As a Welsh expatriate, I was surprised but interested to discover that there are now more women in leadership positions in the Welsh Nationalist party Plaid Cymru than there are in the UK Cabinet.
After September’s reshuffle, Theresa May remains as Home Secretary, a role in which she has occasionally talked a good game but done little materially to endear herself to women. Maria Miller’s appointment as Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, as well as Minister for Women and Equalities, got off to a flying start when an unexacting series of anti-equality accusations against her went viral; even if the list was badly and disingenuously worded, the facts behind it still don’t exactly fill one with confidence in her. The high-profile irritant Louise Mensch, meanwhile, has given up on a parliamentary career after serving just over two years of her term. So much for ‘Tory feminism’.
The UK is currently ranked 57th here, and has never been spectacular at getting women into government. As of early 2012, women represented only 16% of Conservative MPs and 31% of Labour MPs – but what does the number of women in government mean?
Gender parity is obviously not synonymous with strategic influence or decision-making power, and, particularly after Exhibit M, it’s slightly preposterous to think that a particular demographic will vote or make policy according to gender rather than ideology.
The current government itself has provided examples of this, with some of its most prominent and media-friendly female MPs – step forward Nadine Dorries – also pushing the harshest lines on reproductive or employment rights. All of which strengthens the argument for viewing and judging the actions of female politicians on an individual basis, rather than viewing them all as an undifferentiated flash of eye candy whose political presence is considered automatically progressive. This last trope reached its probable peak, as did so much bland but deeply damaging smuggery, under Tony Blair and his insipid cohort of ‘Blair’s Babes’. In France, this year’s slightly more optimistic victory for the Socialist Party under Francois Hollande has nevertheless drawn comparisons with New Labour’s use of women MPs as relatively powerless tokens of progressiveness:
In an article entitled “The irritating photo”, Isabelle Germain asks why these highly qualified women are being treated like Hollande’s trophies. Just like the ‘Blair Babes’, Hollande’s female ministers have their own twee media nickname; the ‘Hollandettes’. Linguistically, the ‘Hollandettes’ are to Hollande what ‘Beliebers’ are to the pop star Justin Beiber – relative to their male leader and their roles determined by his authority. – Source.
Even for a place so historically rife with sniggering male privilege and suspended adolescence as the House of Commons, the language and attitudes recently faced by female MPs has been some of the most patronising for years – not least the current Prime Minister instructing Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘Calm down, dear’ and not even bothering to acknowledge a question from the admittedly objectionable Nadine Dorries, instead dismissing her with the snide innuendo ‘I realise the honourable lady is frustrated’. Not that female parliamentarians should automatically be given an easy ride (hur hur), but neither should their opponents draw so instinctively and with quite so much entitled relish on lazy and reactionary stereotypes of hysteria and frustration as a means of avoiding the issues they wish to raise.
Perhaps of a piece with the deeply retrograde, public school and debating club roots of the present government, we seem to be seeing a renewed emphasis on the idea of politics as an adversarial, point-scoring arena in which women are ill-equipped to spar. This kind of thing is part of what The Thick Of It subverts and satirises so well. For all the show’s scattergun profanity, and the ‘violent sexual imagery’ and Freudian nightmares in its characters’ verbal volleys, the majority of humour in The Thick Of Itis derived not from the successful exercise of power but from impotence and frustration.
In addition, as Jem Bloomfield has noted elsewhere, there’s the extent to which the Lib-Dem avatars’ try-hard laddishness and awkward stabs at dick-swinging plays into their dislikeability – Roger Allam’s shire-tastic Peter Mannion MP, for all his downtrodden One Nation Tory-out-of-time woes, manages to exude more patrician authority than either of them. Overtly chauvinist or patronising attitudes are the preserve of characters, like the awkwardly overfamiliar Steve Fleming, whom the viewer is invited to regard with contempt.
Like The League of Gentlemen before it, The Thick Of It’s female grotesques are no less venal or useless or dim or inane than their male counterparts. Besides giving as good as they get, the show’s women, in the current series in particular, tend to crop up as self-possessed and efficient centres of competence within a given episode’s crisis and clusterfuck, whether it’s Terri’s brisk and matronly, almost instinctive civil servant’s professionalism, or Emma’s ruthless and steely slither up her party’s ladder of opportunity.
The exception to this is of course Rebecca Front’s portrayal of the well-meaning but hapless Nicola Murray MP, first introduced as a Minister put out to grass and now floundering as Leader of the Opposition. Chronically lacking in self-belief, ideas or ideology, beset by power-hungry underlings and colleagues, and unsupported by her offscreen husband, Murray is almost painfully unsuited for the environment in which she finds herself having to operate – but so, crucially, is Peter Mannion, and so was Murray’s forerunner, the spectacularly hangdog Hugh Abbott.
She has the odd display of offhand feminist snark (‘I love the division of labour in here – how the women do the heavy lifting and the men do the heavy sarcasm’), and the occasional pointedly gender-aware exchange with the show’s alpha male antihero Malcolm Tucker, but Murray’s incompetence and ineffectualness is never presented as a function of her being that well-worn cliché, a woman in a man’s world. It is simply the tragedy of several characters that they exist in a political and media world in which those who flourish are flavourless post-Blair clones like the largely unseen Dan Miller.
