A Very Public Sociologist: Gender

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Tuesday, 27 July 2010

Violence Against Women in Sin City

Always one to move with the times, I've recently got round to watching 2005's big screen adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City. There's little point recapitulating the plot(s) of the six vignettes that make up the film, seeing as Wikipedia's already done it. But there are a few things I'd like to say about the violence.

Um, there's lots of it. The movie is stunning to look at, even when heads explode, limbs are hacked off, and a particularly vicious serial killer is castrated. As this hostile review points out, the violence is as copious as it is sadistic. One is tempted to say it's supposed to be. Frank Miller's graphic novels are a roid rage homage to 30s and 40s pulp crime fiction. It is a ménage à trois of redemptive violence, 1940s hyperreality, and a misogynistic/reductive view of women. Robert Rodriguez excuses his utterly faithful portrayal out of a desire to remain true to Miller's originals. For him Sin City was not so much an adaptation, more a translation. In other words, the artistic equivalent of "I wus only following orders, Guv".

And, as you might expect, the gendering of Sin City's violence is deeply problematic. You might argue it doesn't matter, that the film is a blow for equal opportunities as men and women alike are threatened, tortured and butchered. But the misogynistic devil's in the detail. Not only does the film begin and end with the murders of women, all the violence directed at them during the two hours inbetween is tied to sexuality.

Exhibit A: Goldie (Jaime King) shares a night of passion with Marv (Mickey Rourke). There are breast shots aplenty. Marv wakes up to find she's been murdered in a bid to fit him up.

Exhibit B: After escaping the police, Marv hooks up with his probation officer, Lucille (Carla Gugino). Not only does she parade around her flat in her knickers, we are told she's gay. Later Marv winds up in a serial killer's dungeon with a naked Lucille, and shortly after she gets machine gunned.

Exhibit C: It's revealed the serial killer, Kevin (Elijah Wood!), and his mentor, Cardinal Roark (Rutger Hauer), ate the remains of the prostitutes Kevin had killed.

Exhibit D: An evening with Dwight (Clive Owen) (where it is strongly implied they had sex) sees Shellie (Brittany Murphy) getting a post-coital slapping by her ex-boyfriend Jackie Boy (Benicio del Toro).

Exhibit E: Leader of the prostitute-controlled Old Town, Gail (Rosario Dawson) is captured and tortured by the Mob, who want to clear the women's co-op out and return it to the bad old days of pimps and violence. For good measure Dwight gives his on-off lover a slap too.

Exhibit F: Nancy (Jessica Alba) who was saved by Hartigan (Bruce Willis) in the second vignette from the clutches of a serial killer grows up to be an erotic dancer. Her would-be rapist tracks her down and starts torturing her before Hartigan saves the day again.

The linkage between sex and violence toward women is reinforced when you consider the three female characters who do not suffer physical attack. The 11 year old Nancy is abducted and threatened, but is saved. Miho (Devon Aoki) is one of the few prostitutes who wears clothes, and serves as their samurai enforcer in several slick but bloody scenes (of course, a Japanese woman must be proficient in martial arts). And lastly, Becky, the youngest and most child-like of the prostitutes (who, again, wears clothes) turns her back on her sisters and betrays Old Town to the Mob. She escapes the ensuing shoot out and having left prostitution behind, the final scene sees her share a lift with the assassin from the first scene. In contrast to the overt violence of the rest of the film, his method of killing has already been established as gentle, almost romantic.

The portrayal of women in this film doesn't send the most empowering of messages: if you're a woman and you have sex, male violence is sure to follow.

In a decade stamped by neoliberalism, big advances in biological/genetic sciences, and the mainstreaming of pornographic aesthetics, tropes and "world views", the body in culture has been objectified and reified an order of magnitude greater than the exploitation flicks of the 70s and 80s. This is a dehumanised body that's managed and dissected. It's a body for public displays of graphic sex and violence. And it's the sort of hegemonic body likely to remain at the heart of our culture for quite some time to come.

Therefore, Sin City might be zeitgeisty. It may swim with the cultural stream. And the box office takings (plus imminent sequel) suggest there's a ready audience for it. But none of this excuses its positioning of female sexuality as the source of male violence. Sin City's neither edgy or clever. It's a misogynist's wet dream.

Saturday, 5 June 2010

Derrick Bird: Why Men Murder

By all accounts, Derrick Bird - the man on Tuesday who went on a murderous rampage in Cumbria killing 12 and injuring a further 11 - was a normal bloke. Unlike the withdrawn lonesome figure of the "typical" serial killer or mass murderer, Bird appeared to defy the profile. He was well liked and sociable. There are reports of petty squabbles with other cabbies but nothing any different from the arguments that bedevil thousands of other taxi ranks. It's also emerged Bird was in dispute with his twin brother over an inheritance, and that he was being investigated by the Inland Revenue. But again, nothing out of the ordinary.

