In the Daily Mail view of the world, white men are an endangered species under attack from women the world over, lesbians in particular, atheists probably somehow and Europe almost certainly. Our only defenders against this tsunami of political correctness gone mad are Jeremy Clarkson with his blue jeans of justice and Nigel Farage with his tell-it-like-it-is pub loudmouth xenophobia. They are our last hope, our only holdouts in a world of womanholes and chairpeople and choirs of lesbians singing Baa Baa Minority Ethnic Origin Sheep. Without them, men would be doomed to perish in the raging fires of our daughters’ misguided bras.
Here at The Zero we like a bit of the old feminism. We like a bit of the world view that says woman is the [racial slur] of the world, that men have been running the place and doing it badly, that men as a group have been doing harm to women as a group since the two groups first got together and one beat hell out of the other and told it it couldn’t vote for about the next 100,000 years.
You can disagree, obviously. All you need to ignore is the sexualisation of women in the media, the difference in salaries for men and women doing the same job, the absence of female presidents and prime ministers, the odd bit of female genital mutilation, the sexual hypocrisy that says a man’s a player and a woman’s a slag, the varying acceptability of male and female nipple exposure, the lousy rates of female education in the developing world, and the history that says on our side education, suffrage, property and liberty have all been denied to women until about the last hundred years. Ignore that and more and your world view holds up pretty solid.
I carried mine into social work, into the domestic violence that features in literally every case I’ve worked. And that’s literally literally, not hyperbolic Facebook status literally. If you know your Zero you’ll recall how I’m working in a city with one of the highest rates of domestic violence in Europe, how I’ve been frustrated by the lack of prevention services for violent men. There are supports for women who’ve lived with these assholes; shelters for women who’ve run from the men doing them harm, safety planning for the women still with them, counselling for women who’ve survived their shit, counselling for children who saw it all, help for children who’ve begun to copy it. But men do this to women, and while the women are getting the support they need the men move on to other women and do the same to them and make more children see it all and maybe learn it for when their time comes.
I’ve got involved in a groupwork project that aims to do something about it, albeit with only half an eye on violence. It’s looking to take the lousy dads on the milder end of the violence spectrum and teach them how to be better parents, teach them how violence isn’t a part of it. It’s inspired by, as opposed to purchased from, an accredited programme that appears to work if you pick the right people. They’re the men who lack confidence in their parenting, men who think raising children is for women, men who are controlling and misogynistic and maybe violent but open to change of some sort. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.
Put the violence aside, I’m not even slightly interested in men as a special interest in need of particular attention. I’m embarrassed to be a male worker running a men’s group like it’s a passion of mine. I want to go more direct with violent men, give them a rant about patriarchy and the wrong they’re doing, get them to stop doing it. Logic and common sense and experience tell me that wouldn’t do much, and research from the programme says it wouldn’t do anything at all. Seems you have to approach the subject carefully, plant a few ideas about equity in relationships, about gentleness in childcare. You have to talk about how to put children first, how to be a considerate father, partner and ex-partner, how to respect children and women, how violence is the opposite of all that. And that’s a good thing. At the risk of sounding Daily Mail myself, there’s a clear problem of lousy, irresponsible men drinking their way through their children’s lives if they’re in them at all, beating hell out of their partners, staggering from job centre to jail. There aren’t many of them, they don’t number the army of shirkers the Tories dreamt up and there are reasons for them being how they are. But they’re around and something needs done. I’m just not sure it’s in me to stay away from the violence thing.
But in theory at least, if we can get in early before any major damage is done, if we can reshape even slightly their ideas of what it is to be a man and a partner and a father, if we can turn them onto responsibility and respectability and respectfulness maybe the children they raise won’t beat their partners and their generation will do better than ours and the seven million generations before us. And that’s why I’m currently in my Batman costume scaling the houses of parliament.
Devoted as you are to yer man The Zero, and as closely as you monitor my good works, you’ll be aware I do the odd bit of fundraising in spite of hating it almost completely. The past few years I’ve been meddling with Yaknak Projects, a small charity set up by a few friends to run two children’s home in Nepal. They need £16,000 a year to keep the homes running, a delightful spot of constant pressure that cheers them greatly.
I had a plan to change how they fundraised, to reduce the effort and up the ambition a bit. First, I wanted to change the kind of events we took on and the kind of money we aimed for, going for fewer events but doing them on a bigger scale and making them repeatable year on year. Second, I wanted to up the amount brought in by regular donors, aiming towards the all-of-it mark. Third, I wanted to get some decent chunks out of grants and trusts if the first two parts of the plan didn’t cover us.
