Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Body aspiration oddness

I saw this little story on the BBC website the other day

and I thought to myself: what the actual fuck?

I suppose sometimes it's easy to forget what an easy ride you have if you happen to be in possession, as I am thanks to a 50-50 chance 35 years ago, of a dangly, wrinkly, slightly furry triumverate of fun-sized objects in the groinal region. That does make a lot of things very different - I know I recently said that I was annoyed at being told that I didn't realise just how good I had it, and by and large I stand by that, but things like this remind me just how fortunate you are if you're a chap.

Unlike actresses America Ferrara (who plays Ugly Betty) and Britain's Kate Winslet, Ms Hendricks has kept her full figure, adds McNamara, who last week reviewed Mad Men Series 4.

That figure is reportedly in possession of dimensions around 36-32-36 - although some reports suggest 38-32-38 - and her breasts variously described as a C or D cup.

Honestly, who gives a shit? Here's an attractive-looking actor. I mean, good for her, but so what? I assume the shape she has is down to the fact she is in possession of her skeleton, her organs, her flesh, and whatever she eats and exercises, as well as some bits and bobs in the genetic makeup, and whatever. For anyone else to want to look like that, or aspire to look like that, is of course rather unrealistic, given that it's an entirely different human being. We can't aspire to be tall once we've stopped growing; we can't aspire to be shorter, either, even though I daresay lots of people would like to be.

But the thing that gets me is the obsession with dress sizes, tit sizes, every kind of size, the measurements of perfection, the bed of Procrustes. Can you imagine a male actor being described in such borderline creepy terms of his inside leg, his waist measurement, the size of his arse, how much his balls dangle in his trousers, anything like that? Sure, it happens every now and then. But it's the regularity with which women actors are judged like this that makes it obvious who's really being looked at.

I often point and laugh at this kind of thing in the Mail (e.g. "Anorexia's bad, but look at this fat cow!"), and it's more obvious still in those garishly coloured tat-palaces of magazines that you see littering dentists' waiting rooms and news-stands up and down the country. You know the kind of tacky awfulness I'm on about, like the psychic powers of Closer magazine. But I don't know, it seems to be almost everywhere.

I know some might say that the obsession with weight and body size isn't something that the magazines and the media created, and that they're merely reflecting something that's gone on for years. I suppose there's an element of that, but I'm not entirely convinced by that argument. And others might say that it's right for people to want there to be a 'healthy' ideal body shape, not too fat and not too thin, that everyone should think is 'normal', where people are less at risk of getting diabetes, for example, or damaging their health by not eating enough. I understand that too, but I don't think that's what's going on either.

And I know, too, that it's easy to dismiss those tacky women's mags as being a bit like the Beano or something, and beneath worrying about. But I think that's wrong as well - no point looking down our nose and saying it's somehow exempt from criticism by dint of being so bloody awful. The thing is, why is it even being talked about? Why does it even matter? Do you think if some male minister said men should look more like footballers and less like rugby players it would get the same sort of attention? I can't help but think in the negative.

Anyway, in answer to the question, I don't see anything right or wrong with Christina Hendricks. I've never seen the programme so I don't know whether she's any good in it or not, but I don't suddenly think oh my god, so this is what women should look like now, an hourglass instead of a pear, or an apple, or whatever the hell else is in fashion this week. She is what she is because she is what she is. Which kind of goes for the rest of us as well. But I just think there's a difference about the way these things are presented: with women it seems to be more about body aspiration - wanting to change your shape to look like someone else, or something else, or some ideal - whereas with men it's more like, well, that'd be nice.

It's nowhere near the same if you're a bloke. Sure, there's the muscly guy on the front cover of Men's Health (but I've always thought that was the kind of mag that closeted guys would reach for instead of GT. Could be wrong, but there you go) or something like that, but it's less mainstream; men's mags generally have pictures of women on the front, not other men, and while there's the odd bit and piece about diets and trying to develop that six-pack by the time you get to the beach, it's somehow less serious. I even saw some horrifically surgical kind of corsetry for men when I was in M&S the other day, it was a terrible sight. I think I'd rather look like a darts player than some bloke squeezing himself into a corset, and luckily enough there isn't the same kind of pressure on me to do so, or at least that's my opinion anyway.

I suppose the Hendricks stuff comes from a good place - the idea that 'real women' look different from a lot of people you see in photoshoots and on the TV. Maybe somehow it's seen as adjusting a distorted perception. But everyone's 'real'. Some people are tall and willowy, and perfectly happy and healthy and attractive that way; some are shorter, or wider, or more curvy, or whatever, and just as great, but it doesn't make anyone better than anyone else, or more desirable, or anything. It just makes people the shape and size they are. I suppose we'd all like to be a bit more perfect, but I'd like to be a bloody astronaut. It ain't going to happen. Luckily, I don't have magazines, TV, radio and websites telling me I should be an astronaut. The pressure's off. Maybe that's how good it is to be male.