I haven’t seen a great deal written about The Thick Of It’s sexual politics – if there is any out there, do let us know in a comment. Returning to reality, it remains to be seen what effect the predominance of women in Plaid Cymru’s leadership is likely to have. Leanne Woods, Plaid’s first female leader, is refreshing enough for her unabashed socialist and republican ideals – although these principles are very much not common to the whole party.
Woods has attracted the always-dubious label of ‘outspoken’; like ‘feisty’ or the old favourite ‘pushy’, when I hear the word ‘outspoken’ used of a woman in public life I don’t exactly reach for my revolver but I certainly roll my eyes. in 2004 she was, mildly ridiculously, ordered to leave the Welsh Assembly’s debating chamber for referring to the Queen as ‘Mrs Windsor’. Even if you find a constitutional route to socialism more implausible than the idea of impending Welsh independence, Plaid are at least providing an example of how commitment to social justice can be combined with a commitment to gender representation, with both intertwined as strands of the same progressive goal.
Images © BBC
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Y’know how some people claim music makes their world go around/ they couldn’t survive without music/etc etc? Well, I’m like that with comedy, especially comedy by women, especially comedy by women that knocks the tired, old stereotype that “women just aren’t funny” straight out of the patriarchal pool of life.
Well, I’ve got my chicken sizzling in the oven, I’ve applied the final fudge flourish to the chocolate cake, and the 70’s throw back prawn cocktail is ready and waiting on the table. All I need now is a prime comedy guestlist of my favourite funny women to turn this evening into my ultimate fantasy night…
Jennifer Saunders
I try and live my life without putting a load of over-glorified idolisation on any one person (or thing) – but my rule just seems to break whenever I come across Jennifer Saunders. Since my table is limited, I had to choose between French and Saunders, but Jen made the cut for a few reasons.
I can’t talk about Saunders without talking about Absolutely Fabulous. Beyond the fact that it’s just genuinely funny, I think there are several important messages to be found in the programme. Joanna Lumley stated in an interview for French television that she accepted the role of Patsy because she had finally been offered a role where she didn’t have to be the soulless goody two shoes. Saunders has created characters that reflect real life – albeit a twisted form of it – much more closely than many other roles created for women. Because she has a ‘posh’ accent, Lumley is often cast in roles that reflect the character society wishes her to have, but in AbFab she fits perfectly as botoxed, pilled up, fashion obsessed Patsy, far better than anyone could imagine. At a human level, Saunders reminds her audience not to judge a book by its clipped accent or laughter lines; it’s a reversal of the stereotypes that just won’t go away – oh you’re old, so you can’t enjoy a drink, oh you’re a mother so you can’t have a personality away from the child. Then there’s the whole exposure of the fashion scene as the temperamental, judgemental, fat-shaming sham of an industry that it is.
She was amazing on Bad News and More Bad News, the music spoof by the people behind The Young Ones, in which she played a punk journalist that I ignorantly hoped to replicate “when I’m all grown up” (and still kinda secretly do). She’s written a Spice Girls musical which, as a 90s child, I couldn’t be happier about, and of course, I can’t round off this section without mentioning her stint as the fairy godmother on Shrek 2 and her a-maz-ing cover of Holding Out For A Hero.
Tina Fey
Tina Fey changed the face of high school comedy with Mean Girls. High school-based comedy was always full of what I’d call ‘lad-laugh’ humour; the hunt for beer, the quest for tits, the montage of vomit. Very little high school comedy ever actually showed anything within the actual school, until Mean Girls. Adapting material from the sociological study-fuelled Queen-Bees and Wannabes, Fey produced a film that wasn’t only funny, but provided an actual critique of many people’s experiences and perceptions of high school. An unflinchingly look at bitching, cliques and passive aggressive bullying that can relentlessly curse students on a daily basis, the film provided insight for those that had already left school, and a beam of hope for those currently in school. Plus it made a legend of Glen Coco and gave me one of my all time favourite lines involving wide set vaginas and heavy flows.
Fey is an unashamed feminist, which I love, and she’s effin’ hilarious about it. I have always maintained that you should use humour to show the bastards that they can’t get you down, and Fey mixes important feminist messages without ever sounding preachy or obtuse. Bossypants is an amazing autobiography where she talks not just about her infinitely interesting life but discusses truly interesting topics. The Time I Was a Bit Skinny and The Time I Was a Bit Fat are two short chapters that discuss body image; her responses to anonymous online commentators are hilarious and powerful; and her discussion of Photoshopped images of women is refreshing, honest, and completely different from anything you’ll find elsewhere on the subject.
Sophie Kinsella
You might not necessarily associate Kinsella straight away as a woman of comedy since she’s best known as a chick-lit author. On For Books’ Sake you’ll often find me arguing the merits of chick-lit as comedy aimed at women and the importance of not being put off by ridiculous flowery covers and storylines about heterosexual thirtysomething romances. I often cite Kinsella’s Shopaholic series when discussing chick-lit as comedy for women for more than the fact that I just find them funny. The subject matter of the novel could easily turn a light story into a gritty social warning – the curse of debt and addiction, the crushing demoralisation of being stuck in a career you hate in order to pay the bills, the social anguish of being judged and criticised by those you can’t help but think are better than you. However, Kinsella approaches these subjects with the character of Becky Bloomwood/Brandon and makes them funny, and while I acknowledge that it’s a tired old trope that all women like shopping, there’s plenty of subject matter to relate to.