A couple of years ago we started stage one, rounding up friends, friends of friends, co-workers and co-workers’ friends to run a 10k or half marathon. We had a team of 13 aiming for about £4,000, a figure almost stupidly ambitious against what we’d had before. We got about £7,500 once we counted Gift Aid. I can’t even tell you the level of smugness I was walking around with. I’m talking Gwyneth Paltrow.
Last year we started stage two, the regular donors thing. In the world of fundraising, regular donations are the joy of joys. You ask someone for money once and they keep giving it to you month after month, and all you’ve got to do check your bank statements to see if they’ve stopped. Back before we started on this we were getting a couple of hundred a month from the trustees and a friend or two but mostly when we encouraged people to give regularly they responded by not doing that at all. We changed how we went about asking, talking up the idea of being a small band of dedicated noble types helping to keep this small charity going. People started giving and got us up to £8,500 a year, more than half our running costs. At that point, by comparison, Gwyneth was looking modest, full of doubt and insecurities.
Last year brought us down a Paltrow or two. Rerunning the runs we had a lot of people who said they’d be up for it didn’t bother. We ended up with fewer runners and a lot less cash, coming out with about £3,500; a top-five fundraiser but disappointing against the first year. And there’s no Plan B with this stuff, there’s no one writing cheques if we don’t bring in the cash. It’s just us.
This week I got started on the third, hopefully still annual, big fundraiser. Here we’re looking to get people running again but also figuring ways to get lazier types to do something they’re at least halfway up for. So far we’ve nicked the idea of feeding yourself for a pound a day from whichever charity thought it up first, and added the Daal Bhat Challenge where, like a native Nepali, you have to eat curry and rice three times a day for a week. The trick is now to find people who can be bothered doing this and get them to do it, and find people who can’t be bothered and see if we can get them to do it too. The trick is then to find people who want to give us money and have them give it to us, and find people who want to keep their money and see if we can take at least a little from them.
There’s a brutal bit of maths here. We need £7,500. If we set a realistic average of £150 sponsorship per entrant, excluding Gift Aid, we need about 40 people. They’d put us to £6,000, with Gift Aid taking us to £7,500. We’ve got four trustees plus me who have basically no choice about doing this, and four people who’ve already signed to triathlons and half marathons. That leaves us with 31 people to recruit. We’ve got 13 people from the past two years we can ask, some of whom might be interested. That leaves us with a minimum of 18 new people to find. And we’re not the Race for Life, we can’t go putting up posters on subways or adverts on TV. This is ambitious for us. This is pressure. This is an assload of consequences just waiting.
The thing with fundraising is you have to dress it up like it’s fun. You have to be all positive and win people over with charm and enthusiasm and flattery. I have to put aside the panic and the maths that keeps me awake. Trying to get money from people, I tell them how much good it’s going to do. What keeps me awake is the opposite of that. It’s the absence of their money and the bad things its absence will do. If we don’t bring in this cash what’ll happen is we don’t pay rent on the boys’ houses and we don’t buy them food. We take them out of school and out of the houses and put them back in the orphanages they were living in before, in the orphanages where 150 children cram in together. We will fail them completely. We need to get this money.
That whooshing noise you just heard was the sound of my sphincter closing shut.
As I’ve often said, I very much believe the children are our future. Teach them well, I’ve often said, and thereafter watch them lead the way. I also very much believe when the night falls the loneliness calls. And that you should give me one moment in time.
Look around the world of social work, you see how undereducation knackers people almost completely. How adults struggle with the basics of reading and writing, how they work shitty jobs or no jobs at all, how their confidence takes a dive, how they don’t value education because it did nothing for them, how they pass that on to their kids. Look around the world of the rest of the world, you’ll see how undereducation knackers everything almost completely and how male dickheads are stopping millions of girls getting an education. UNICEF agrees with me here, as it so often does, pointing to the links with child labour, sexual exploitation, the spread of HIV and AIDS, child mortality and other awfulnesses. Get girls into education, you grow educated women. That’ll be why the dickhead men aren’t so into it.