Looking at the pattern of victims, it suggests Bird was motivated by score settling. He shot his brother first, followed by the family solicitor and then his fellow taxi drivers, wounding three and killing another. After this the shootings become random and apparently incomprehensible, ending only when Bird turned the gun on himself.

Mass shootings are thankfully very rare in Britain, which makes them all the more shocking when they do occur. Their senseless and random character seem to defy explanation. But as appalling as they are should we just accept that out of six billion people, someone somewhere on the planet will occasionally flip and kill large numbers of people? That seemingly normal men (for it is almost always men) walk among us liable to detonate at any moment is somehow part of the human condition, as libertarian blogger Charlotte Gore claims?

In the first place, these phenomena are not inexplicable: in their own perverse way they're perfectly logical. In an illuminating discussion on Thursday's This Week, celebrity psychologist Linda Papadopoulos applied some watered-down Freud to the Cumbria shootings. As a man who perceived himself powerless and hemmed in by his work and financial situation, the murders could be interpreted as Bird reasserting control over his life. First he shoots those he holds responsible for his feelings of powerlessness - his brother, the solicitor, and the cabbies. With the situations "resolved" his psychosis spills over into imposing his will on the world beyond his control. To the outsider gunning down random people makes no sense, but within the terms of Bird's state of mind this was the logical progression. And the final act - Bird's decision to take his life - affirms his control over the situation, underlining it from start to finish.

Similar features can be read off other shootings. Massacres like Columbine and Virginia Tech have been interpreted as particularly grisly ways for Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold and Seung-Hui Cho to achieve celebrity. To an extent this was true - in the videos filmed prior to the shootings Harris and Klebold fantasised about their own post-massacre biopics. Cho saw himself as a Jesus-like freedom fighter. But this is part of a broader psychopathology of 'taking control' and self-assertion vis an uncaring and indifferent world.

In her brief talk and subsequent discussion, Papadopoulos broadens the question out - why are the perpetrators of mass shootings always men? Women too are subject to the same social processes and psychological states as men, albeit with added gendered oppression on top - but women do not commit these crimes. The reason for this is not men's innate capacity for violence: for Papadopoulos it is rooted in gendered socialisation processes. This should not be reduced to giving boys toy guns and girls dolls to play with: it is about building emotional capacities. Despite being the 21st century and with real progress made on gender issues, hegemonic masculinity still remains structured around strength, leadership, heterosexuality, paternalism, dominance, and reason/rationality. Emotion, or more properly, emotion associated with weakness and vulnerability remain very much the property of hegemonic femininity - if a man is expressive and empathic his sexuality automatically comes into question. For Papadopoulos the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity leaves many men ill-equipped to handle their emotions. Bottling them up is how a real man handles frustration, disappointment and sadness. Small wonder it's men are more likely to suffer depression, be diagnosed with a mental illness, and commit suicide. Or find violent outlets for the tumult building up inside them. In other words, traditional masculinity does not explain why a man picks up a gun and goes on a killing spree. But it does condition the lives of all men to greater or lesser extents. It provides a frame for interpreting and dealing with (or rather, not dealing with) emotions, and a guide/ideal showing how real men should handle their problems. It's for reasons rooted in Derrick Bird's psyche that this complex of masculinity and personal life history turned him into a murderer.

It's no accident that Papadopolous's argument is derived from psychoanalysis, which has always stressed the importance of social processes (particularly language) in the constitution of the ego and the unconscious. Nevertheless her account is bounded by focusing on the individual perpetrator and each case is treated as a self-contained tragedy. And this is accepted by conventional sociology. Psychoanalysis does blur the psychology/sociology boundary somewhat, but sociology is generally content with leaving questions like this to the psychologists. Crude caricatures of pop sociology does appear in the mainstream media at times like these to explain mass murders in terms of celebrity (as per the Time article above) or copycatting news coverage. But sociology can draw attention to something psychologist and other commentators have missed: that murderous rampages have a history, and it is one that is relatively recent.

In the US, the first mass shooting understood in terms of its use here was in 1966. The first high school shooting was in 1979. In the last two years there have been five such killing sprees. To help explain this the spate of similar killings China is currently reeling from may point toward an answer. The writer of this piece suggests the lack of mental health provision and China's rapid pace of social change are contributing factors to these attacks. Analogous processes in Western countries could also be having a similar effect.

This isn't to glibly "blame society" for what happened in Cumbria on Tuesday. No one is responsible for the shootings but Bird. Nevertheless his actions did not take place in a vacuum. His character was shaped by the complex frames and expectations of masculinity like any other man. And, like everyone else, he was conditioned by what's happened to British society over the last 30 years: a restructuring that has seen deindustrialisation, the decline of established social solidarities (particularly working class solidarity), the dismantling of the post-war settlement and the rise of neoliberal individualism as the cultural dominant. There's no such thing as society. You're all on your own now.

