If you’ve got a guest post brewing in your brain, pitch us at [email protected].

Last night, I was drawing away at my desk with Radio 4 on in the background and idly chatting to my boyfriend, who is in Poland at the moment.

A Moral Maze came on the radio, aiming to address the moral challenges around the government’s Troubled Families initiative, in the wake of the government’s ‘Broken Britain Tsar’, Louise Casey, suggesting that women in these families should be financially discouraged from having more children if they are struggling to cope at present. This comes off the back of Eric Pickles saying we’re too politically correct to lay blame where it belongs, which is with the troubled families where recidivistic criminality and truancy endures across several generations.

It is, they suggest, a moral failure of the families who languish on benefits that they do not lift themselves out of antisocial behaviour and state dependency.

In this Moral Maze, it was said more than once “we all know who these families are” when panel members asked for clarification on whether they were discussing troubled or troublesome families.

The criteria for being regarded as a Troubled Family are that a family has five or more of the following seven traits:

• Having a low income
• No one in the family who is working
• Poor housing
• Parents who have no qualifications
• The mother has a mental health problem
• One parent has a longstanding illness or disability
• The family is unable to afford basics, including food and clothes

Source: they’re outlined in this Independent piece.

However, the Moral Maze‘s panel also discussed some very loaded terms like “serial fatherlessness” which seemed to point quite firmly to where they apportion the blame for this supposed crisis.

Of course, like most government statistics, the figure of 120,000 families in the UK meeting this definition is disputed, with most attempts to replicate the research finding far, far fewer families than in the initial research.

The panel didn’t seem to pick up on what seems to be glaringly obvious to me as a major issue with the defining traits, focusing instead on whether poverty caused families to struggle to the point where adhering to social norms was difficult or whether the families themselves were essentially lazy or immoral enough to drive themselves into this situation. There are obvious echoes to the description of “feral youths” we had a year ago when the country was ablaze with rioting.

To me, the most pernicious aspect of the definition is the bias against disabled people, particularly against disabled women. Since it’s far harder for disabled people to find decent education or well-paid employment, and since depression and other mental health challenges are incredibly common among disabled people (perhaps because we’re being told that our problems are our own moral inadequacies?), it seems like a given that most families where one or both parents are disabled are automatically well on the way to being labelled as problematic.

In fact, if you examine a family where neither parent is ill, disabled or has mental health problems, they must meet all five of the remaining criteria, but a disabled family where the mother has mental health issues need only meet three of the five non-health-related factors to be labelled as problematic.

If you then add in the idea that the mothers in troubled families should be discouraged, perhaps financially, from having more children than they can afford or cope with, we’re worryingly close to a programme of eugenics that disproportionately targets disabled and mentally ill women.

The discussion on Moral Maze didn’t pick up on this point, seemingly assuming that it should be taken as read that ill-health and impairment, whether physical or mental, constitutes a problem for society.

It’s a disturbingly regressive idea that in order to end poverty, you end the poor, and one that should be challenged with passion at every turn.

Reading through earlier government documents relating to this, however, paints a different picture to the one now being presented by ministers. The definition there ran:

• First, examine families where either there is proof of the child having committed a crime or where a member of the family has an ASBO or similar charge around social conduct.
• Secondly, identify families where a child has been regularly excluded from school, has 15% or higher unauthorised absence or where the child is regularly truanting.
• If families meet one of the two, then examine if no-one in the family works or is in post-compulsory education (one of those NEETs – Not in Employment, Education or Training).
• After examining these identifying factors, local considerations may be applied where families meet two or three of the above factors exist and there is cause for concern.

These local considerations can include:

• Where a family member has been in prison in the last year, where the police have been called out regularly, where the family is involved in a gang or where they are prolific offenders.
• Where a child is on the child protection register or where the local authority is considering taking the child into care.
• Where a family member has long-term health problems, particularly:

  Emotional and mental health problems
  Drug and alcohol misuse
  Long term health conditions
  Health problems caused by domestic abuse
  Under 18 conceptions

Now, this list of issues seems problematic, but less so when you take into account the idea that these should only be considered once it’s established that there are problems with criminality or where the child is not attending school often enough. Worklessness is given less priority than these and health problems such as alchoholism are even less relevant.

Source: this Troubled Families Programme PDF from March 2012.