So what is it worth aspiring to? While I perfectly understand why anyone would want to aspire to be Christina Hendricks, or might like to look that way, or think they should be that way, or think that if they were that way then things might be better, all I aspire to is just to be in a life where I don't have to be beaten down and crushed by the things I aspire to but can't ever achieve. As Ian Dury said "All I want for my birthday is another birthday". I just think that is easier if you're a man.

Ah, but… oh, er…

Simple enough story in the papers today. It's quite obviously the case that workers can't be forced to retire after 65.

NOW THE RIGHT TO WORK PAST 65. Simple, really.

Except:

WORKERS CAN BE FORCED OUT AT 65. Nyurgh-nyurgh-nyer-nyer-nyurgh.

Oh, who knows which one is right? Who even cares? For once, I suppose, at least it's somehow comforting to know they can't both be wrong. Or maybe they can. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between. Maybe they don't give a shit. Maybe they both looked at the same piece of information and though: well, let's tell it like this. Maybe the Mail found out something the Express didn't. Maybe the Express found out what the Mail was doing, and decided to stick two fingers up to it. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe no-one cares at all. Maybe if you're 65 and approaching enforced retirement / a happy career of not being forced to quit, you've got more on your mind than spending nearly a quid of your hard-earned money getting two pretty much contradictory views of exactly the same thing.

Still, at least it's not about immigration. Unless they've managed to weave that in there somewhere. HARD-WORKING PENSIONERS NOT ALLOWED TO CARRY ON WORKING TILL THEY'RE DEAD / FORCED TO KEEP ON WORKING JUST TO KEEP THE BOILER RUNNING, AND IT'S ALL BECAUSE WE'RE GIVING HANDOUTS TO SPONGEING SWARTHY TYPES, YOU KNOW WHAT I'M ON ABOUT, AND THEY GET FREE HOUSES AND EVERYTHING, SOMEONE TOLD ME. Or something like that.

I don't know if these contradictory front pages - with a bonus Cheryl Cole and intrusion into family death for a bit of fun - make them look good, or bad. I don't really mind - so long as it's bad. I'm guessing it is bad, because it usually is.

Why it’s worth getting worked up

This is a guest post. Chris Spann (Spann to his friends) is a social media yuppy with too much rage and not enough friends. When he's not working for the man in the day, he's complaining bitterly about the media (amongst other things) over at Spann's Blog.

As you may (but probably don't) know, I run a blog. In that blog, amongst other things, I blog about the media, and bitch about all the things that guys like Anton, Tabloidwatch, UponNothing/Angry Mob and 5CC do as well - In fact, it was a post on this here site (Well, the old blogspot one, to be precise) that inspired me to start my own little outpost on the media fuckfield. You see, before reading Anton's post on the Jan Moir shitstorm from last year, I didn't realise just how poor the papers in this country could (quite regularly) be. I knew they twisted stories to fit their agendas, sure; but until reading the afore mentioned sites, I never realised just how big a group of lying, two-faced, sadistic bastards they could be, who would damn anyone with a moment's notice and if they could make the matter in question push their readers respective rage buttons (which were usually issues inflated by the papers themselves), then all the better.

I then realised with some horror that these blogs were being updated multiple times in a day, by men with jobs and who weren't doing this for money or for any sort of other tangible gain, but who could still rustle up a better journalistic enquiry than the people paid to spume this shit into people's homes via the internet and the printed press; a tiny voice screaming against the sea of lies and spin that are the papers who write this dreck, well aware that they are not likely to be held responsible for their words because they're so heavily involved in the organisation that's supposed to keep them in check. I don't claim to be as loud a part of that voice (I don't blog often enough, or have as many readers, just to name two reasons), but around November last year I decided to start shouting back as well. In that time, I watched the Daily Mail shit itself into a frenzy over the election, desperately slating anyone who looked like they stood even an outside chance of succeeding (Culminating in a fucking atrocious attack on Nick Clegg over an article he wrote years ago), the Star continue to simply make shit up in order to have something to stick on their front page, and a whole catalog of other events that have made me despair for humanity - and almost pity the people who read those words and took them at face value - After all, "the papers aren't allowed to lie", as somebody told me once.