For millions Britain of the 80s, 90s and 00s was and is to live life at the sharp end. Money worries, precarious living, social isolation, alienation and anomie, frustration. The existence of these social pathologies are nothing new but it seems the scale of their cultural influence is of greater than was the case in the post-war period. It's not beyond the realms of possibility the lived presence of these developments in the every day is what for a few individuals, combines with their individual mental states and relationship to masculinity to produce a Derrick Bird or a Michael Ryan. How else to explain their comparatively recent appearance?

Ultimately we can never be absolutely certain why men like Bird take the decision to start killing. But a creative mix of a psychological approach married to a sociological appreciation of the social relations that condition and structure our lives can go some way to approximating a state of mind and explain how it came about.

Wednesday, 9 December 2009

Porn as Ideology

While we're on the subject ... can porn be considered an ideology? I ask because I've become aware of this site, Make Love, Not Porn (it is safe(ish) for work). It's still at the early build stage, but the idea is simple. Visitors are invited to leave comments juxtaposing 'porn world' sex to real world sex. So for example, in porn world "men love coming on women's faces, and women love having men come on their faces", whereas in the real world "some women like this, some don't. Some guys like to do this, some guys don't. It's entirely up to personal choice". Sounds like a useful project that might tackle some of the myths propagated by porn.

But seeing as it promises an idealised sexual experience (of sorts), is there a case for considering porn as an ideology? In Marxism, ideology is typically thought of in two ways. Firstly as a set of ideas that offer a partial and distorted view of reality, glossing over the power relations and processes that underpin capitalism (this is why you should take any self-described socialist who talks about 'Marxist ideology' for a pseud). Secondly, ideology is a lived relation denoting all the ideas and discourses that mediate our relationships to the wider social world - an understanding elaborated on (but not without its own problems) in Louis Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. These two functions or forms of ideology are not mutually exclusive. For example, the world view of seriously religious folk rejects scientific and other secular means of interpreting social life in favour of the theologies of whatever doctrine they subscribe to. But nevertheless, the live this ideology - it guides their relationships with the wider world.

Therefore in the Marxist sense, is porn an ideology? On immediate appearances it would seem not to be. After all, it's just people doing sex acts in front of a camera. And that's all there is to it, innit? True, while some performers and commentators such as Ovidie, Nina Hartley, and Susannah Breslin have written extensively on porn and have provided valuable insights into the commodification of sex, their ideas do not structure the mass production and consumption of porn. Very few people settle down with a copy of the Porn Manifesto before catching up with Ron Jeremy's latest adventures. What goes into product and how it is shot is the preserve of the studios who churn it out.

If we grant that porn in and of itself is not an ideology, it definitely has ideological effects. You don't have to be a conservative or feminist opponent to realise sex in porn is profoundly reductive and objectifying, reducing women to their orifices and breasts and men to their cocks. Sex is entirely mechanical and genital-centric and is focused around the climax of the male performer, which usually entails coming on his partner's face or another part of her body. And this is the norm. Now, I do not subscribe to the discredited hypodermic model of media influence in which an audience passively watches something and then acts it out in real life. But it is clear the staged, "artificial" sex in porn is impacting on contemporary heterosexual masculinities and femininities in significant ways.

In the case of masculinity, the ubiquity of porn has centered the economy of desire around male pleasure. For instance, back in my pre-internet school days me and a mixed group of my mates had a stash of magazines we kept in the ruins of a half-demolished local pottery (we found most of these magazines - the route home from school was a dumping ground for discarded copies of Electric Blue, Men Only, Fiesta etc. for some reason). And, if memory serves, alongside gynaecological spreads of Mary from Barnstaple, the smutty stories they carried celebrated a masculinity that was affirmed in not only screwing as many women as possible, but making sure they climaxed too. Perhaps top shelf publications are still the same today, but the easy availability of porn on the internet has effectively rendered them a niche pursuit. Chances are for adolescent and young men, for whom porn is likely to be their first experience of sex and in the absence of other information about sexual behaviour, the porn "model" can condition and influence their approaches to and expectations of sex.

This is to say nothing about how porn frames women for men. While female porn stars can hardly be said to be passive, their performance is organised around bringing their male co-star(s) to climax and/or by extension, do so for the pleasure of the viewer. They are constructed as objects of heterosexual male desire and serve only to satisfy that - a point reinforced by the titles the studios give their output. This positioning of women has radiated out from porn, informing the aesthetics and preoccupations of low-brow lads' mags like Zoo and Nuts to music videos, to driving the new acceptability of so-called gentlemen's clubs (of course, the objectification of women beyond porn is nothing new but there is more of an overt sexual component to it than was the case 10-20 years ago).

The messages porn sends out for women aren't the most progressive either. Quite apart from extending its particular take on the hegemonic feminine ideal to every nook and cranny of women's bodies (see here and here), it prescribes a particular performance of female sexuality. This suggests that a real woman should not only be happy to accommodate her sexual partner in every way, but would find pleasure in doing so too. Furthermore, this is a sexuality that is always up for it, that can be lit up by a beacon at any time. And ultimately, if she is not satisfied she is at least gratified in pleasuring her man. Her own sexual pleasure is secondary and irrelevant.

