn't news, but it overstepped a mark. What it did was confront us with what we'd accepted. People will stop the EDL marching or ban the BNP from appearing on Question Time, but they'd never hand out anti-racism leaflets outside of a Chubby Brown gig. Because it's a "joke", it's seen as something we can debate about, but shouldn't do anything about.

The same happens with the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is a racist and homophobic publication. What the Moir article reveals is not their homophobia, but our willingness to let them get away with it for so long. If you wish to review the Moir piece and decide her career upon it, I suggest you do the same for the whole paper. Moir is not a loose cannon or a radical here (partly because she is a conservative). She is one of the many voices within the Mail who publish such sentiments daily, but were unwilling to do so in such a forward manner. It's much easier to concoct a phoney on-line poll to get your point across, as was the case in the "Do you think gypsies should be able to jump hospital queues?" saga.

Firing Moir is like firing a single member of the BNP for being too near the knuckle: it's not the member that has to be opposed, but the central ideology. Does this mean an end to the freedom of the press? Not really: as it happens the press cannot publish whatever they like. They can't publish homophobic, racist or sexist articles and that happens to be the law. For the paper to even consider running the story, they must have been in some line of agreement. OK, it was an editorial, thus it can deviate from the party line considerably. However, let's not be naive. The choice of language and brutality of phrasing deviated, but not the meaning. This paper is opposed to gay marriage and was pro-Section 28. It minds its tongue but it does so out of self-protection. It's like the guy in the pub who is willing to be racist, but only in hushed tones as they're afraid of being heard. Even worse, when they are heard they try to explain themselves, concluding "But that's not racist...if it is, then call me racist, but I'd see nothing wrong with racism".

What I'm calling for is the end of the Daily Mail. I think banning Moir is a pussy ass approach to this. It's like cutting off the Hydra's head. Who would they get in to replace her: Carole Malone? Richard Littlejohn? Carl Schmitt? The end of the Daily Mail wouldn't mean the closing of the paper, but a radical overhaul of the shit they're allowed to produce in the name of journalism. In the past they have lied, manipulated stats, created stats where needed (in the case of the polls mentioned above) and pushed an agenda which is actually against everything that decent people actually stand for. People need to demand more from the press. We need to see less of the useless afterbirth that falls out of the back end of Strictly Come Dancing (and by the way, BBC, just because you put "strictly" at the start of the title, doesn't mean it's cool. It's still ballroom dancing, it's still hosted by that reactionary chinny shite, and it got its name from an Australian movie from about 20 years ago. And as we all know Australia in the early 90s was like Germany in the 1970s, which was like England in the 1950s, but with worse music....so stop it). We need to see less of the clearly made-up/misrepresented attacks on political correctness, which serve not to save us from losing our liberty, but only to undermine our equality. We need to demand that they ask genuinely probing questions to politicians and demand answers in return, rather than playing on cheap point scoring. We need to demand to be treated like adults. If a story becomes over-simplified by reducing it to a few column inches and dropping the reading age, then talk to the readers like they're grown up, add more column inches and educate them. If a story needs 10 pages to cover it, cover it in 10 pages! It's the news, it's our news and it's our press! If it's not worth doing that, then the story means nothing.

Anyway, that's what I thought when I had a cold.