Anyway, I was chatting to a friend recently, who mentioned that he'd recently read one of my posts, and said that he wished that he had both the time and the inclination to run a blog like the ones mentioned, but felt that he wouldn't be able to contribute in a meaningful way without simply resorting to posting "OH FOR FUCKS SAKE, WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT?" over and over again until his fingers were worn to dust and the tears of blood had soaked into the floorboards of his house, and this got me thinking: You don't need to write about this shit to contribute. The fact that you're here now reading this means that you're contributing. If you've ever questioned something you've read in the news, you're contributing. The fact is, if you have a mind inquisitive enough to simply say "wait a second, this doesn't seem right", or an instinct sharp enough to see that what's written on the page in front of you might not neccesarily be black and white (so to speak), you are adding to a group of voices that's rallying against the bollocks pushed down our throat daily.

If you hear people in work discussing immigration, or broken Britain, or welfare culture, and you stand up to them and attempt to explain that what they've seen online might not neccesarily be true, you're helping again. Even if you don't succeed in changing their minds (As Politics, like religion, is a pointless argument; it's simply two people who know they're right trying to convince the other that they're wrong), by simply trying, you've done your bit. Just because you don't have the ego to think that other people would be interested in reading a thousand words of yours on a subject, or you don't have the time to check whether a story is missing out important facts that might alter it, do not think you're not part of the resistance (And I'm well aware of how wanky that sounds), because the fact that if you at least want to do those things, you're one more person who hasn't slipped into the trap of simply salivating with rage every time the racism bell is rang in the papers like one of Pavlov's dogs eager to stick your snout into another platter of meaningless guff with a bias so lopsided that it could shift the world on it's axis.

There's a line in a song by the band Flobots (Who you should definitely check out) that says "There is a war going on for your mind. If you are thinking, you are winning", and I believe that this is entirely the case. I'm not saying the media is always wrong; I'm just saying that you should always check out a story further before you commit to being worked up into a spittle-flecked frenzy about it, and by simply being here and reading any of the blogs mentioned, you're helping us take a step closer to the time where offices won't be full of talk about "Hey, they're making a game about Raoul Moat", or "Fucking Muslims, stealing our toilets", and frankly the sooner we get there, the better.

The media is a powerful part of society, and unfortunately we're not yet at the stage where the part of society that can see past them is big enough to be able to truly make a difference, but do not think that if you're not writing about it you're not making a difference. At the end of the day, the words written by us bloggers probably reach a few thousand people at best, while the papers and their online equivalents are seen by millions of eyes every day, so the people writing these blogs are probably making no greater a contribution than you are by simply seeing around the lies and trying to help people see the truth behind the churnalism. We're already in a position where a staggering proportion of society's thoughts are controlled by the media, and by not being part of that, YOU ARE HELPING.

Now, it's 4am and I'm out of my tree on energy drinks; it's time for bed.

Back to work

It's always a struggle, getting back to work after being away.

You head off, full of expectation, your case neatly packed, through the tedium of airport searches and clanging grey airport terminals with their uncomfortable, functional furniture on which a thousand thousand arses have previously sat and farted; you arrive; you immerse yourself in another land, another climate, another place, another way of behaving that's detached from a world of commuting, or sitting in a bleak, draughty office with just the whirr of the air-conditioning to provide some kind of music; your spirits might soar as you imagine everything you could do when you return home; then you sit at a plane window, overlooking clouds, or tiny villages and roads, or at a train window, watching "someone running up to bowl"; and you imagine the world is full of possibilities.

Away, somewhere else, everything is alien but not frightening; a holiday is a place of comfort and security, but escape, novelty, strangeness that you can paddle in.

You can feel the sea foaming over your bare feet and the sand oozing between your toes; you can see the things you've only seen photographs of, and now you're looking at them with your own eyes.

You can feel the sun on your back, the warmth around, different sounds, music, see the moon in the sky, but somehow it looks different here.

Then, from that world, you return to the ordinary world, the mundane, the familiar. As you return, the possibilities decrease.

You could be going anywhere, then you could be going anywhere in the country you live, then anywhere in your town, then anywhere in your street, then, all of a sudden, nowhere except the place you always end up returning to - the place you forgot about, or remembered, while you were away, but the place that you weren't for so long, and now you are again, and everything returns.

Not just the sense of cosiness or predictability that you might feel comfortable with when you're in that place you call home, but all those feelings too, all those emotions that you managed to escape for a little while, when you were somewhere else, when you were someone else maybe, when everything seemed possible, when you dreamed a little more than usual.

The walls begin to close in. Only a few things are possible. Those possibilities aren't endless after all; they're fairly stiffly limited, and you've got to go back to the same places, and do the same things, where you always go, and you always do.