Therefore, at least where the Marxist approach to ideology is concerned, porn can legitimately be considered an ideology. It offers a simplistic and distorted view of sex and sexual acts that celebrates and reinforces an arbitrary inequality between male and female performers. And because porn is everywhere, feeding and in turn feeding off mainstream publishing, fashion, music and film, it has colonised contemporary masculinity and femininity in subtle and non-too-subtle ways, colouring and conditioning views of what sex is and how it should be done. In other words, porn is both a distortion of and a "lived relation" to the world, drawing from, plugging into and reinforcing existing gendered relations. But what, if anything, can be done?

Monday, 7 December 2009

HIV/AIDS and Male Genital Cutting

I bet that title caught your eye! A few weeks ago when I should have been busy finishing my PhD, I went along to a Keele gender, sexuality and law seminar on 'HIV/AIDS: Male Genital Cutting and the New Discourses of Race and Masculinity'. Presenting were GSL stalwarts, Marie Fox and Michael Thomson.

The cutting the title speaks of is not a niche sexual practice but of course refers to circumcision. Since the 1860s the practice of circumcision has become secularised and medicalised, particularly in the USA. Here it was adopted by the white middle class, who believed it would protect the male body from dirt and disease. There was also the suggestion that it curbed sexual appetite and was therefore an invaluable technology in the war against masturbation. Unsurprisingly circumcision found favour among the "scientific" racists of the day as a way of managing the perceived "dangers" of black male sexuality. As Joane Nagel puts it, black men were seen as "a sexual predator, a threat to White southern womanhood and White male sexual hegemony" (in The Sociological Quarterly (2000) 41(1), p.12).

What has this got to do with HIV/AIDS? In recent years circumcision has found renewed favour in some medical circles because of the role it can allegedly play in HIV prevention. During randomised trials in sub-Saharan Africa over 2007-8, it was discovered that circumcision can reduce the risk of HIV transmission by 51-60 per cent (though these are subject to a degree of dispute). Nevertheless these are being used to justify the establishment of mass circumcision programmes in Africa to combat local epidemics, even though some studies show correlation and others do not.

There is a problem with how circumcision is being "marketed" too. Rather than being a magic bullet that will see off HIV it should be used as part of a package of measures, such as condom use, delayed sexual debut and reduced numbers of partners to better enable prevention. It's also necessary that circumcision's limitations are out there too. For example, in the West where circumcision takes place in clinical settings, there is still a two to ten per cent risk of complications. Replicated in a mass programme where clinical facilities are not so readily available you have the potential for creating another large-scale health problem. Furthermore, there's a possibility circumcision might encourage riskier sexual behaviour - especially if men have unprotected sex while the wound hasn't healed properly.

Returning to race, one question these observations raised is why are circumcision programmes being proposed for an African context? In the West HIV infection rates are declining, except in the USA, and yet no similar programme is proposed here. Plus viewed in the context of the racist history of circumcision in America, doesn't its promotion as a means of managing the sexuality of black African men - even for the laudable aim of tackling the spread of HIV - at least look a little politically suspect?

This isn't to say Marie and Michael are suggesting efforts at HIV prevention in Africa are a neo-colonial conspiracy. After all, the science behind circumcision might eventually prove robust. But it is worth reflecting that there exists something of a circumcision lobby in America and can therefore be seen as a "solution" looking for a problem. This and related questions came up in the subsequent discussion. Who are promoting circumcision? What agencies are working together? Why is it being pushed over other preventative programmes? How is it finding favour among key sponsors, who more often than not are not native to the countries affected?

Whatever the case, this paper demonstrates the difficult political questions that continue to bedevil the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Saturday, 3 October 2009

New Anti-BNP Leaflet Hits the Streets

Members of North Staffs Against Racism and Fascism (NorSCARF) were out last weekend leafleting around Abbey Green ward in Stoke-on-Trent. For readers unfamiliar with the political topography of The Potteries, Abbey Green is one of two wards in the city (the other is Bentilee) where all three of its council seats are occupied by the BNP. NorSCARF has targeted the Abbey in this instance because two of the BNP's leading members sit as councillors here. As the Richard and Judy of the far right (or should that be Joseph and Magda?), Alby (pictured) and Ellie Walker are the friendly aryan faces of the fluffy, community-minded BNP (see here). And it just so happens at next year's council elections Alby is up for re-election. If the good people of the Abbey turf him out it would constitute a very heavy body blow to the BNP indeed.

Here is the text of the latest NorSCARF leaflet, with some comments on the end.

Abbey Green Matters - A NorSCARF Bulletin

BNP Oppose New Children's Centre

THREE BNP COUNCILLORS are opposing a new Sure Start Children's Centre at Hillside primary school and in the process are whipping up fears and misinformation.