I think that the shift from what this document describes to the seven traits of unsuccessful people defined above and communicated by ministers more recently is incredibly telling in determining the underlying ideology at play here. Rather than say that criminality and absence from school or the structure of employment, education or training are the main challenges facing families and requiring intervention, we’re left with the impression that there are wickedly immoral, lazy people, primarily the poor, disabled people and single mothers, who are tearing apart the fabric of the country.

The original notion – that families who are troubled and troubling through antisocial or criminal behaviour, where children are being denied the life chances that education provides, could do with additional support and intervention to assist them in re-introducing structure to what can often be a chaotic and fraught existence – seems sound. To turn this into yet another attack on poor people, disabled people and women just seems like a moral failure of government, and that, I think, is far more likely to tear the country apart.

• Described as ‘suave’ by Simply Knitting Magazine, Howard Hardiman is a writer and artist who makes comic books about lonely badgers, dog-headed escorts and disabled superheroines. He lives on the Isle of Wight and collects jigsaw puzzle pieces he finds in the street.

www.howardhardiman.com
www.thelengths.com
www.thepeckhaminvalids.com

Humble Bundle V

The Humble Bundle is a nice little concept: a collection of indie titles for you to pay what you want for and then decide how much of that fee goes to a) the developers, b) Humble Bundle themselves, or c) charity.

I got it on the first day (and, sorry, but by the time this post goes live I suspect the window will have closed) so I only got the first five games that were included.  Since then there’ve been three more titles added if you paid over the average.  These were added in light of this bundle making over $1.8 million in the first 15 hours.

Included in the Bundle were:

• Psychonauts
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent
• LIMBO
• Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP
• Bastion*
• Braid*+
• Lone Survivor*+
• Super Meat Boy*+

* denotes games that were unlocked if you paid over the average; + denotes those titles added at a later stage.

Like I say, I only got the first five, but I’m not too sore as I already have Braid (not a big fan) and I’m not overly interested in the other two.  I’m not going to discuss the games themselves here because that’ll be coming in a “Playing…” post later on.

I thought it would be nice show you that sometimes, somewhere out there, someone does something good.  A lot of money has been raised for charity through this: not least through Big Names of Gaming competing to be the top contributors (Notch and HumbleBrony Bundle have been vying for the top spot: when I bought the bundle they were dueling around the $3000 mark, now they’re on $12,345.67 and £11,111.11 respectively).

Taken from Humblebundle.com at 10:40am GMT, 13/06/2012

Of course, as the popularity of indie games continues to rise, it’s nice to be able to have the choice to decide how much of your cash goes to the developers as opposed to not really knowing for sure how much just gets kept by various third parties.

Sigh, Misogyny

From that nice little snippet of camaraderie, I regret that I must now depress the tone somewhat and talk about InternetFail, and more specifically, how it’s been discussed recently with regard to the world of gaming.

At the start of June BBC News Magazine ran an article highlighting the constant, abhorrent abuse that female gamers get in online play: here.  It mostly focusses on the experiences of one Wisconsin gamer called Jenny, of the CoD ilk, and the abuse she gets daily on voice chats.  She records them and uploads them to her website, Not in the Kitchen Anymore, and I gotta say, she handles this shit pretty well but the point is she shouldn’t have to.  Especially, as the article points out, 42% of US gamers are women, and adult women outnumber teenage boys quite considerably.

There’s also a BBC World Service programme based on her experiences and those of other female gamers.  If you read the article or listen to the programme you might hear some charming young fellows claiming “freedom of speech”, but here’s a point of interest for any such time someone tries to use this smokescreen of an excuse if you call them out as misogynists (or racists, homophobes, etc… the list, depressingly, goes on).  In both American and European (incl. British) law the “freedom of speech” excuse doesn’t fly.

Why’s that?  Well, if you actually read the laws you’ll see there are exclusions to what the precious First Amendment protects: look here.  What’s that?  Obscenity?  Threats?  Defamation?  Intentional infliction of emotional distress?  They’re all excluded from protection by the First Amendment?  OHGAWDNO!  It’s like living in a world where people treat each other with respect!  How horrible.

And, Euro law?  Just for starters you can consult Article 10 and Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights.  Yeah.  Human rights.  But be careful out there: trying to educate these fools in the error of their ways and the legal flaws in their defence might offend them.  The fact you’ve done some learnings (that aren’t centred around how to make tasty lunchtime treats) is clearly a work of pure evil!