I also love her quiet acknowledgement of the ridiculous suggestion that to read or write chick-lit you must be stupid. In an interview with the Guardian Kinsella wryly brushes off the hideous suggestion by the interviewer that somewhere her life must have gone wrong if she has an Oxbridge degree in business and finance yet chooses to write chick-lit. Her calm attitude towards suggestions that would leave me chucking plates against the wall shows professionalism and class that many would not associate with the genre.
Caitlin Moran
On a basic level, Caitlin Moran is on my list because I want so desperately to get her in a room and demand that she tells me how I can become just like her. When someone asks me what I want to do with my life, my response is always “to become a combination of Charlie Brooker and Caitlin Moran”.
I became aware of her work with How to Be a Woman. The fact that such an overtly feminist book became a bestseller is fabulously encouraging for all modern feminists, and the manner in which she writes her personal feminist agendas is inspiring. While I’m not a huge fan OF WRITING IN CAPITALS TO EMPHASISE EVERY POINT I MAKE, I am a fan of the messages she writes so simply and beautifully. Encouraging every woman to stand on a chair and shout “I AM A FEMINIST” without ever patronising those who may not automatically associate themselves with feminism is an attitude that I feel is necessary if we’re to get more young people to identify as feminists. Her statement that “you’re not fat if you can find a dress you look nice in and run up three flights of stairs” has become something of a mantra for me when I’m having a down day/week/month, and her unflinchingly honest approach to unfortunately controversial issues such as female masturbation and abortion is helping many women to finally be able to talk about them without any false shame or embarrassment. Plus, y’know, she’s piss funny and she went out drinking with Lady Gaga. Caitlin, on the off-chance that you’re reading this, STOP TELLING ME HOW TO BE A WOMAN AND JUST TELL ME HOW TO BE YOU. (End unnecessary capitals.)
Angela Carter
Okay, so this is maybe the least obvious choice for my guestlist, but let me explain. While the early works of Carter may be the epitome of darkness, towards the end of her writing career and her life, her work began to pick up elements of obscure, magical humour. Wise Children, her final novel, brings together her developing interest in the lightness of human behaviour with the eye-popping spectacle of magic realism, all of which results in a beautifully hilarious final novel with heartbreaking undertones.
I don’t just want to invite Carter because she’s funny, though. I want to invite her because she is my ultimate feminist icon. Her (at the time) unique approach to feminism and sexuality, constant refusal to change her opinions and beliefs just because she didn’t fit in with current trends, and her skills as a writer (not only of fiction, but of intelligent and
persuasive feminist essays and arguments) make her one of my all time heroines. From what I’ve read from biographies she was really, really funny in real life too, making her the perfect final addition to my table.
So there it is, my funny women party guestlist. But which women of comedy would you invite? Do you love my choices, or is my sense of humour enough to make you laugh in disgust?
- Gina Kershaw is the Features Editor on literary website For Books’ Sake. She has a fortnightly column there, Gina Goes Pop, where she rants about all things pop culture. She has a degree in English Literature and hopes one day to turn her penchant for sitting around the house in her pajamas eating custard creams and writing into a career. You can follow her on twitter – @gmkershaw91 – or check out her blog.
Having as I do firsthand experience of the impact of Thatcher’s thirteen years, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death – although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass – is something to which I’ll be largely indifferent. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.
Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, and to consider the effect of her gender on her role as a woman in power. Quick, before the next bus goes past.
The Icon Lady
Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
– Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens
Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.
The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign.
Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.
Iron Maidens
Thatcher’s image, rather than appealing solely to a particular aspect of femininity, was a tense mixture of conflicting and mutually reinforcing signifiers. Angela Carter identified it as a composite of feminine archetypes, including Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, Elizabeth I as Gloriana, Countess Dracula, and one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts – tropes sharing a certain type of burlesqued and grotesque dragon-femininity. The 1981 Falklands conflict allowed the discourse around Thatcher to reference the precedents of both Queen Victoria and Churchill, and she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia’.
Justine Picardie, in a grimly fascinating read, roots Thatcher’s style in the rigid grooming of well-turned-out 1950s femininity in general and her sartorially plain Methodist upbringing in particular:
Interviewed by Dr Miriam Stoppard for Yorkshire Television in 1985, she gave a glimpse of a childhood desire for the luxury of colour, and shop-bought extravagance, whether a new dress or sofa cover: ‘that was a great expenditure and a great event. So you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on it. My mother: “That’s not serviceable.” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable.’
Even at the height of her political power, she chose to retain the ‘pretty’ and ‘softening’ effects of her trademark horrible bows. Alongside this tendency towards aspirational frivolity, she cultivated connotations of the provincial housewife – a ‘Housewife Superstar’ – wearing an apron while on the campaign trail and being shown washing dishes while contesting the party leadership.
Her ‘Iron Lady’ speech distinctly echoed the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman… heart and stomach of a king’ construction associated with Elizabeth I in its drawing on the tension between conflicting signifiers:
I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World. A cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of those things? Yes… Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke.