The Sure Start centre will provide childcare, support for mothers and a baby clinic, and will join a growing list of successful Sure Start centres in the city.

The BNP is opposing the Children's Centre because they claim that mothers will be given drugs support. There are no plans for any drugs support at this centre or at any of the others around the city. But even if there were, surely helping people to come off drugs is sensible?

Not for the BNP. They would prefer to punish all local young mothers for reasons of political dogma.

The BNP have previously proposed cutting funding for the Citizens; Advice Bureau in case it benefits immigrants. They have also opposed new schools and even a new health centre.

It's about time we got rid of the BNP and got ourselves some councillors who will actually help local people.

Curfews, Long Skirts and Matrons: The BNP Policy for Women

SINGLE YOUNG MOTHERS should be refused any benefit and placed in homes run by matrons. That's the shocking motion to be discussed at the forthcoming BNP conference. It calls for these mothers to have "a curfew of approx 9pm, a dress code which states skirts must come to at least the knees and no cleavage to be on show. Failure to comply with the homes' rules will result in the mother being sent to prison, and the baby being taken into care".

This is just the latest BNP attack on women.

Last year a leading BNP organiser dismissed rape as "simply sex". "Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal", he wrote. "To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence. A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched".

The BNP do not believe that women should have an equal right to work. A leading BNP officer recently told the BBC that the answer to the recession was for women to give up work.

It is no surprise then that so many women reject the divisive and aggressive politics of the BNP.

Comments
To start off with this leaflet is much better than the standard "don't vote for nasty Nazis" fare pushed by Unite Against Fascism and Britain's largest revolutionary socialist party. Years of churning out propaganda concentrating on Holocaust denial and the like has done little to resist the rising tide of BNP support, nor has it inspired enough voters in other parties to turn out. The approach here, combining a pertinent local issue and a (proposed) national policy exposes the BNP more effectively than UAF's moralistic appeals to people's better nature. It's no accident NorSCARF's new *political* approach owes more to its relationship with Searchlight than the SWP's anti-fascist front group. And I wouldn't be surprised if it goes down well in the Abbey. When I was last out canvassing round the ward there were a fair few young mums prepared to give the BNP a punt.

There are a few minor criticisms that can be made - bearing in mind NorSCARF is a broad anti-fascist organisation and not a simon pure socialist outfit. Firstly, it was perhaps unfortunate this leaflet went out shortly before Gordon Brown himself announced plans for (compulsory?) state supervision of 16-17 year old mums. Second, attacking the BNP for opposing new schools overlooks the fact a good chunk of the city are too - for the right reasons. The new schools in question are going to be the government's flagship academy scheme. If the BNP see a bandwagon, they'll try their damnedest to jump on it. Lastly, the leaflet calls on voted to elect "councillors who will actually help local people". As Labour are best poised to win back Abbey Green, it's unfortunate their likely candidate is of the lowest calibre possible. See this, for example.

But in all NorSCARF are on the right track.

Sunday, 6 September 2009

Hardcore Profits

Last Sunday's Hardcore Profits was must see viewing for anyone interested in the commodification of sex in contemporary capitalism. In Hardcore Profits, "Tim Samuels explores the rising pervasiveness of pornography, discovers how new technology is changing porn, and questions porn films' reluctance to portray safe sex on screen." All of this is linked to money - big money. According to a guestimate by the American porn industry's trade publication, Adult Video News, its value was somewhere in the region of $13bn. That was three years ago.

Samuels reveals there are some surprising names with their snouts in the porn trough. In Britain Sky and Virgin take a cut from individual subscriptions to the adult channels doing the rounds on cable and digital. So when Jacqui Smith's hubby went on an evening's fact-finding mission with Dirty Debutantes, chances are some taxpayers' cash ended up in Rupert Murdoch's pockets. Google and other search engines also trouser porn money through adsense and preferential rankings. Samuels also brands the biggest purveyors of porn in Britain happen to be wholesome family-friendly companies like Vodafone and 3. According to an industry expert he interviewed, the mobile porn market is worth $1.7bn with projections of it rising to $4.6bn by 2012. On top of all this the big hotel firms make a packet from the pay-per-view porn they pipe to their rooms. And lastly Visa and Mastercard make a healthy margin from charging porn firms a premium on internet-based card transactions. According to Scott Cotman, CEO of the free PornTube site, this amounts to 1.5% extra over and above what straight businesses have to pay.

With this cash sloshing around Wall St have started showing an interest. Samuels meets up with Francis Koenig, founder of the Adultvest hedge fund. It is unique because it only invests in the adult entertainment industry. Since launching in 2005 the fund has - according to Koenig - been catapulted into the top quartile for investment returns. Asked about who has invested in the fund Koenig keeps mum. This isn't surprising - the two funds he runs require $100k and $1million as base investment. The steep entry level rules out everyone but wealthy individuals and institutional investors.