Although Jenny of Wisconsin might be able to deal with it, there are a lot of people out there who can’t or don’t want to.  It takes a lot of effort, seriously.  I’m an antisocial gamer – we know this – I like playing games on my own, I hate chat and I hate voice-chats even more.  I don’t want to listen to somebody’s inane drivel while I shoot stuff, regardless of the content.  I ditched the one MMO I played a long time ago because of the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic crap that occurred on a daily basis.  Not directed at me, just there – and no one really ever objected (if you did, you got the abuse turned on you).

My solution is not one that everyone can adopt.  I just avoid the social elements, even if it’s online team-based play like TF2, and I refuse to disclose any information about myself.  Generally, I am the wallpaper: I keep quiet and ignore chat.  This is mostly because I’m a misanthrope and do not care for being social, but partly it’s also because I know that a lot of people on chat are going to be dicks.  I just don’t understand why banter has to be offensive, even if it doesn’t go near questions of gender.

Taken from Kickstarter.com at 11:30am GMT, on 13/06/2012

But back to the specific point of misogyny in the gamingverse.  I mentioned the KickStarter from Feminist Frequency in May’s “Playing…” post and the woman behind it, Anita Sarkeesian, has been yet another figurehead victim of abuse.  She put her head over that parapet, so to speak, and has had it all but shot to smithereens.  Gladly, however, this isn’t going to stop her making those videos, nor has it stopped people pledging (when I last checked, she was on $87,000+ with 68 hours left to go).  But this sort of thing does make me want to adopt a superhero persona, fly all over the world, and stand in defence of these women.

I was going to say “brave women” just ther, but that, to me, gives too much credit to these scum-sucking parasites of the internet.  It shouldn’t have to be brave just to identify as female and like games.  FFS.

At least – if we’re to take anything positive away from this – this all-too-common abuse is being given more and more of a public face.  A site that BBC article mentions is Fat,  Ugly or Slutty (because that’s pretty much all you are if you’re a female gamer, apparently) where you can upload screengrabs of sexist abuse/harrasment.  So, if you can catch the abuse you receive, or see, in a screen grab or a recording, make it known!

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.

– Sarah Churchwell

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.

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

*

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

Amy Winehouse, for all the typically Machiavellian marketing behind her early development and signing, was an atypical star to launch, even before the drink, drugs, bisexuality, tattoos and self-harm and sprawling domestic disharmony on the streets of Camden set in. 2003 was a year of slickly manufactured, crowdpleasing pop anthems spawned by reality tv or established industry hit machines: Britney, Christina, Avril, Beyoncé, Sugababes, Rachel Stevens, Girls Aloud. In this climate, Winehouse’s debut Frank, an engagingly personal and subtly powerful blend of jazz, soul, dub and heavy drinking, stood out as an album of grit among gloss, accomplished and ambitious, recalling the eclectic and impeccably imperious style of Dinah Washington and Nina Simone.

Equally, despite her status as a product of the Sylvia Young and Brit stage schools, Winehouse was hardly manufactured, having been a genuinely talented singer, guitarist and songwriter from a young age. The lyrics she produced and her delivery of them were cool, critical and cynical – ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ is a punchily sung and scathing dismissal of the dominant gold-digging paradigm. Her definitive, self-mythologising single ‘Rehab’, despite its refrain’s predictable propensity to generate tasteless jokes and mawkish headlines in the wake of her death, is a staggering song of self-awareness, wiped clean of messy emoting or self-pity and resolutely swerving any courting of sorrow or sympathy. Its protagonist does not bewail her fate in the clasp of addiction but makes her refusal to be pathologised an active and empowering choice – ‘no, no, no’ means no. Like much of Winehouse’s material, the song addresses and analyses addiction, dependency, depression and the complexities of female independence with a wry, arch, clear-eyed and mocking wit that could have leavened the weight of many a confessional memoir.