Sitting in the office. The overly bright strip lighting causing shadows everywhere, bouncing off the piles of papers. Everything as it was. Nothing changed. You've missed nothing. You are not irreplaceable. Things didn't fall apart while you were away. No-one really missed you very much, and nothing really happened - just the same rearrangement of the same set of tasks, just with your assignments spread around other people, who had to work harder because you didn't want to be there. You're not really the lynchpin at all, and you never will be. Because this is you, and you're not really ever going to be anything - not here, not anywhere, probably not in any way you want to be. You're pretty much expendable, and that's never going to change. Keep your head down and just keep going. It's not going to change, any time soon, or any time at all, and there's nothing you can do about it. You're lucky to have something to do at all, even if you are a drone. Don't pity yourself. Just accept it, and get on with it. There's nothing else to do.

Back to work, then. Back to work. The unchanging series of things to do, slightly different but not different enough each and every day. The same tedium. The same slow realisation, spread across a thousand hours or more, that this is it, and this is all there ever might be, or will be.

But at least you got away. Escaped for a while. Tasted something else. Had a glimpse. Work isn't so bad, if it brings you glimpses. Sometimes that's all there is, and maybe it's foolish to imagine there might be more. Why imagine? Just make the most of what there is, and get on with it. Back to work, back to work. It's not so bad. Time moves along, and you can grab your car keys and your coat, and get out of there. And then begin it all again tomorrow, waiting for another day to pass by, like water.

Alex Higgins

Some people will tell you that when Gazza broke down in floods of tears in Italia 90, it changed everything. It might have done for a lot of people, but I remember something before then: Alex Higgins's tears when he won the 1982 World Snooker final.

It's hard to separate one moment out of a sporting great's life and say there, that is who the person was, because it's all too easy to slip into the world of cliche, to imagine that everything was perfect before the world titles and there was some inevitable arc towards destruction and eventual death; it's easy to look back and imagine the dots got joined together by straight lines, but you have to suspect that things are even more complicated with Higgins than with anyone else. Here was someone who was quite rightly loved and hated, who acted appallingly and brilliantly. How can you separate it all out? How can you take one strand and say, this is who this person was? It's impossible.

There was always something of the outsider about Higgins. There was a look on his face of a man who'd been wronged, who wasn't quite right, who was always going to have to fight just to stand still. He was more crumpled, more battered, less together than the other neat and tidy snooker stars on television in the 1980s. Higgins didn't wear a tie, citing medical reasons. He'd sit there, screwing his mangled features up as he lit another cigarette, looking like everything could fall apart at any second... but then sometimes it didn't fall apart. Sometimes it all came together.

Higgins was the loser's hero, the guy who couldn't be relied upon to get anything right, but who could, when he did get it right, beat anyone. There's something almost childish about the risk-taking behaviour, the desire to try anything to try and win, to go for the near impossible when the safe option is there, but when it comes off, it's amazing. The more methodical sporting heroes - in snooker, Steve Davis or Ray Reardon - are always going to win more times with their approach. But in this bit of action from 1982, Higgins pulls off an amazing series of shots to crush Jimmy White:

Maybe there's a part of all of us who are failures, and losers, and defeated, who admire the courage of Higgins to go for it when the odds were against him. Those of us who are never going to amount to anything can look at someone like that and think, well, that's what happens when you really try, it might come off, and you might just do it. We all just want a millionth of what he had, and we'd be happy. Here was someone who was a fighter - against his rivals, against authority figures, against cancer, against everyone, including himself, of course. It was that battling spirit that saw him overcome cancer, though the operations and treatment, as well as the lifestyle he'd had, did for him in the end. But he raged against the dying of the light, like he'd raged against everything.

It's hard to like someone like Higgins, whatever you think of his sporting achievements. I dare say in real life he could be an awful person. I don't want to read all the stories from friends and lovers that will no doubt appear in the papers, but I imagine there will be some unsavoury stories that come out - those, after all, are the ones that attract the most attention, the bigger headlines, the potentially bigger payout. Who knows what really happened.

But I just remember being a younger person, looking at Higgins's face contorted in tears as he won that 1982 final. Tears of joy, that he could have won again, despite everything. Tears of relief, that it was all over. And probably tears for all kinds of other reasons, too. Here was someone so painfully, obviously fallible, and yet, there he was, champion of the world, best of everyone. He was a terrible ambassador for the sport, hounded for every tiny swear, cough, indiscretion and so on by the press, often rightly so, sometimes making a lot out of a little. But for those moments, as the tears fell, he was proven to be the best of the best. The rest of us can only dream of such magic. That's why a lot of us love sport, for the power to transport you to somewhere else, to see a glimpse of someone else's dream, to see a part of your own hopes invested in someone else.

And years later, they're gone, and you're still here. But still. If you could have a millionth of what they had, you'd take it right away. I know I would.

Off for a bit

See you on Saturday, Sunday or whenever...