You’ll recall how Malala Yousafzai is a 15-year-old girl from the Swat District of Pakistan. Back in 2009, when she was 11 and the Taliban were banning girls’ education and blowing up their schools, she blogged for the BBC’s Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl under the pseudonym of Gul Makai. She wrote about how her dad’s school was slowly emptying, how her English teacher couldn’t make it in because of a curfew, how she got death threats on the way home. Clever as she was, brave as she was, she gave up her anonymity to feature in Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf’s documentary, Class Dismissed, which, you should be warned, includes shots of corpses left in the streets after the Taliban was done with them. Malala did a few interviews speaking out against the Taliban’s repression, got known for it, and in October 2011 was nominated for the Children’s Peace Prize. In October 2012, as she sat on her school bus after finishing an exam, she was shot in the head by some Taliban prick. Their spokesman called her activism “a new chapter of obscenity” and threatened the media for its unsympathetic accounts of their attempted assassination of a schoolgirl because what they lack in humanity they also lack in self-awareness.
Malala survived. The single bullet passed through her head and neck and stopped in her shoulder, not far from her spine. She was in a coma for days, passing through hospitals in Pakistan on her way to a specialist place in England. She regained consciousness after her arrival there and started her long recovery. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and last month returned to education, starting her GCSEs in a school in Birmingham on her way to becoming a doctor and/or politician. She is so many kinds of awesome you can’t keep count of it all.
In her honour, and working with her and her family, Vital Voices Global Partnership set up the Malala Fund to campaign for and enable girls’ education. In April, Malala announced the fund’s first grant, paying for the education of 40 girls in the Swat Valley. It was, she said, the happiest moment of her life. I assume being named as the Chazza of the Month bumps it to second place. Like she says in that video up there, “Let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls”. You can help her with that by donating to the fund as close to immediately as you can manage.
Skipping quietly over the big news of the week (she was an anti-feminist who never looked down after getting herself through the glass ceiling, a class warrior on the wrong side of the war and a homophobe whose homophobia brought in homophobic law) I suggest we turn our attention to a more pressing issue: me. As you’ll recall I’ve been terribly ill, mummy’s brave little soldier keeping his chin up through the flu, a chest infection, a spot of whooping cough and very little in the way of blogging. Throughout this charming episode I’ve had a number of very helpful people explain it’s all down to my vegetarianism, there having been no documented cases of illness among meat eaters. Indeed, it is said the fearsome plague of the Middle Ages was due almost entirely to the people of western Europe overindulging in houmous. Similarly, during one of the eight years I spent in a wheelchair I was indeed vegetarian, and there can be no denying that famous vegetarian Linda McCartney continues to be dead.
This kind of thing is one of the perks of vegetarianism. We’re never short on a bit of conversation from nosey people, we don’t go long without a bit of nutritional advice from people who know basically nothing about nutrition. People who combine telling you you’re not getting enough protein with not having any idea how much protein you should actually be getting. People who ask if you’re taking vitamins while cramming a Chicken McBastard in their mouths. Still, I will concede this recent bout of illness has coincided with an eight-year stretch of being a really crap vegetarian and an almost complete absence of the vitamins and foodstuffs I should actually be getting. And while I maintain it’s the crapness rather than the veggieness that’s the issue here, I need to do a bit of something.
You’ll recall my recent efforts to improve things on this front didn’t go particularly well. I’d promised to cook tofu like I’m not scared of its unfamiliar wibbley-wobbliness, combine proteins like I know what I’m talking about and boost B12 and omega 3 like I give a shit about either of them. I’ve not so much done all of that as not done any of it even slightly. I bought two big bottles of multi-vitamins and took some of them, and snacked on nuts and seeds for as long as it took for the packets of nuts and seeds to run out and be replaced by crisps and chocolate. They offer less in the way of protein but more in the way of wanting to live. I suspect I was aiming too high. I took on too much all at once. It was yer classic new year gym subscription. What I need is a gentle stroll at a mild incline on an undemanding treadmill no more than three feet from a Curly Wurly. With that in mind I’m limiting myself to tofu-based experimentation.
Fact is I like tofu, but only when cooked by other people. As is the case with all other foods. The few times I’ve tried to cook it I’ve mostly ballsed it up, like that time I threw it in stir fry and ended up with something that looked like grey scrambled eggs run over by a shopping trolley and had the same powdery aftertaste you get when you kiss your granny’s forehead. I don’t quite understand when I should be using silken tofu (the slippery/sloppery white stuff) or firm tofu (the spongy/squishy beige stuff) or how a big block of rubbery gloop can come from a bean. You look at a bean, you look at tofu, you’d never put the two together. And as much as I wish I could cook the stuff, I mostly can’t be bothered thinking about considering the possibility of approaching the notion of pondering actually doing something about it.