To evaluate Winehouse’s career as a story of potential unfulfilled, as many obituaries are doing, is to ignore the quality of second album Back to Black, with its clutch of BRITs, Grammys and Ivor Novellos, as well as the sheer depth of its influence. Winehouse’s international success began a scramble by record companies to scrounge up similar eclectic and experimental female artists. It is perhaps unfortunate that all this process actually got us was an indistinguishable female-centred quirk-quake comprised of Little Pixie Roux and the Machine for Lashes, as well as current favourites Adele and Duffy – both well-behaved, clean and immaculately blue-eyed biters of a vintage musical style which Winehouse had almost singlehandedly reinvigorated. For all their undoubted technical ability, such singers purvey blandly perfect reproductions of retro soul, whereas Winehouse was able to inhabit past musical modes like she wore her Ronettes-inspired beehive, investing them with something contemporary and compelling through that awesome, syrupy, rolling contralto. Her aesthetic – glamorously grubby, leonine and Cleopatra-eyed – was similarly inimitable and atypical. Even Lady Gaga credited Winehouse with smoothing the path to mainstream success for other ‘strange girls’.

The tributes to Amy Winehouse clotting the front pages this past weekend reflect the other aspect of her fame: the purpose she served as media cipher. The narrative into which she was coralled – discovered, lauded, rewarded, exploited, drug-ravaged and wrung dry by the cynics and sycophants around her – is a traditional trajectory for women in the public eye, from Marilyn to Britney. Mixed in with the clichés of the demon-driven artist, Winehouse’s dedication to the life of a good-time girl provided an obvious temptation for the press to shoehorn the shapeless and slippery business of living into a rigid mould of Meaning, to make her a signifier of the plagues afflicting modern womanhood – not all of modern womanhood, of course, just those of us susceptible to the lure of urban independence and its giddy, glittering thrills.

There is an obvious irony in the fact that the media’s very concentration on her as a reliably scandalous page-filler embedded her in public consciousness as not an artist but a cautionary tale of misjudged relationships and worse-judged substance indulgence, eliciting a weird and volatile mixture of compassion and contempt. There was, too, a ghoulish and lascivious edge to public concern over Winehouse – as there was, back in the day, over Courtney Love and, latterly, Britney Spears – which is seldom present in attitudes to their male counterparts. The same organs which engorged themselves with pictures of Winehouse in her various stages of decline, distress and debauchery are continuing to objectify and sensationalise her as, inevitably, a ‘brilliant but troubled’ combination of tragic loss and dreadful warning. She deserves a better class of memorialist.

*

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

Amid calls for the video to be banned, it’s interesting to see how much of the outrage centres on the murder, rather than the rape. Granted, the shooting and its aftermath is shown far more explicitly than the hinted-at assault, but commentary such as that of media watchdog Paul Porter:

“‘Man Down’ is an inexcusable, shock-only, shoot-and-kill theme song. In my 30 years of viewing BET, I have never witnessed such a cold, calculated execution of murder in primetime…”

appears to be divorcing the shooting from its context, concentrating on Rihanna as the agent and perpetrator of a crime, rather than as the victim of one. This wilfully ignores one of the video’s central messages, which is the ease with which these roles can be merged.

Sex and violence, and sexual violence, as themes in art and entertainment are as old as art and entertainment themselves. To be flippant for a second: maybe it’s just the use of the word ‘Mama’, but the chorus of ‘Man Down’ put me in mind of that certain section of Bohemian Rhapsody where the narrator, having just killed a man, ruminates on how ‘life had just begun and now I’ve gone and thrown it all away’. And while I don’t think Freddie Mercury was ever actively described as a positive role model, neither was he castigated for encouraging cold-blooded cod-operatic executions among 1970s youth.

Is Rihanna coming in for particular criticism because of the publicity previously given to her real-life encounters with violence? Those of you following along at home will of course have noticed that she didn’t respond to her experience of assault by shooting Chris Brown on the concourse of Grand Central Station. Surely no one seriously believes ‘Man Down’ to be advocating that the victims of violence engage in violent reprisals – any more than that was true of Thelma & Louise, or Straw Dogs, or, to really stretch the analogy, Death and the Maiden? ‘Man Down’ is, on one level, a revenge fantasy which relies on the dramatic and the sensational to get its message across.