Not a Man to Match Her?
Thatcher’s courting of various feminine roles did not prevent the assigning of masculine attributes to her – notably in oppositional parodies and satire. Her iconic Spitting Image puppet was shown wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigar, addressed as ‘Sir’, and given a more or less explicit emasculating effect upon male colleagues and political opponents:
Outside satire, the 1984 Miners’ Strike has been conceptualised both as a mass emasculation of ordinary male miners and an overt bout of cock-duelling between Thatcher and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, each of whom were criticised for an absolutist and stubbornly Napoleonic approach to the conflict rather than a more ‘feminine’ openness to negotiation and compromise.
As Dawn Fowler notes in her consideration of dramatic treatments of the Falklands War, a problem with such portrayals of Thatcher is that she ‘can be represented as simply denying her true feminine self in favour of a crazed fascist agenda.’ The Comic Strip’s satirical take on Thatcher’s battles with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council presented her as the victim of alien or demonic possession, the ending of which left her soft and passive – restored to her presumably appropriate, natural form. Both applauding Thatcher for her ability to overcome ‘traditional’ feminine weakness and irrationality and behave symbolically as a man, and castigating her for her failure or suppression of a ‘true’ soft and accommodating female nature, are equally dubious in the qualities they seek to assign to ‘real’ women.
Thatcher was repeatedly likened to a female impersonator, a man in blue dresses. The reason for this is simple, and apparently shatterproof: we have so firmly linked power and masculinity that we think a powerful woman is a category error. Instead of changing our ideas about power, we change the sex of a powerful woman.
No Job for a Lady?
While Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister was of course a landmark for women in politics, her much-vaunted ‘grocer’s daughter’ outsider status was mediated through an Oxford education and marriage into wealth. The number of prominent women serving as MPs and Cabinet ministers prior to or alongside Thatcher – Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield, Betty Harvie Anderson, Jenny Lee, Barbara Castle to name a few – make her ascension exceptional but not unique. Nor should Thatcher’s progress in the male-dominated world of British politics obscure how little she actually did for women once in office: the lack of women appointed to ministerial positions; her disparaging of ‘strident Women’s Libbers’; her invariably male ideological protégés. Historian Helen Castor, discussing the ‘extraordinary’ parallels between the iconography of Thatcher and that of Elizabeth I, points out that both women emphasised themselves as the exception to a rule:
…what those two women both did was not say, Women can rule, women can hold power. They both said, Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.
At a point where Thatcher’s chosen ideology is resulting in falling standards of living for women – and men – across Britain; where the dim and insubstantial Louise Mensch can manage to position herself as a rising star, and where the Home Secretary’s political decisions make fewer headlines than her choice of shoe, I’m relieved to see that attempts to rehabilitate Thatcher as any kind of feminist icon are largely being resisted. It remains to be seen whether The Iron Lady, and its fallout in the form of frankly offensive Thatcher-inspired fashion shoots, means that her image is now undergoing a further transcendence into the realms of irony and kitsch (as has happened with both Marilyn and Che), or whether this is part of a conscious revival of the political associations her image originally carried and to which we are being returned – conditions profoundly unfriendly to female independence and agency despite the women occasionally employed as their shock troops.
]]>THEIR LINKS ARE LOUD, BUT NEVER SQUAAARE
- We’ve been reading Sinfest with interest of late. This is probably the ed’s favourite of the feminism-themed arc they’ve had on there.
- WOMEN OF THE FUTURE, 1902 STYLE. Taken from the second block of images on this site, if you want to see the whole set.
- Ladies In Monochrome – we’ve plugged this before as it’s by one of our guest bloggers, but go look. Poignant and charming in equal measure.
- Stand-up Bethany Black talks sexism and comedy from a personal perspective.
- New She Makes War download – for free or pay-what-you-can! We love her. Top stuff. ]]>
Chav, n. British slang (derogatory). In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.
– Oxford English Dictionary
Chav and other C-words
If ‘cunt’ is reportedly losing its power to shock or offend, don’t worry, other c-words are available. ‘Class’, for instance, appears to have become unsuitable for use in polite society these days, while ‘Chav’ has become commonplace in the respectable parlance of those who would never dream of using any other c-word so blithely. Owen Jones’s book Chavs, a welcome and necessary analysis of the latter phenomenon, identifies it as a culture “created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists”. Chavs examines the word’s place in current political and cultural discourse in the context of a simultaneous narrowing of socio-economic opportunity and an erasure of traditional working-class identity.
Before we begin, it’s worth heading off a few preconceptions at the pass. ‘Chav’ is a multivalent and unstable signifier, and the word’s origin and evolution shows it meaning different things to different people. It’s been around a relatively long time: a 2005 study described ‘chav’ as a strange subculture which, unlike its predecessors, lacked any association with a particular musical movement or political ideals. 2004 saw the rise of ‘chavertising’, a marketing strategy targeting ’chavs’ as a subculture with spending power, whose members ‘wore their wealth’ and prioritised consumption. At the tail-end of 2004, I attended a gig in Chatham by the former Libertine Carl Barat, whose dubious supergroup, in deference to the town’s history with the term, and with who knows what degree of irony or self-awareness, styled themselves ‘The Chavs’ for the evening. And the (working class and Welsh) novelty rap crew Goldie Lookin Chain were satirizing various aspects of ‘chav’ culture as far back as 2001.