But that has to change. I’ve acquired a tofu cookbook, one devoted entirely to the beige beany mush to the exclusion of all other foods. Except the food you mix with it when cooking, obviously. Otherwise it’d just be a book of different ways of putting tofu on a plate and even I don’t need a book for that. Actually, I just tried it and it ended up sideways in a toast rack and now my house is on fire. I need this book. It’s got yer classic ‘70s brown recipes and a bunch of half-interesting curries, stir fries and desserts. Plan is to tackle this stuff once a week ‘til I know what I’m doing, and fight the urge to post pictures to the Zero Twitter feed like some tedious Instagram foodie bastard.
Naturally I don’t think this will make even the tiniest bit of difference to my lousy immune system but it’ll give me better grounds for being smug when the finger-wagging meat eaters visit me in my sickbed/dialysis/the morgue to say they told me so. How I hate them.
When last we met I was banging on about politicising the office, turning a bunch of disaffected social workers into an army of right-on activists taking to the streets. You’ll recall the plan was to splash images of the prophet Gore around the place to get some interest going in yer basic environmentalism, bombard them with information about the bedroom tax and how it’ll affect our service users to get them into the politics, and have them heading a protest march by the end of the month. This plan, as good as it was, has undergone a number of changes. I chose instead to perform a more intimate form of awareness-raising, staging a bed-in in which I was joined, in place of Yoko Ono, by the flu, a chest infection, suspected whooping cough and colossal amounts of self-pity. It’s been less effective than I’d hoped.
Before I was struck down in what is very sadly my prime I’d gone along to a public meeting that was looking to organise this march against the bedroom tax, flanked by some guy who’d told me about it and some other guy who follows me around like a second bumhole. You’ll recall the bedroom tax is the government’s latest wheeze to screw over the people who dare use the welfare system designed for people exactly like them. It looks to withhold housing benefit from people with unoccupied bedrooms, working on the assumption all those Daily Mail stories about benefit claimants in mansions are not only true but typical. It looks to hurt a disproportionate number of disabled people, this being Iain Duncan Smith’s consolation for failing to turn 101 cancer patients into that fancy coat he wanted.
It was my first time at this kind of thing. It was equal parts interesting, exciting and cringey. Certainly all the activist stereotypes were there: the worthy types getting all flustered and excited like revolution was upon us; the angry types getting all loud and ranty and shoutier than thou; the self-promoters making it all about them; the veterans still fighting Thatcher; the would-be anarchists talking up riots and vandalism, having come from the office via Pret. Lots of vanity talk. Lots of people having a moment. And not one concise fucker in the room. Everyone who spoke made a good point fairly quickly, liked the round of applause they got and banged on for ten minutes trying for another. For the budding activist looking to keep hold of modesty and self-awareness it was all a bit trying. For the cynical bastard it was all a bit fish and barrel. But cynicism kills this kind of thing. I put it aside.
Then they brought on Tommy Sheridan. You’ll recall he’s the former socialist MSP who was jailed for his folk-hero protests against the poll tax and the Faslane nuclear base. And also for his perjury in the defamation trial following the News of the World’s allegations he attended a swinger’s club. He’s a little toxic, our Tommy. He’s easy to discredit. He could, by association, discredit the campaign. He could be off-putting to people with only half an interest in it. And he could be eyeing this as his chance to get back in the spotlight. All things considered, him being involved is like taking a dump in a jacuzzi and asking everyone to jump in. That said, he was a great speaker. He made actual points. He stayed focused. He made useful comparisons to past campaigns without sounding stuck in the past. He urged the organisers to get organised. I agreed with basically everything he said, and wished someone else had said it all.
Archetypes, cynicism and Tommy notwithstanding, the meeting had a vague whiff of excitement about it. It seems spontaneous pockets of action have sprung up around the country with marches and protests planned in Bath, Belfast, Birmingham, Bolton, Brighton, Bristol, Cambourne, Camdridge, Cardiff, Carlisle, Chester, Croydon, Darlington, Dover, Durham, Edinburgh, Exeter, Glasgow, Halifax, Hanley, Hastings, Hull, Ipswich, Kent, King’s Lynn, Leeds, Leicester, Lincoln, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Peterborough, Plymouth, Preston, Runcorn, Sandwell, Sheffield, Somerset, Southampton, St Austell, Teeside, Warrington, Weymouth, Whitehaven, Wigan, Wiltshire, Workington, Wrexham and York. Momentum is gathering. And organisation is on its way, this meeting setting up a committee to coordinate a national gathering of organisations. This is local, grass roots stuff turning national. The marches got decent crowds and enough coverage for people to notice them. Something has started.