The influx of big money and the demands for large returns has led to unforseen social consequences, quite apart from those traditionally flagged up by feminists. The health of pornographic actors frequently comes second to the aesthetics of fucking. In short condoms are out because sex looks better without them. When three female stars contracted HIV in 2004, the studios adopted but quickly discarded condom use (Wicked Pictures remains the only studio where condoms are mandatory). The only precaution the industry has taken is compulsory monthly testing for all (registered) performers. One actor, Randy Spears, notes this is woefully inadequate. The big customers of porn - the hotels that buy it for pay-per-view for example, could make a difference by bulk ordering porn that promotes safe sex. And yet they don't, leading Spears to conclude another HIV outbreak is likely (in fact there was a small scare this June).

In the age of globalisation unforseen consequences can spread well beyond the porn sets of southern California. Samuels takes off to Ghana and finds how porn is invading even the most remote of villages. He meets up with Earnest who's trying to promote abstinence-based HIV prevention. But we soon find out he's competing with mobile porn cinemas that get hauled around the countryside. According to interviews with some of the villagers this has led to an increased frequency of rapes and marital breakdown. If this wasn't bad enough the Ghanese AIDS commission sees the corrosive effect American porn has on its work. In the opinion of its director general, one legacy of colonialism and Western hegemony is an acceptance of the superiority of its cultural artifacts and norms over Ghanese customs. So when they see Americans having sex without condoms young men are likely to follow suit. Samuels speaks to Kofi and Frank, who are HIV positive. In the absence of sex education they learned about it via porn and did not pick up on the importance of condoms.

Unfortunately Samuels' report slightly disappoints on three counts. While the big firms are asked to provide statements on the place porn occupies in their business (Visa, Mastercard, etc. gave non-answers and empty spin) they are not challenged about the more testy issue of condom use. Second, little is given over to the misogyny underlying mainstream male-oriented straight porn. It is touched on occasionally in the discomfort felt by one actress and the objectifying/dehumanising reduction of women to genitals and sex acts, but more could easily be made of it. This is just as critical an issue as condom use - if porn is the main sex education received by millions of young men then it will affect their perception of and behaviour toward women. Third there is a question of timing. It would appear the film was shot before the economic crisis kicked in early Autumn last year. Since then the porn industry has proven to be anything but recession-proof. According to this piece in the LA Times, the recession has driven traffic away from DVDs and paysites to free porn. The result has been falling revenue for the studios, fewer productions, declining rates for work and reduced hours for performers. If you're a top-ranking star like Brandy Taylor (pictured) you should be okay. But for those who are not there is an increasing competition among models, a competition favouring women willing to do more and more extreme performances. Despite this porn is more pernicious than ever. Ironically economic crisis is now driving its expansion as the main players fight for their share of the free to view market by offering up more material for nothing.

These criticisms might be unfair. After all I haven't seen the second part of the documentary yet. But whatever conclusions the film has reached, it offers a glimpse into a complex world socialists need to get a handle on.

Sunday, 23 August 2009

Mass Effect and Ideology

Since becoming a X-Box widower I've seen some contemporary games up close. It's all very strange for me as I haven't played any game at length apart from Civ III for about 10 years. And things have moved on from the PlayStation haven't they? I can remember marveling at the scratchy digitised speech and four colours onscreen my beloved ZX Spectrum struggled to creak out of its chip set. And now? The advances are mind-blowing. But anyway, one of the games CBC has enjoyed playing is Bioware's 2007 masterpiece Mass Effect. This science fiction role playing game casts you as a gun-toting space warrior out to save the galaxy.

As a role-playing game Mass Effect comes with a mythos every bit as complete as Star Trek or a Games Workshop offering. Set in 2183 the Human Systems Alliance is a newcomer to the community of galactic civilisations, known collectively as Citadel Space after the alien megastructure that is the seat of interstellar governance. Being something of an upstart species, there is tension between humanity and the Turians - who fought a very brief war after a bungled first contact. And there's some generalised resentment among humans toward the rest of the Citadel races for keeping us on a leash and not according us full member status on the community's governing council. However, when Saren, a Turian spectre turns rogue the council are forced to raise Shepard (you) to spectre status and go after him. During the course of the pursuit it becomes clear Saren is involved in a plot that could wipe out all organic life in the galaxy. It falls to Shepard to stop him and his allies.

Mass Effect was extremely well-received by the gaming press and it's not difficult to see why. With game mechanics that owe more to table top games than its console-based brethren, a morality system that effects plot outcomes in the game, satisfying combat sequences with very big guns and an immersive story line it is, as one reviewer noted, like playing a novel. It is so good that it can be entertaining to watch as well. The BC household is definitely looking forward to the release of the sequel early next year.