Jones’s book, however, focuses on a particular and relatively recent variation in the word‘s meaning, one which is concentrated in political and media discourse and which is overwhelmingly used about the working class rather than by them. This hasn’t always been, and isn’t always the case – Lynsey Hanley’s review of the book locates the idea of ‘chavs’ within the complexities of working-class communities, where the word can be used to differentiate between ‘those who aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it’. Back in my 1990s comprehensive-schooled childhood, the latter group were certainly distinguishable, known with varying degrees of contempt, amusement or nervousness as ‘neds’ or ‘townies’. But these terms were localised, used within a community to delineate internal hierarchies, rather than to section off an entire community by those at one socio-economic remove from it.
Regardless of the tortuous relationship between the term and the demographic it describes, the use of the word in 21st century political discourse has developed a peculiar, specific and politically-loaded edge. Jones outlines how the word has been stripped of its previous meaning and reapplied in government and media rhetoric, almost invariably being conflated with ‘lower socio-economic group’ by those of a higher one, without reference to or cognisance of the lower socio-economic individuals being tarred with the same brush.
An equal-opportunity stereotype?
At first glance, ‘chav’ is a term tied to class rather than gender. Chav stereotypes are remarkably even-handed: for every lager-swilling lout there’s a single mother, for every Wayne Rooney a Waynetta Slob. The sports gear and leisurewear prominent in ‘chav’ uniform is a type of dress which makes it possible to efface one’s femininity with shapeless tracksuits and scraped-back hair. The baseball cap which graces the cover of Jones’ book is a gender-neutral accessory. Is the female ‘chav’ a recognisable figure? A google image search for ‘chavette’ brings up images of relative deprivation and degradation rather than the upwardly-mobile targets of ‘chavertising’ – the ubiquitous Croydon facelift, tracksuits, pregnant stomachs and yards of bare skin. Many of these are self-conscious or pastiche portrayals by those not identifying as a permanent part of the subculture – a kind of chav drag. There’s also a Newcastle fancy-dress company selling a ‘Super Chavette’ costume, as well as several ‘chav babe’ sites – the straight, and no less curious, counterpart of the numerous gay male chav-porn sites discussed here by Jack Cullen. And the ‘chav’ icon extraordinaire is of course female too – Little Britain‘s Vicky Pollard, one of the oddest fictional stereotypes to be fixed as a moral standard since George Bush Senior instructed America to be ‘more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons’.
The types of women stereotyped as ‘chavs’ make an interesting point about the particularly virulent strain of misogyny which chav-hatred can contain. Anti-chav commentators reveal a disquieting obsession with the presumed sexual precociousness and promiscuity of young working-class women, as well as their aggressive lack of deference and their status outside traditional family and community hierarchies. The behaviour for which ‘chavs’ are criticised includes being too loud, too flash, too drunk, too vulgar and too disrespectful towards their ‘betters‘. Is this particularly problematic behaviour when observed in women?
The tendency for anti-chav rhetoric to thinly veil both misogyny and class hatred reached an eyebrow-raising pitch with James Delingpole’s spittle-flecked rant that Vicky Pollard embodies:
… several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye…
Here an anti-chav stance allows a thoroughly unpleasant perpetuation of damaging stereotypes of the working class female (sexual promiscuity, sexual precociousness, a thoughtless or scheming lack of protection resulting in pregnancy) as well as a proscribing of non-traditional behaviour (women existing outside traditional family roles, deriving financial support from the state rather than a husband). All this with barely a glance at context or circumstance. Imogen Tyler’s 2008 study ‘Chav Mum, Chav Scum’ found not only that the word ‘has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor’, but also that “the figure of the female chav, and the vilification of young white working-class mothers, embodies historically familiar and contemporary anxieties about female sexuality, reproduction, fertility, and ‘racial mixing.'”
This gendered and class-based disgust has become particularly prevalent in UK comedy, as identified in Barbara Ellen’s wrecking-ball swing at Little Britain:
Rewarding middle-class, educated, comedy workaholics for lampooning people without any of their advantages, struggling on the margins of society – was this where we’d come to, a boorish festival of exploitation and contempt? … Vicky Pollard alone gave certain sections of the media a label for the disgust they love to express towards young girls spiralling downwards, due to poverty, illiteracy and teen pregnancy…
While the comedies in question do not exclusively portray working class and female characters, the unedifying sight of Oxbridge-educated male comedians sticking it to underclass female grotesques does form part of a disconcerting trend in contemporary comedy towards punching downwards. Pace Kathy Burke as the proto-chav Waynetta Slob, the only recent mainstream female comedian to draw on this stereotype has been Catherine Tate as Lauren Cooper, a character who compared to Pollard is relatively nuanced and sympathetic. (One of Cooper’s appearances has as its pay-off her unsuspected and incongruous knowledge of Shakespeare, rather than a further display of the depths of her blissful ignorance.)
Are we bovvered, though?