On 16 April a petition is being submitted to the Scottish Parliament calling on the SNP government to use its power to counter the threat of eviction for rent arrears in local authority tenancies. I’ll be part of the crowd outside Holyrood cheering it on, assuming I’m not struck down by smallpox or gout.
If you’ve trawled around the other parts of The Zero you’ll know all about how I got into this do-gooding lark. How I got sick of my cynicism and naysaying, how I quit ranting about problems and turned my attention to their causes and solutions. How I got all up on futurism and how if we’re not working to a better world we’re keeping it back. How my indifference turned gradually to… difference, which is the opposite of that. That doesn’t sound right.
It was that sort of thinking that attracted me to social work. From the outside it seemed like it had the potential to change people, to get them away from things doing them harm or turn them from lousy decisions. It looked like maybe it could get stuck into the things around them, the systems and structures and powers that ruin lives and keep them ruined and keep the generations after them ruined. I was looking for a job to help bring change to people and to society at large and to the generations lined up ahead of ours. I was looking for a job that would teach people to fish. Or farm beancurd, which would be more in keeping with my strict vegetarian principles. That sort of thinking was all the rage in the right-on ‘70s and Thatchered ‘80s, radical social work saying everything was shit but would get sorted. Talk to people practising back then you’d think they split their time between getting down and dirty in people’s homes and getting placardy on the streets, with the occasional ten minutes in the office. You’d think they actually believed they could have a part in changing the world, like they had a chance going up against the causes of poverty instead of just looking on and handing out cash for nappies. Looking back, it seems like social work was part of a philosophy. That’s not how it feels right now, not in my office.
There, most of the talk is around fake tans and football and almost-famous nobodies in nothing magazines. There’s barely an ounce of politicking around the place, nothing in the way of morality or agenda. I’m not saying there’s not room for chat or silliness or dicking around in the workplace but I’d like a touch of principle now and again. There’s one guy into this stuff but for most people it’s very definitely just a job. It’s a job they care about, like they care about the people they’re working with, like they care about doing it well. They know it matters. But it’s a job in relation to nothing bigger. That’s not how it should be. Community care workers should be bigging up disability rights and fighting benefit cuts and lousy care provision. Criminal justice workers should be bigging up progressive sentences instead of custodials we know make everything worse. People, it’s time to Zerofy the office! It’s Zero hour! I’m brainstorming catchphrases here. Let’s get Zeroiggy with it!
That last one was pretty good. First, me and this other guy will try and get some interest going in the Social Work Action Network, a progressive pressure group that looks to get social work away from managerialism and more towards right-onness. In fact maybe we’ll go and ask the team leader to pay for us to attend and if that fails maybe we’ll email the service manager two weeks ago and not hear anything back yet. Second, we’ll try and get some interest going in slagging off the bedroom tax which is about to screw over a good share of our service users. There’s a march being organized in a few cities people could take an interest in. This other guy went to a planning meeting a couple weeks back and is dragging me to the next one, and together maybe we’ll get others into it instead of just being laughed at like is happening currently. Third, to take our principles into general future-facing do-goodery, I’ll release The Mighty Gore. As before, he’ll take his inspiring and terrifying message of environmental disaster straight to the hearts of non-believers, striking fear into the hearts I mentioned earlier in this sentence. That’s just bad writing. In the first wave I’ll target the water cooler which gets through several thousand plastic cups a day, the bin in the lunch room which is filled with all manner of recyclables, and the lights in the bathrooms because things always sound punchy in threes. That’s just good writing. With these efforts combined, with this ally working alongside me, and with all the enthusiasm and drive I can muster, I’ll very quickly achieve the thing I was talking about when I started this entry last week and forgot about completely. Let’s get Zeroiggy with it!
When last we met I was banging on about stag nights and homophobic banter, the two intertwined more closely than David Cameron’s tongue and the devil’s dirty bumhole. There was a lot of it kicking about and much of it incredibly immature. I never would have believed the word ‘gaylord’ was still in use, or that if it was it would be used so often, or that if it was and was being used often it would be by full-grown adults, or that if it was and they were they’d be using it on a non-ironic basis. But that’s the thing with homophobia: It’s basically everywhere.