Some reviewers have noted comments on contemporary issues within the game. One of your antagonists is a species called the Geth - a race of mechanoids who rebelled against their creators, the Quarians. On top of this the game's deadly threat comes from the Reapers, a race of ancient psychotic killing machines bent on galactic-level genocide. Through these dangerous enemies Mass Effect is able to tick the artificial intelligence anxiety box. And there is racism too. Human xenophobes are not keen on alien races and there is a growing chauvinist movement back on Earth. It's up to the player whether one endorses these sentiments in their dealings with other races or challenge the casual racists they encounter.

However the science fiction is pretty derivative. Ships can traverse the galaxy in a blink of an eye thanks to mass relays (i.e. jump gates), and a major plot point involves the fate of a prehistoric but extinct spacefaring race, the Protheans.

Another (depressing) derivative feature carried over from the likes of Star Trek and Babylon 5 is the preponderance of humanoid species. This is the most obvious place where ideology starts rearing its ugly head. It signifies a poverty of imagination - after all, while TV science fiction has real physical limits on what aliens can look like that isn't the case in video games. There is zero appreciation of scientific speculation on extra-terrestrial life. The alien races are also manifestations of particular human traits in much the same way the aliens of Star Trek are. The Taurians are conscientious public servants. The Salarians are technological fetishists. All Hanar are devout. The Krogan are impulsive and ultra-violent.

By far the most questionable set of essentialist aliens are the Asari. A lot of science fiction has a problematic relationship with gender and Mass Effect is no different. The Asari are a race of blue-skinned asexual humanoids, but just so happen to have the hegemonic hour glass-perfect bodies of human women. Their culture is communicative and based on cooperation and consensus, not competition. They have an ability to empathise with others and are exceedingly spiritual beings. I don't know what concerns me more - that a mass media artifact like Mass Effect can get away with portraying women in a one-dimensional fashion or that those who conceived the Asari saw it fit to brand hegemonic femininity alien. It's also worth noting that apart from humans, all the dozens of characters you encounter from the other races (apart from the Rachni queen and your Quarian squad member, Tali'Zorah) are male. And yet it's only the femininity of the Asari that elicits comment.

Then there is the persistence of capitalism. Mass Effect takes the ideology of capitalism as natural and eternal to absurd extremes. Not only is the Human Systems Alliance a science fiction extension of what we have today replete with rogue corporations (Blade Runner, Alien), crime syndicates and mercenaries, but every alien society is organised around production for profit too. This only serves to feed back into the natural/eternal assumptions basic to all capitalist ideology.

A final couple of points refer to the view of history underpinning the game mythos. Mass Effect is as far from Civ III as any other action-based role playing video game, but both are premised on struggle, albeit struggle between essentialised and homogenous civilisations. In Civ they were human, here they are different species. But in both cases they neatly map onto the tropes deployed in nationalist and chauvinist thinking. Second this is combined with our old discredited 19th century friend - the Great Man view of history. Commander Shepard is one of these great wo/men and on your shoulders alone rests the fate of the entire galaxy. Everyone else is a no mark buffeted by your historical wake. This is a Randian world where social complexity scarcely gets a look in and the cult of individuality is fetishised.

That said, without all this wouldn't video games be boring?

One last point. The left has no problem reviewing films, TV shows and books to draw out the ideologies curled up inside them, but when was the last time you saw a video game get a critical review in one of our publications? As ever I fear the left have been slow off the mark. Video games are now bigger than the film industry. Famously in its first week Grand Theft Auto IV grossed over $500 million. Every day millions of people play games with crude ideological excrescences that wouldn't appear so unabashed in film or TV. The odd scathing polemic in say Socialism Today wouldn't have the global games industry quaking in its boots, but it could help us be more alive to ways some of the baser capitalist ideologies continue to be transmitted.

Saturday, 23 May 2009

Utopian Bodies

At the regular Keele sociology seminar on Tuesday, Mark Featherstone presented a condensed version of a book chapter looking at utopian bodies. Mark has written extensively for the burgeoning field of utopian studies, which has proven to be an insightful and interesting branch of ideology critique. Utopian thinking and utopian politics has a long pedigree in Western thought stretching right back to the ancient Greeks. This history has seen all manner of weird utopias proposed but they all share two key principles. Utopias are spatially and temporally closed to the outside world, and internally they are socially identical, which is enforced by overt regulation or an implicit ideology. Furthermore utopias come in two flavours: the conservative (i.e. rigidly hierarchical) or egalitarian.

There is a further assumption undergirding utopian thought. As perfect communities utopias rest upon an orderly person with their orderly personalities. In pre-modern utopias this was part of Aristotle's great chain of being, of uniting the micro with the macro scales in one essential unity, which is exemplified by DaVinci's sketch of the Vitruvian Man (pictured). However this cosmic unity (which was carried over into mediaeval thought) started breaking down with the advent of modern thought. Rather than one vast ribbon tying all the elements of creation together, science, philosophy and sociology disassembled social phenomena and demonstrated how it was constituted out of the social relations obtaining between people. This argument can be observed most forcefully in Emile Durkheim's sociology, and particularly his The Division of Labour in Society. Durkheim was not the first to use the body/organism metaphor to describe society, but (along with Marx) he was a pioneer of theorising the consequences of the growing division of labour, a process leading to greater social differentiation, a decomposition of 'traditional' relationships and the formation of new norms and values. However the rate of breakdown can and does outpace the speed of recomposition, leading to outbreaks of anomie.