Apart from the latent misogyny informing some chav-hatred, then, why is ‘chav’ a feminist issue? The ‘chav’ stereotypes which have gained media prominence and cultural currency are those which are politically useful, being amenable to adoption for narratives which draw on the idea of a semi-criminal, scrounging, feckless underclass to justify political attacks on all of us lower down the socio-economic scale. Many of these stereotypes are female, just as many of the targets of these attacks will be. The current government’s rhetoric repeatedly plays on the stereotype of the idle and recklessly promiscuous single mother, whose ‘irresponsibility’ must be punished, to validate the wider reduction or removal of state support from benefits claimants – even though over half of single parents are in paid employment, a figure rising to 71% for those with a child over the age of twelve. The Daily Mail, happily conflating fact and fiction, used a picture of Waynetta Slob to illustrate an article on the increased number of women claiming sickness benefit, accompanied by the headline ‘Rising toll of ‘Waynettas’. As the smoke cleared after last month’s riots over much of the UK, the single mother was again in the firing line, along with the moral decline, sexual depravity, and social disintegration she is held to represent.
There is still a frustrating lack of attention to class paid by mainstream feminism, whose academic and theoretical focus is often divorced from practical considerations of material inequality, with the result that feminist analysis can seem off-puttingly remote and attuned only to middle-class concerns. Far from having vanished as a vector of political identity, class remains a stubborn and strengthening line of social division. The concept of the stereotypical ‘chav’, and its expansion into a term covering an entire externally-defined and already disadvantaged group, can make socio-economic differences appear insurmountable barriers, erasing the potential for solidarity over the common problems we face. Acknowledging that the discourse around ‘chavs’ can be disingenuous, and can provide a cover for denigrating the social agency and sexual autonomy of working-class women, as well as for wider political attacks on the unemployed and working poor, would be a significant step forward.
- Chavs is available from Verso Books now
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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.
]]>Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: THAT’S NOT FUNNY!
I love live comedy, honest I do. I spent two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year and I’ll be there for the full three weeks this year. Some of my best friends are (very good) comedians. However, as a scene: live comedy has a problem. I haven’t been an aficionado for many years, so maybe it was always there – but if recent articles are anything to go by; it seems to be growing. Increasingly, the search for ‘edgy’ material is translating into a scene where the recoil laugh – the I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that laugh – is the only one aimed for. The targets are ‘soft’ – minorities and marginalized groups – and the jokes prod at the same old prejudices. The numbers of times I come home from a comedy gig wanting to dry-clean my brain is rising.
My hackles were finally raised enough to write this article after an especially bad gig I went to recently. A sketch group of white, able-bodied young men performed a series of female grotesques which were so consistently unpleasant that – though cheerily presented – the unmistakable undercurrent to the evening was ‘we really don’t like women much.’ Most sketches involved a member of the group donning a plastic wig to ‘be a girl’ – and every female character was a Lolita, a whore, a woman giving birth or a mother who hated her children. The punchlines ranged from coat hanger abortions to incest to rape to paedophilia. At my table, from about halfway through, we didn’t laugh so much as look to each other for reaction shots and a reality check. This troupe’s final skit was a song and dance number, the ‘Cell Block Tango’ from Chicago, with the words changed to ‘she had it coming’. Had there not been other people on the bill who I really wanted to see, I would have walked out then and there.
The problem is more widespread than just one shit comedy troupe . People more eloquent than myself have pointed out this return to the bad old days. It seems like the decades of hard-earned progress, a basic standard of ‘don’t be a shit to the marginalised’, is being discarded because now it’s apparently ironic. Sexism is increasingly tolerated (after all, everything’s sorted and equal now, so just lighten up, bitch) and other kinds of prejudice are also creeping back, too. ‘It’s not racist, it’s just un-PC, and no one likes political correctness. So, while we’re at it, what about those immigrants, homos, and the disabled, aye?’
Increasingly comedians who get pulled up for saying genuinely unpleasant things (I’m looking at you, Frankie Boyle) have taken this to be their selling point and then upped the ante in general douchery. While Jordan, the gossip-magazines’ favourite glamour model, might seem a fair target, when exactly did her disabled son become fair game, too? Let alone in a joke about incest and rape. I’ll repeat that: an incest-rape joke about a disabled eight-year-old child.
While I’m sure there has always been some truly unpleasant comedy around, its apparent mainstream acceptance is a new trend. The Frankie Boyle joke aired on Channel 4. This worries me because our words do carry a power – they reflect how we see the world, but they also set our standards for what is normal, acceptable, okay. The trickle-down effect has real-world consequences. The rise of the rape joke can be a horrific trigger for those who have experienced it. In increments, these themes – packaged as entertainment – normalise these horrors and dismiss their seriousness.
This is not an argument for censorship – I had fervent arguments a few years ago with Daily Fail-reading colleagues about whether Jerry Springer: The Opera should be shown on TV (yes, yes, a thousand times yes!) – but there is a huge middle ground between Mary Whitehouse prudery and comedy which is getting pretty close to hatespeech. Please, guys: self-regulate a little by engaging the brain.