At the stag it was on the level of supposedly non-homophobic name calling, where people make out it’s not homophobia at all, where objects or concepts are gay if you don’t like them, where people are fags if you think they’re stupid, where homosexuality is a byword for badness. Morons like this. Chris Moyles liked this, spreading his family-friendly homophobia to millions of listeners because he’s a cock. That earned him Stonewall’s Bully of the Year award. Like they said, ‘Chris Moyles is not helping young LGBT people struggling to come out through his comments’. But it’s not just charmless ex-DJs who indulge in this shit. A teacher in Mrs Zero’s old school used to call stuff gay to sound down with the kids. The straight kids. Presumably the gay kids and the bisexual kids and the kids who hadn’t quite figured themselves out were less keen to get down with him on account of him being an arsehole.
If you know anything about wedges you’ll recognise that as the thin end of one, the other end being homophobic threats, homophobic violence and vandalism, homophobic murder, homophobic politics, religions and laws backed up by a homophobic media. Back in 2008, Stonewall, the campaigning charity that looks to even things up a bit, ran a survey of homophobic crimes in the UK. It reckoned one in five lesbians and gay men had been on the receiving end of a homophobic incident or hate crime in the preceding three years, that one in six of these incidents involved physical assault, that one in eight involved unwanted sexual contact. Occasionally these things make the headlines. There was the guy in Edinburgh beaten by four men and a woman. There were the two men in Coventry punched in the face and kicked in the chest because one of them looked wrong to their attacker. There was Stuart Walker, murdered. And although the world seems to be getting its shit together and it seems like every generation looks back at the last thinking it was in the stone age, the Stonewall survey found people aged 18-24 were far more likely to be abused and harassed than were old people, and that young men seemed to be the most common perpetrators. As level as society’s getting – which isn’t very – it’s headed wrong here.
A look around the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill tells you how the world’s working, people talking about ‘gay marriage’ as opposed to ‘marriage equality’ like people are asking for something special as opposed to what the straight part of the world’s always had. Without the bill, straight people getting married is like people playing golf in a country club that doesn’t allow Jews. A look at the bill’s debate tells you everything you need to know about the people working to keep it that way. People like David Burrowes who reckons “the state is trying to divide and rule the meaning of marriage”. People like Ian Paisley who reckons marriage equality is killing heterosexual marriages in Spain and Portugal. People like Tony Baldry, who chipped in some wisdom from Christianity and Islam to say how much the idea sucked. People like Roger Gale, who reckoned the bill was almost Orwellian, that same-sex marriage had the whiff of Alice in Wonderland about it and who made a helpful reference to incest. Twats, all of them. The bill got through, obviously, and progress is on its way. But these poisonous people still think these poisonous things, and millions of poisonous people agree with them.
We need a Chazza of the Month that’s going to fix all this. A charity that campaigns for equality in law, that points to inequalities in politics and the media, a charity that works in schools to help gay and lesbian kids with what they’re going through and shouldn’t be, that tells other kids to not be assholes, that will make stag nights of the future halfway bearable for people who aren’t galactic twats. I’m thinking maybe Stonewall. They take money right here.
It’s tricky, this male feminism lark. It’s hard, looking like the enemy I’m trying to fight. I am, if we’re keeping track of these things, a white, able-bodied, heterosexual man packed full of privilege and power, weighed down by the burdens and baggage of my demographic brethren whose history of racist, disablist, homophobic, sexist behaviour has been ballsing things up since we first crawled out of the soup and said everyone else was shit. In my heart I’m catastrophically disabled, fiercely lesbianic, a kaleidoscope of skin colours rotating in direct opposition to the majority skin colour of the people around me. Sadly it’s for my body, rather than my right-on soul, that I am judged. And even the body’s working alright now, the intersectionality points I had for my wheelchair lost in a haze of half marathons and tip top health. True, disability didn’t counter the tyranny of my genitals or my skin colour but it moved me a little along the continuum, a little away from the Jeremy Clarkson end of things, a little towards a limping Condoleeza Rice. Just to the left of that wee guy from Diff’rent Strokes. Yes yes. As I’ve often said, there’s nothing worse than being a white, able-bodied, heterosexual man. Except for being one or all of the opposites of all of those things.
