Weather With You

My story of this name appears with the good folks at HCE Review.

And over at Shiny, I’ve (unexpectedly) turned royal correspondent to review Craig Brown’s fabulous biography of Princess Margaret.

Let The Art Monsters Play

There’s a Paris Review piece I’ve seen circulating on newsletters and social media. I had a read of it today. The greater part of Claire Dederer’s essay was unfortunately lost on me as I’m not a film guy and haven’t seen any Woody Allen films – I say unfortunately because Dederer wrestles at such length with the question: can you enjoy Woody Allen films while aware of his personal reprehensibility? Dederer says: ‘Look, I don’t get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It’s a rare pleasure. And I’m supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen misbehaved? It hardly seems fair.’

She goes through it for paragraphs – her feelings about the movies, her experiences of watching the movies at different points in her life, arguments with friends about the movies. She includes a dialogue with a male friend about the film Manhattan:

‘You’re just thinking about Soon-Yi—you’re letting that color the movie. I thought you were better than that.’

‘I think it’s creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi.’

‘Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics.’

Reading all this, it strikes me that this is a conversation about ‘high art’. Can you imagine this conversation about O J Simpson, R Kelly, Gary Glitter? (‘Get over it. You really need to judge Happy People/U Saved Me on its aesthetics.’) Dederer writes: ‘I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.’

Then Dederer turns her focus inward:

Look at all the awful things I haven’t done. Maybe I’m not a monster.

But here’s a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.

Why does it make Dederer monstrous? Because ‘A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one.’

She goes on to say this:

When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left untelephoned, spousal sex unhad. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.

Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of a real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness—that of the artist who completes her work.

I recently read What’s There is There, the new anthology of Norman Geras’s writing. If you’ve never heard of the professor and blogger, this is a good introductory collection, with essays and thoughts on war, terrorism, compassion, and literature. Geras spent a lot of his life writing about the duty to help others versus personal self interest. In a blog post titled ‘Why does football matter?’ he argues that:

Even if one thinks – as I do – that we have obligations as human beings to others in grave need, difficulty or danger, to demand of people that they give all of their time and attention to such things amounts to demanding of them that they sacrifice the whole part of their lives which might otherwise be given to pursuing their own enjoyments and their own happiness. That would be an exorbitant expectation.

Sure, Dederer’s own duties as she writes them are more local. And I want to say: ‘Claire! Jesus! Give yourself a break!’ A life comprised of nothing except responsibility would be a life half lived – and it’s my view that we make mistakes, and cause more trouble down the line, when we overcommit ourselves and take on more responsibility than we want and can handle. Everyone needs time out – and if every time out, moment of solitude or diversion, is selfish, then so be it. Ask the golf widow.

As Geras also said: ‘Football matters to those to whom it does matter just in the way that, for others, ballet, music, walking in the countryside, literature, movies and gardening matter – in the way, indeed, that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness matter.’

We know that evil men leveraged their talent into positions of power where they could exploit others. Should that become a barrier or impediment for the exercise of your own talent, and pleasure derived? Hell no. There’s no reason to deny yourself a moment of doing something you like and are good at. The art monsters need to be let out of the closet every once in a while, and allowed to play in the fields.

On Sin, Passivity, Aggression

A few years ago a local ideas festival in my city held a panel debate called ‘Has lad culture gone too far?’ This innocuous title turned out to be misleading – I suspect that the event had been organised by a fringe libertarian group to publicise its own agenda and that most of the audience (and the festival organisers) weren’t aware of that. I wandered down out of curiosity. True to form, there was a local councillor and a sexual violence support worker for balance, but the panel was dominated by a couple of men who pushed heavy politicised grievances against the feminist movement – portrayed as a network of hysterics trying to police free speech and behaviour. As the evening dragged on, the atmosphere inside the community hall grew pricklier. I heckled. Other people heckled. Women walked out of the hall, visibly shaken with anger.

That night came back to me as I followed the sexual assault and harassment scandal of the past few weeks. It feels like a turning point, but then Savile and the celeb scandals felt like a turning point and I still remember people at the time, with the reflexive bitterness that passes for cynicism in this country, saying that it was all a ‘witchhunt’, a ‘bandwagon’, that accusers were ‘attention seeking’ and all of this. What I learned though, was that the real personal liberty at the core of it all is physical autonomy. You have nothing without it. The struggle for physical autonomy was a significant part of anti slavery and torture movements, it has been written into international law and is the reason we have courts and prisons. Argue against feminism all you want, but if you think women should just put up with being groped, hassled and followed around, as a matter of course, then you are no kind of liberal or libertarian. Don’t pretend you are talking out of good faith.

I also wonder about the proposed safeguards to this kind of thing. Political correspondents cry ‘If only Parliament had a proper HR department’ without considering that, outside the Westminster village, HR is very much part of the problem. Things get covered up, because ‘he’s a good manager, he’s been with us 37 years, he will be unioned up, the papers might get involved and it’s all too difficult.’ Lashing together some kind of regulatory body for the HoC won’t change anything. There’s a reason these things happen to large sclerotic semi accountable organisations, it is because people like their pay scales, their flexi and their little games – any serious reform that threatens this will be quietly tabled forever. Harvey Weinstein is Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Savile is Jimmy Savile, he’s been with us Xlight years… papers might get involved… too difficult…

I can, off the top of my head, think of reasonable safeguards that could minimise sexual harassment in workplaces. My ideas may well have all kinds of flaws and complications, they may have already been implemented with problems arising, but I use this blog to blue sky. Don’t worry, I don’t want segregated spaces or speech codes – these are just simple proposals which would in my view be good for workers’ rights anyway.

1) Ensure a reasonable gender ratio in offices or on projects – because, obviously, men are unlikely to harass women if there are other women around

2) Introduce entry-level representation at strategy/board level and ensure that a reasonable proportion of reps are women. A senior exec is less likely to harass a woman employee if he knows he’ll be facing that employee at a strategy meeting the next day.

3) Build protections into employment law that allow employees to discuss workplace experiences outside the workplace – including on social media. As long as data protection is not breached, there’s no reason people should not be able to discuss work matters on Facebook or in the pub. The workplace omerta must be broken.

Of course these would only be structural changes and would not address social misogyny and the established level of entitlement that an alarming number of men seem to have. But, if a sense of entitlement can lead to evils, so can humility. Part of the reason that predatory men get away with what they do, is because we are all conditioned to an extent into passivity – to accept what is, manage your expectations, keep your head down and say nothing. This stuff is drummed into you at a young age and reinforced in adulthood by workplace conditionality, class etiquette, credit and debt, libel courts and half a hundred other things. Even the advice we give to prevent sexual assaults – plan your night, don’t walk home alone, stick to main roads – is commonsensical but reinforces that sense of passivity.

The problem is us, Jonathan Freedland writes today, and also says that ‘I suspect most of us have been interrogating our own past or present conduct in the workplace, wondering if we’ve been getting it wrong. We all need to make that effort, and to make it in good faith.’ And I agree – a moral inventory of this kind is useful, and necessary. But we can all try in our lives to be more proactive, when it counts, and less passive. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. The courageous stories and reportage on this subject over the last few weeks is hopefully just the beginning of how.