Some would argue that if I don’t like this brand of comedy, I just shouldn’t watch it. To some extent they’re right, and I do try. When I saw a poster in Edinburgh for a standup show called ‘The Lying Bitch and the Wardrobe’ (I see what you did there) I had a pretty strong inkling that this wouldn’t be my kind of thing and I didn’t go. But on a mixed bill (as almost all small live comedy gigs are) there’s rarely any warning what each person will do – so while you might have gone along because you recognise one name that you like, there is no disclosure until you’re hearing it that the third act, Joe Bloggs, will be your prejudiced asshat for the evening, berating you all with a microphone for at least ten minutes.
Oh, and you paid to see this.
I don’t think anything should be off-limits – but some topics are so unpleasant (not to mention increasingly over-mined) that if a comedian wants to tackle them they will need to be so damn funny, so ingenious, original, tactful – that 80% of comedians just shouldn’t bother. Needless to say, the 80% that aren’t up to speed don’t get this, and the 20% that can do it well often have better things to do than prod triggertastic subjects and tired old clichés with a great big stick. They’re off crafting material that makes you belly-laugh (and think) rather than just titter nervously in disbelief.
As my friend James Ross, who runs the consistently wonderful Fat Kitten Improv group and the Better Living Through Comedy night put it: “From a purely technical standpoint, shock humour suffers acutely from a law of diminishing returns: the audience build up a resistance to it, and that alone would be good reason to limit its use.”
I think the thing which is missing (besides originality) is a measure of basic empathy. In the increasingly desperate search for ‘dark’ and ‘cutting edge’ material, comedians forget that a lot of their lazily-picked targets are people. Real people. People with feelings and also (self-interest alert, guys:) people who go to comedy gigs.
The rising amount of ‘ironic’ misogyny is not creating a particularly friendly environment for a certain 50% of punters. Last year I went to the Comedy Store to see twelve different comedians being filmed for The World Stands Up. I wasn’t entirely sure if the person who’d invited me along had intended the evening as a date or not, so it was potentially awkward already. Then, as the evening unfolded, four out of twelve comedians used ‘bad fellatio’ as the bedrock of their sets. One standup spent his whole set mocking his wife for not pleasuring him correctly. In the narratives that we heard that night, women’s main role was as dispensers of sexual favours – and we couldn’t even do that right. Thanks, guys. I haven’t been back to the Comedy Store since.
For another example, I was once out with a group for a friend’s birthday when a standup did a set about making a mess in the disabled toilet and blaming it on a disabled person. While he wasn’t to know that birthday girl, sat in the front row, had cerebral palsy, why did he think this would be a good topic in the first place? How many times has he encouraged the able-bodied to laugh at this disadvantaged minority’s expense?
Example of good standup! Catherine Semark performing at Edinburgh Fringe. Photo by me.
This isn’t an argument for ‘nice’ comedy. Some of my favourite comedians are pretty darn dark and twisted – Bill Hicks, Dylan Moran, and I heartily recommend London sketch group The Beta Males – but the ‘type’ of twisted is crucial. Jokes are about status – people use them every day to agree boundaries of what’s acceptable, and with that comes a certain amount of responsibility. When activist comedians such as Mark Thomas or Kate Smurthwaite use humour to mock people in power for making bad decisions, that’s something very different to a middle class standup laying into ‘chavs’ for ‘talking funny and drinking cheap booze’.
Anger and humour are very often interlinked, but where you aim that anger makes all the difference. Aim it ‘up’ at deserving, more powerful targets and it’s subversive, it can hold people to account – satire has a long and proud tradition. Aim that anger ‘down’ at the underdog and it’s tired, old and – frankly – it’s bullying.
- Hannah Eiseman-Renyard is a short, fat, ginger four-eyes who nonetheless loves live comedy. She works as an editor by day, a writer/performance poet by night, and on the weekends she fights crime. She’ll sleep when she’s dead. Hannah runs the Whippersnapper Press, a web-publishing site for short, innovative and funny creative writing. She is twenty-five and lives in North London with her three grandchildren and thirty cats. Her turn-ons include moss, handicrafts and Bohemian clichés.
I’ve been more or less enjoying Ten O’Clock Live’s exuberant attempt to blend righteous indignation and political analysis with gags about Ed Balls’ surname. Britain’s current political nightmares certainly need and deserve something like it. Inevitably, there’s a lot to criticise: the show can be lightweight and facile, and its concern with playing to a broad audience can lead it to simplify complex issues and treat them in a manner often unhelpfully flippant and glib. Tonal inconsistency exists between its sporadically vicious satirical intent and the soft-soaping it tends to give when interviewing political figures. The much-vaunted live format adds little, the graphics and set make Brass Eye’s intentionally eye-bleeding credits look soothing, and the pace of the initial episode felt frenetic and rushed, as though the show’s producers didn’t trust the audience to pay attention beyond the length of a YouTube viral – although they’d hardly be unique in that.
My main concern, though, is Lauren Laverne, whose involvement I’d been avidly anticipating. Full disclosure: I was a teenage Kenickie fan, and I hoped Laverne, their former singer, would bring some of the arch wit, droll delivery and star-spangled glamour which she used to rock onstage, as well as the stridently socialist principles she used to espouse (in the run-up to the 1997 election, she wrote a politically-conscious column for the NME, and Kenickie repaid Geri Halliwell’s pro-Thatcher drivelling by succinctly denouncing the Spice Girls as ‘Tory scum’). In fairness, over ten years on, that sort of expectation was both naïve and nostalgic. While she wasn’t great, her performance didn’t have me rapt in the slack-jawed horror which appeared to be affecting some reviewers, whose critical responses to the show singled out Laverne, its only female presenter, for her allegedly pointless and tokenistic inclusion and relatively toothless comic chops.
left to right: Mitchell, Laverne, Carr, and Brooker.