Roger Ebert wrote of Irréversible, whose backwards chronology ‘Man Down’ recalls, that the film’s structure makes it inherently moral – that by presenting the vengeance before the acts that inspire it, we are forced to process the vengeance first, and therefore think more deeply about its implications. Might the same apply to ‘Man Down’? Throughout the lyrics and video, the song’s protagonist may contextualise and explain her actions, but she’s not free of regret, she isn’t gleeful or exultant, and she acknowledges her actions as a crime with implications for the rest of her life. She calls herself a ‘criminal’ and reflects that her rapist and victim was ‘somebody’s son’. The narrative doesn’t glorify murder, but it recognises that we live in a world where this kind of fantasy-vigilante approach might often seem more accessible and plausible than relying for justice on the state or the police.

Art and entertainment don’t exist in a vacuum. Art will be asked to justify itself, particularly when it touches on themes that are an everyday reality for many of us and which feed into issues like the space which women, particularly women of colour, have to express themselves, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes versus the impetus, the desire, and perhaps the moral duty, to openly discuss the conditions under which we live.

The complex intersections of race and gender hardly lend themselves to being cleared up in the confines of a blog post, but ‘Man Down’ has sparked plenty of engaged and informative discussion online – at Crunk Feminist, The Beautiful Struggler, and Hello Beautiful for starters. I’m just glad debate is happening and that we have a mainstream artist who doesn’t shy away from instigating it.

*

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

“The whole message with [Adele] is that it’s just music, it’s just really good music,” said Russell. “There is nothing else. There are no gimmicks, no selling of sexuality. I think in the American market, particularly, they have come to the conclusion that is what you have to do.”

The main reason why Russell’s claims about Adele should be regarded with scepticism is that Russell is the head of Adele’s record label. Even leaving aside such vested interests, his argument that she represents some kind of paradigm shift has been ably deconstructed here by Laura Snapes.

The Guardian article linked to above has a few frustrating facets of its own. I’m not sure why Rihanna’s ‘S&M’ should be hoicked in to illustrate Russell’s point: there’s a difference between having a sexualised image – usually, when it’s the subject of criticism, one that’s been externally imposed on an artist – and singing about sex and sexuality. Especially when ‘S&M’ is a more complex song than that framework allows for – arguably one in which Rihanna presents non-mainstream sexuality in terms of female agency. Finally, the idea of good-girl, sexless Adele vs bad-girl, sexualised Rihanna is a false dichotomy with problems in abundance.

Adele’s own image is hardly free of contrivance, harking back as it does to the blue-eyed soul divas of the 1960s – classily sexualised, perhaps, but sexualised nonetheless. In her chosen brand of popular music, a degree of sex in your self-presentation is, as Russell correctly identifies, inextricably linked to commercial success. It’s even arguable, unfortunately, that it’s Adele’s very distance from the currently acceptable aesthetic norms of her genre that has necessitated she be marketed with a different, ‘desexualised’ focus. Had Adele possessed her own voice but the body of, oh, let’s say Katy Perry, would her image have been sexed-up business as usual?

Russell is taking issue, of course, not with the marketing and self-presentation of all women in music, but with a particular branch of commercial pop, and the marketing therein of female artists by predominantly male management, which was ever thus. If his comments do kickstart a new way of measuring the money-making potential of women in music, then great, but it’s going to be an uphill struggle in view of the constant and increasing pressures on female performers – as well as male – to conform to a blandly beautiful industry standard.

Is Adele’s refusal to bow to that standard, as Russell claims, as radical today as the Prodigy were in the early 1990s? Let’s face it, mainstream acts are so limp and colourless right now, and popular culture so devoid of ideas, experiments and imagination, that yeah, it probably is. Never mind that the Prodigy were highly politicised and engaged with a wider oppositional culture, while Adele is outspoken in bemoaning her tax burden.

While no one can begrudge Adele her success, or deny that it’s refreshing to witness, the fact that she can be said to occupy a radical position is more an indictment of contemporary music than it is a compliment to her. The most positive thing about Russell’s remarks is the opportunity they offer to reiterate a greater truth: that commercial profit-driven pap purely designed to generate a profit is more than socio-culturally damaging for women, it’s dull.

*

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.
– Jacqueline Susann, after reading Portnoy’s Complaint

Last week was a busy week in the book world. Sainsburys found itself anointed Bookseller of the Year to the chagrin of actual booksellers, the beleaguered Waterstones chain was saved from the asset-stripping abyss, and the Man Booker International Prize went to the veteran novelist Philip Roth. The last of these events made the biggest splash in the mainstream press, due to the consequent resignation in protest from the judging panel of Carmen Callil, the redoubtable founder of Virago Press, who – cue shock, horror, and the frantic ordering by booksellers of Roth’s backlist – disparaged Roth as a writer and disputed his worthiness to win.

“Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.”
– Carmen Callil: Why I quit the Man Booker International panel

The criticism traditionally levelled at the Roth canon is that it mines a deep seam of misogyny. Although Callil was quick to quash any conjecture that her decision to dish Roth was influenced by feminist considerations, emphasising rather her concerns over awarding the prize to yet another North American novelist, this didn’t prevent the Telegraph reporting the affair under the headline ‘Feminist Judge Resigns…’, nor the majority of reports stressing her feminist credentials – or taint, perhaps – as head of Virago. Although Callil argues that her objections to Roth transcend his portrayal of women, much of the subsequent debate centred on the misogynist-or-not nature of Roth’s writing. Several female authors appear for the prosecution towards the end of this piece, while Linda Grant and Karen Stabiner have previously argued for a more nuanced perspective.

What interested me about the whole farrago, apart from the unbecoming glee with which several respondents leapt upon Callil’s admittedly oddly graphic description of her reaction to Roth’s writing (‘[He] goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.‘), was how quickly comments to many of the pieces above dived into questions of whether Roth, with his ‘priapic’ preoccupations and thematic concentration on the ups and downs of male sexuality, was just too ‘male’ a writer for Callil’s tastes and, by extension, for those of female readers as a whole. Robert McCrum in the Observer wrote of Callil:

Her expertise is as an ebullient and pioneering feminist publisher from the 1970s. It’s hardly a surprise that she should find herself unresponsive to Roth’s lifelong subject: the adventures of the ordinary sexual (American) man.

Female readers, and especially those with feminist sensibilities, so the argument seems to run, cannot be expected to appreciate or enjoy writing by men which concentrates on the male experience. Any criticisms they might raise of such writing, based on personal evaluations of its quality, technique, or aesthetic appeal, rather than its content, can therefore be instantly dismissed because, well, you were never going to like it anyway, were you. It’s not for you. Apart from anything else, this assertion is unsound: the articles above and elsewhere illustrate that many women do enjoy and appreciate writing by Roth and his contentious ilk – Updike, Amis, Easton Ellis – and it is no less the case that many male readers really don’t. Like the comparable myths about male and female approaches to music and music writing, the suggestion that writers, and readers, can be neatly divided on the basis of gender, and their responses to art explained away accordingly, is as bizarre and unhelpful as it is frustratingly persistent.

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine

No. It’s: “Will it make me look hotter when I step out of it outside a bar or restaurant?”

Yes, the main thing that will make a woman decide on a particular car is how ‘hot’ she feels in it. Telegraph writer Neil Lyndon – bemoaning the fact that his wife’s friend opted for a car she liked and he deemed useless – goes on to tell us all about the new Citroën DS3, decorated by graphic artist Orla Kiely. Now you really will be able to match your car to your handbag. Isn’t that snazzy, girls? All your tricksy car decisions solved by this one simple, fashionable step!

The new Citroën DS3 - if I use the Orla Kiely design, can I have this racing version? Image (c) CarsRoute.com

According to Lyndon, his wife’s divorced friend ignored all sensible, practical considerations when making her car choice, and simply went for a pretty French hatchback. Because that’s what women do, of course: we go for the pretty option despite it possibly being on fire.

The thing is – and this will come as no surprise to those familiar with his prior work – Lyndon is talking complete twaddle. According to AutoEbid.com’s Help Me Choose a New Car function, you can choose from six factors when trying to find the perfect car for you. They are: Comfort, Styling, Handling, Depreciation, Economy, and Safety. The price is a liming criterion: the thing that helps you to narrow your choice, rather than the main principle of selection. In fact, unless you are going into the market with an extremely limited amount of money, the cost of the car will only ever help you to select a class, or possibly a financing option. Put it another way: no one will switch from a brand-new Fiat 500 to a second-hand Volvo XC90, even though both can be had for roughly £10k.

So how do people choose cars, then, if it’s not the price?

1. First and foremost, functionality. What are you going to use the car for? If you have five children that will need running to school every morning, you will probably end up with that Volvo. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an urban runabout, something small and easy to park is probably better.