My latest struggle in this patriarchal madhouse for which I am demographically responsible has been one of the toughest yet: organising a stag do. My oldest and truest friend, my most loyal and loving confidante has, in the absence of a better alternative, asked me to be his best man. What an honour. What a privilege. What a pain in the ass it’s been. Get more than three men in a room together, chances are they’ll revert to blokey stereotype quicker than you can say “Tits and beer”. Chances are half of them won’t have any reverting to do having never strayed from the stereotype to begin with. It’s hard, putting together a feminist stag night when so many of the traditions are sexist bollocks, when so many of the attendees want the traditional sexist bollocks and when there are so many pairs of actual bollocks. An unreconstructed stag night means putting the stag in a dress and heels because resembling a woman is humiliating, trading barbed witticisms about his lack of masculinity and/or his latent homosexuality because both are hilarious, demonstrating the correlation between the relative spiciness of available curries and the size of the eater’s penis because brown people don’t eat like us, and paying a woman or women to remove their clothing and/or perform a sex act because nothing celebrates the beginning of a lifelong union like engaging the services of a sex worker. If you’re not keen on misogyny, homophobia and racist banter these things can grate a little.
Have to say, I object to the cliché almost as much as the misogyny. Hen nights kill me the same way, all spa days and dares, all cocktails and sparklers, all L plates and deely boppers and inflatable cocks. As someone who’s lived 34 consecutive years refusing to utter the phrase “At the end of the day” that shit pains me. But still, the misogyny was the bigger problem. And I was up against it.
I thought maybe we could go abroad, take in the sights. They thought maybe we could go to a strip club, take in the tits. I thought maybe we could do a parachute jump. They thought maybe we could do a strip club. I thought rock climbing. They thought strip club. I thought bowling. They thought strip club. I thought basically anything that wasn’t a strip club. They thought more along the lines of a strip club. There was a very definite consensus in terms of the strip club.
I’ve had this happen before, at another stag I didn’t organise and felt even less able to ram my politics into. There the talk of strip clubs went on a few hours until I said I wasn’t going and found myself on the pavement at one in the morning debating gender politics with horny drunk people. There we reached a lousy compromise where I waited in the foyer while they all paid for tits. The fiver I paid to get in still gets to me. This time the strip club wasn’t happening. It didn’t happen. I failed on all other counts.
We put the stag in a dress. They did the curry/dick thing, cracked wise about women and gay men, covered the essentials of football, beer, tits, birds and birds’ tits. I did a few sarky gags to puncture it all but it was like farting against a hurricane. I let most of it go, because when challenging that stuff means ruining your friend’s stag night you either ruin your friend’s stag night or let most of it go. I mostly sold out, let the world be like it is for a night. I won a tiny battle, lost the war. And after I left I’m pretty sure they all went to a strip club. Still, baby steps and all that.
One thing I’ll tell you: No one gets into social work for the laughs. I’m in about seven months now and it’s been a relentless parade of misery and awfulness, a daily dose of systemic dickery and individual flaws and failure. It’s been punctuated by the occasional bit of progress and improvement, the odd bit of reason to think sometimes it works. I think maybe you have to be in a long time to get enough success to keep you going, to feel you’ve made enough of a difference often enough it counters all the times people charge into their miseries and all you can do is write about it. I sound a little down on social work, and on life. A week-long child protection course will do that to you.
The past four days I’ve been holed up in a training centre, me and 14 other newbies too fresh to be cynical, too new to shrug anything off easily. Professional detachment protects people. We haven’t got it figured yet. We’ve spent four days talking over cases of child abuse. Talking over kids beaten and burned and tortured and poisoned, kids unwashed and hungry, kids seeing the world with adult eyes, seeing their parents drunk and high. Kids touched where they shouldn’t be, kids made to touch people where they shouldn’t, kids raped and told to keep quiet. We’ve been talking these lives over, feeling shitty about them. They’ve been living them; we’ve been feeling extra shitty, like it’s not our place to feel anything, like our sympathy’s an indulgence.
Today we worked through a stack of serious case reviews, cases where children died and workers didn’t see enough to see it coming or do enough to stop it happening. Peter Connolly, murdered at 17 months. Kennedy McFarlane, killed at three years old, drugged and beaten by her mum’s boyfriend. Caleb Ness, killed at 11 weeks, tiny and so thoroughly helpless you can’t figure it fully, his life so short, his tragedy so huge you can’t find its edges. Victoria Climbié, burned and beaten, chained and tortured and killed at 8 years old, let down so completely we should be ashamed for about the next thousand generations.
Get through tomorrow, I’ll take on these cases myself. It’s work I want to do. It’s mildly terrifying. 65 million people in the country, all behind closed doors, all with their curtains drawn, all working to keep their secrets. Children scattered over the country, scared and living with God knows what. Me with my questions. Me trying to find where the truth is.