A few of these responses betrayed problematic attitudes of their own, seeming unwilling to countenance the idea of a regional-accented blonde with an indie-pop background and glittery eyelids as anything more than eye-candy. The Telegraph’s Ed Cumming, in a review entitled ‘What is the point of Lauren Laverne?’, dismissed her as ‘northern totty’ and declared ‘it’s hard to see what, apart from the sadly obvious, she brings to the table’. The Metro described her as the show’s ‘weak link’ and claimed, less than accurately, that she ‘looked lost and confused when The XX or Mumford and Sons didn’t pop up in the headlines’. Kevin O’Sullivan in the Mirror sneered that ‘Poor token female Lauren Laverne … comes across as a bland bombshell recovering from entirely successful comedy bypass surgery’.
While I’m sure her looks and residual indie cred didn’t harm her chances, asserting that Laverne was picked for ‘northern totty duty’, able to engage with little beyond the autocue, seems overly harsh. Apart from an occasional turn on Mock the Week, Laverne’s background is in presenting and live broadcasting on the Culture Show and 6Music, and her anchorwoman role on Ten O’Clock Live is presumably based on her abilities and experience in this arena, rather than that of live comedy. The two require different skillsets and Laverne is an excellent host, introducing and concluding the show, linking pieces, throwing to break and chairing roundtable discussions. That’s what she brings to the table – she’s not a weak link, she’s the link, there to be the viewer’s guide. Unfortunately, her function as this – the show’s secretary, or Mum, or primary-school teacher – means that she’s there less to perform and more to keep the boys in order and to ask them what they think, the opinionless eye of a satirical storm whipped up by her more vocal and dynamic co-presenters.
Lauren Laverne poses for Green Britain Day in June of last year. Photo: Department of Energy & Climate Change Flickr gallery. Shared under Creative Commons licence.
When Laverne does step out of the secretarial role, she’s badly served by her material. The opening show’s skit in which she played an airhead newscaster may have been an attempt to play on the superficially vacuous persona which several reviewers were expecting of her, but its feeble stabs at humour reinforced the image rather than subverting it. The same was true of the recent piece in which she haplessly ‘volunteered’ backstage, a part which could have been taken by one of the male presenters to make the same point – that making public services reliant on ill-informed and inexperienced amateurs is a blatantly bad idea – without the Ditzy Provincial Blonde aspect to which her material seems wedded. Elsewhere, Laverne’s rants on corporate accountability and the Coalition’s selling-short of liberal democracy, while gobsmackingly commendable (and she clearly means it, man), impress more for rhetorical power than comic panache. In the show’s third episode she invoked the spectres of her past by quoting the Manic Street Preachers during a defence of public libraries; I loved the principles behind this piece, but it was annoyingly punctuated by lazy self-deprecating gags – she’s a girl, so she’s looking up what ‘menstruation’ means! And she’s got access to all these books, but she just wants to read something by Katie Price! – which undermined her authority to make the serious points at the sketch’s heart. Again, perhaps the idea was to knowingly play on or subvert the dumb blonde image, but Laverne is alone in resorting, or having to resort, to jokes at her own expense rather than that of the show’s purported targets. Laverne is also a mother who frequently mentions taking her kids to the local library – this angle could have been used to support her case as well as introducing nuance to her persona, but I guess motherhood would have been unsexily out of step with the show’s desired audience. In a comedy catch-22, while I’d like her to be more than the attractive anchorwoman, when she does so the material she’s given seems to reinforce the recommendation that she stick to presenting.
All this says less about Laverne’s own intelligence or ability and more about her frustrating under-use by the show’s writers and producers. To place her in this ‘straight-man’ role, and to have her as the only female, seems surprisingly regressive. We’ve come a long way from women in comedy troupes, notably the Pythons’ ‘glamour stooge’ Carol Cleveland, being little but dollybird foils. The Morris/Iannucci axis of satire particularly excelled at utilising performers like Rebecca Front, Doon Mackichan, and Gina McKee throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
Since Laverne’s position as the show’s lone female exacerbates any criticism she receives, might some of this critical heat simmer down if Ten O’Clock Live featured another woman, in a performing rather than presenting role? There’s no shortage of vocal and opinionated female comics – I can think, before Googling ‘female political comic’, of Natalie Haynes, Shazia Mirza, Jo Brand, and Josie Long – whose participation might be as interesting, amusing and incisive as that of Brooker, Mitchell or Carr. But after all, once we start analysing the show’s diversity beyond gender, it becomes painfully apparent that Laverne’s fellow presenters are three middle-aged, middle-class white Englishmen in suits, all but Brooker Cambridge-educated, with the most diverse thing about them being their haircuts’ degree of aerodynamism. My problems with Laverne are symptomatic of greater problems with the show: while sometimes refreshingly radical in perspective, it’s still small-c conservative in parts.
Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine
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