2. Up there as a consideration is styling: you want it to look good. In fact, certain TV shows have gone so far as to have an entire segment over whether a car is ‘cool’ or not. The guide there, by the way, is whether a cool person would drive it. Perhaps X & Y Communications neglected to canvas the Top Gear audience in their research.

3. The last, all encompassing question is: I live with it? This includes things like reliability, fuel economy, ability to park it in London, whether the suspension will destroy your spine the first time you drive over road-humps.

The ‘price’ question helps to narrow your options, and, on occasion, to disabuse you of the notion that you really could afford to buy a supercar if you sell the house and both kidneys.

The key question Lyndon ignored was what his wife’s friend wanted in a car: she wanted a cute little urban runabout that would cheer her up in the mornings. Put simply, she wanted that ‘new car’ feeling: you’ve chosen well, your car looks good, and you love it more than it is natural to love an inanimate object. If she was a man lovingly polishing his vintage (decrepit) Rolls, Lyndon would have smiled indulgently.

What Lyndon is bemoaning is not women’s tendency to pick cars that make them look good – we all do that. No one has ever looked at a car and thought, “sure, it’s beautiful, but given the choice I’d go for the ugly, uncomfortable one on the left.”  Our budgets and priorities may vary, but the intent remains the same. You buy the thing that makes you feel happy when you’re inside it. Lyndon seems to have forgotten that, or have momentarily blanked out all car adverts, ever. It’s such an established cliché that car makers can now produce meta-tastic pastiches of previous ads and we lap it up. Check out this Volvo V60 “How to make a sexy car advert” clip:

When you sell a lifestyle, of course you’re going to sell a cool, stylish one. Only a fool would try to market a boring car for boring people.

I'm told it has great fuel economy. Image (c) NewCarNet

Of course, that’s really the thing Lyndon is taking an issue with. He wanted his wife’s friend to go away and make a list of her requirements, and bring back the top three cars that fulfilled them. He would then counsel her to make the reasoned, practical decision. She wanted to buy a cool hatchback following a messy divorce. The thing is, women going through messy divorces are not meant to want cool hatchbacks. They’re not meant to want anything funky or stylish. They should be worried about making ends meet, and where the rent is coming from, and how they’re going to get to work now that their ex-husband has custody of the car. No divorced woman should want to look or feel attractive, and she certainly shouldn’t be be gallivanting around bars or restaurants. I could choose this point to make a catty comment about how Lyndon left his wife for another woman, published a book railing against the “universal dominance of feminism” and has since been struggling to rebuild his career.

Lyndon’s article reveals nothing about gender or, indeed, about car choice (and I highly doubt the odious Mr Lyndon chose his own car based on a set of requirements and flowcharts). All it shows us is how deep his prejudices still lie: a woman who is hard up and urgently needs a car should not, in Lyndon’s world, get to make that sort of choice. Having asked his advice, she should have acknowledged his superiority and allowed him to select one for her. After all, her preference for a “chic little French-made hatchback” instantly indicated to him that she must not have the know-how to do it herself.

And as for the Citroën DS3, the target of Lyndon’s ire: well, it’s not doing too badly, despite Lyndon’s contempt. It’s just been named Top Gear Magazine‘s 2010 Car of the Year.

M

MARRIAGE

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2.24

So begins marriage. In this day and age, most people think of such ‘cleaving’ as kinda cute, an emotional commitment “’til death do us part”; and indeed the union matrimony represents (‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh’) begins with the word’s Latin ancestor, the double-gendered maritus / marita (= ‘husband / wife’). Ever-efficient, the Romans join husband and wife in one word, giving us, in miniature, marriage’s first definition: ‘the relation between married persons; wedlock’.

Ooh little darlin’…

I do... Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. Image from http://www.halloweenweb.co.uk/

But before all our newfangled post-Romantic notions of individualism, marriage was much less dewy-eyed. It required nothing more than parental consent, and its functions were social, religious and legal. Firstly, it acknowledged a sexual relationship and those children born within it, thus easing the financial burden of bastard upkeep on society and oiling the cogs of inheritance. Secondly, it was a Holy Sacrament, an institution to prevent sin, though it did not sanction guilt-free sex – too much fun with your wife, and it became adultery (= ‘pollution of the marriage bed’).