We need as many eyes as possible, as many routes to the truth as possible, as many routes out for as many children as possible. The NSPCC’s the Chazza of the Month. They keep Childline going, taking 650,000 calls and online contacts last year. They run the Parents Under Pressure programme, getting in about children whose parents use drugs or alcohol, working to keep the danger from them. They run Minding the Baby, making weekly visits to babies born to young and vulnerable parents, kids themselves who haven’t got enough figured to know how not to do harm. They’re campaigning their assess off for children’s rights and researching their assess off to find better ways of doing things. They’ve got a ton of work going. A bit of cash their way will help.
Hell of a week. The lunches have been good. They did soup on Monday. It was cold outside.
Not infrequently have I banged on about the potential power of social networking as a force for do-goodery. Not infrequently have I banged on about the tedium of social networking in the hands of most of its users. Conflicted as I am I’m finally a big fan of Twitter, having introduced a blanket ban on friends who might want to tell the world about their old washing machines, their new washing machines or their tedious marriages. Limiting my follows to political types, right ons, social workers and general contrarians, I have a feed of wishy-washy, liberally, pinko-commie news, ideas and arguments.
There are some cracking accounts for doers of good. NoMorePage3, obviously, although to date there remains the same amount of Page 3s as there always has been (one). YesYou’reRacist, YesYou’reGaycist and YepYou’reSexist are essential public service feeds calling out racist, homophobic and sexist tweeters who protest too much, proving “I’m not racist, but” is the most nerve wracking start to any sentence ever. And there’s the Everyday Sexism project, asking female Twitterites to tweet examples of the sexist bullshit they put up with when they’d rather be going about their business unmolested; in some cases quite literally.
Everyday Sexism’s Twitter feed, website and Huffington Post blog should shut every last pie hole belonging to men who think they’re now the endangered species and women who think feminism’s a done deal. They highlight the tedious, blokey banter that’s still knocking about, the “Get in the kitchen” kind of stuff, the “Barbecuing’s a man’s job” kind of thing, the “Someone’s hormonal” kind of bollocks. They highlight the lecherous behaviour that’s still doing the rounds, the gawking at cleavage, the wolf whistling at passers by, the winking at girls and wanking on streets. They highlight the creepy, threatening behaviour that’s wrecking the place, the lascivious looks that says women are decoration, the sexualised banter that assumes they’re up for it, the stalking that says they’re property. And they highlight the everyday sexual assaults you wouldn’t believe are still happening. Every day.
Interesting as this is, you’ll naturally be wondering what effect it’s had on me, being as how I am essentially the wind beneath your wings. It’s been a revelation, a genuinely surprising account of how many men are still dragging their knuckles and how many women are hassled and bullied and scared and abused. I’m fairly sure I’m not a big lechy bastard or a big intimidating power tripper but I’ve checked some of my behaviour, I’ve had a think about how I present to women. I noticed recently, in the communal showers at the swimming pool, how Mrs Zero chose her spot carefully, avoiding the corner where she’d be between two men. When I take a spot now, I make sure I don’t create these kinds of awkward spaces for women, going next to other men unless the place is deserted and I’d come off creepy sidling up to some random wet guy. Similarly, when I go to a spin class like the middle class wanker I’m slowly becoming I avoid the bikes next to lone women in case they worry I’ll spend the class cracking onto them. I won’t, obviously, because I’m off the market, I’m not that creepy and I wouldn’t get far with this combination of face, personality and body odour but, point is, I’m more sensitive to how women might feel about behaviour that is, but might not look, entirely benign. And yes, Jeremy Clarkson will be rolling his eyes and complaining how you can’t say boo to a female goose nowadays but then if he were our template for gender politics we’d be making the world in his image, storming the WI, handing out blue jeans and cocks.
You’ll be wondering now what you can do. Women, you can share your experiences, telling other women they’re not alone and telling men to knock it the hell off. Men, you can knock it the hell off. And everyone, you can follow and like and promote Everyday Sexism and vote for it in the Shorty Awards to let more people know it’s around. Do this. Do all of this and the day will come when we won’t need this kind of project any more, when women won’t have to tweet about their experiences because they won’t be experiencing them any more. And on that day, when equity comes at last to humanity and all are free and equal, you can finally tell me about your washing machine and your marriage and whatever you’ve made in your slow fucking cooker.