Finally – then as now – marriage linked families, dynasties, and countries together ‘in-law’, in a way that could be personal, symbolic, or world-changing: new money meeting impoverished aristocracy; the Venetian Doge annually ‘marrying’ the sea; Catherine of Braganza bringing England £300,000, Bombay and Tangier as her dowry. In extension, it helped negotiate the legal exchange of worldly goods, including a dower for the bride should she survive her groom, inheritance for the children, and the resolution of all money matters under the auspices of the pater familias. So it was impossible for a wife to run up debt, to own property, or, in any sense, to exist independently of her husband. In consequence, marriage became the Holy Grail for 99.9% of young women, who dreaded remaining financially dependent on rich relations or married sisters should the marriage-market reject them (as it did, if you were the wrong side of one in three aristocratic women).

…if U ain’t busy for the next 7 years…

Phew. In its second definition marriage takes up the legal challenge, becoming ‘the action, or act, of marrying; the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’.

Dearly Beloved... Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin.

The non-specifics here are no accident: to the irritation of the early modern church, ‘contract marriages’ and Dodgy Marriage more generally (Scotch Marriages or Fleet Marriages) endured for centuries before the Marriage Act of 1753 put paid to such shenanigans and demanded a public service or none at all. Previously, ‘the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’ could be an exchange of bent or halved coins, the presentation of a ring, or a declaration (‘I make you my wife’). There were certain caveats to this last, of course – you had to use the present tense (no conditionals), unless you used the future and then tumbled into bed: present consummation is present consent.

All very neat, in theory, although such marriages generally took place on the hoof between impetuous couples and only became of real significance once the bride fell pregnant or one or both of the parties got into difficulties. Then you get into semantics: what does ‘will’ mean, exactly? It’s an uncooperative word, conflating what you ‘want’ and what you ‘will do’. Church courts agreed, and many of those marriages that were challenged were dissolved, with an inevitably skewed impact on the would-be wife.

So marriage is as much about speech and silence as ‘cleaving’: moreover, much of its value depends on the weight society gives how you live (today, you can lose your state benefits if you ‘live with another person as if you are married‘). It also creates interesting problems if you are physically silenced before you can assert your consent (as happens in Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed), or if your marriage is explosively interrupted, as in Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun. Conversely, Renaissance actors wondered what God thought about marriages carried out on stage as part of a performance: valid or not? Why not? This whole idea is, in essence, the premise of Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2004), where nobody questions the legality of Victor’s (clearly accidental) declaration to the bride of the title, despite trying every other conceivable method to get him out of it.

…Let’s pretend we’re married and go all night.

The word marriage reflects this in a now-obsolete sense, as ‘intimate union’, antonymic to virginity. And here I nearly tripped up on another little tradition: breach of promise, a common law tort allowing a partner to sue their long-fled lover for damages based on the impact of such ‘intimate union’ but also on the value of language – ‘Does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you die? Well you’re still alive…’

This tort was overwhelmingly used by women, although originally payable to the father of a seduced girl, who had lost ‘services’ (make me a cuppa, love) because of her pregnancy. Later on, it became a means of quantifying waste of time, reputation and trousseau-money in a marriage market competitive enough that such things mattered. Although the tort was abolished in the UK in 1970, a version is still in use elsewhere: a jilted woman in Chicago is currently suing her fiance for the costs of her cancelled wedding, and ’emotional distress’. Whether or not she will succeed is unclear, but her early-modern precursors inevitably triumphed:

See my interesting client
Victim of a heartless wile!
See the traitor all defiant ,
Wears a supercilious smile!
Sweetly smiled my client on him
Coyly wooed and gently won him….

W.S. Gilbert, Trial By Jury (1875)

Trial By Jury explains why the tort was so useful to jilted women, but also why it declined: by 1875 female financial options were expanding enough to change the public perception of such cases from ‘poor innocent maid vs. base seducer’ to ‘I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger…’ So what began as a way to compensate gender inequality itself ended as a vehicle for misogyny, with stories of pretty girls luring men in and then threatening to do the legal equivalent of ‘thcreaming and thcreaming until i’m thick‘. What God has joined, let no man put asunder.

Further Reading:

• Check out Lawrence Stone’s The Road To Divorce: England 1530-1987, which tells you everything you need to know about everything.

• Sadly finished now, but keep an eye out for Amanda Vickery’s At Home With The Georgians, should it ever return to TV.

NEXT WEEK: N is for Nanny