Contemporaneously Freud's development of psychoanalysis undid the essential unity of personhood and offered an explanation of ordered and disordered bodies. Personalities were not coherent wholes, they were made up of the chaotic and impulsive id, the tyrannical ideal personhood of the superego and the mediating element, the ego. Later on Jacques Lacan reinterpreted these core Freudian concepts - the id became 'the real', the feeling, the phenomenology of one's body that cannot be communicated. The ego was translated into the imaginary, combining the functions of ego and superego and presenting a representational sense of self-image. Therefore the id and real denote the unrepresented (and unrepresentable) while ego and the imaginary refer to (internal/external) representations of the unified self.

This is where utopianism comes back in - the ego and the imaginary represents a utopian body form shaped by the ideologies, discourses, hegemonies and technologies of the body circulating around society. In the West this has always involved a privileging of order of disorder, male over female bodies and the ideal body beautiful as opposed to the real lived body that breakdowns and dies ('excremental bodies', as Foucault put it). To show up the persistence of utopian bodies Mark turned to their treatment in ancient Greece (and their representations today), the New Testament, the French Revolution, Soviet, Nazi and the contemporary capitalist body.

Beginning with the Greeks, Plato's Phaedo describes the death of Socrates, which emphasises the transient nature of the flesh and the transcendental soul. But the more familiar image of the classical body is handed down to us from the Polykleitos sculptures - the Doryphoros, Discophoros and Diadumenos and which more recently has resurfaced in 300. In this images the Greek body is always upright - it is a phallic body but is denuded of sexuality thanks to the diminutive nature of their genitals. Instead the phallus is transferred to the utopian (male) body, and is distinct from the feminised depictions of Dionysus, women and slaves.

Similar themes appear in The New Testament. Mark's reading of Corinthians has distinct parallels with the Phaedo. The body is to be disciplined by the soul to ensure, upon death, communion with the mystical (utopian) body of Christ. Here the soul is the source and guarantor of purity and self-identity whereas the body is both corruptible and corrupting - hence the reason for eschewing the flesh altogether.

The utopian body of the French revolution drew on all these themes. It was incorruptible, upright, virtuous and selflessly dedicated to the revolutionary public. Common imagery of the time depicted Hercules locked in combat with the Hydra - Hercules' utopian body condenses revolutionary value, the Hydra symbolises the multi-headed aristocratic conspiracy. The enemies of the revolution were variously portrayed as feminine, as animals, and as feminised animals promiscuously engaged in sex.

The imagery of the USSR under high Stalinism incorporated these themes. The explosion of new art in the early soviet republic (for example, El Lissitzky's New Man) conceived humanity as an abstraction, rejecting the constraints of lived bodies. It was the art appropriate to an industrial utopia in which mechanism exists as a possibility. But as the power of the bureaucracy consolidated its hold over post-revolutionary Russia, these artistic sensibilities became married to the new technocratic order. The body as abstraction became the body as motor, the robot worker unencumbered by fleshy limits, the worker that founds its propagandistic expression in the figure of Stakhanov and the Stakhanovite movement. The flipside of the Stakhanovite body was 'Oblomovism' - the decadent, indolent, work shy and idle bodies that were said to represent a cultural threat to socialist construction. The corrective mechanism was the gulag.

If Soviet utopian bodies were geared around work, Nazi bodies were all about combat. For example, the neo-classicism of Arno Breker's sculptures emphasise the martial qualities of the (male) utopian body. The conservative German writer, Ernst Junger chimed with prevailing Nazi hegemony by writing about near-painless superhuman soldiers that in many ways prefigured Terminator cyborgs. This celebration of hyper-masculinity and glorification of war was the Nazi and conservative response to a perceived masculine crisis of the Weimar years, both in terms of a flourishing cultural liberalism and the emasculation of the Fatherland at the hands of the allied powers. These utopian bodies were actively differentiated from the feminine and the decadent, corrupting bodies of the homosexual and Jew.

Post 1945 liberal democratic political culture embraced human rights and explicitly committed itself to saving excremental bodies. This however is undermined at every turn by the relentless exploitation of workers' bodies by capital and the hegemonic status of the body as worker, consumer and marketing device. The contemporary utopian body is ageless, flawless, cybernetic and networked. The excremental body of now is not eliminated, but is to be pitied (recipients of charity, impoverished workers overseas) or condemned (chavs, the overweight).

The most interesting point fleshed out in the discussion was the place of gender. All of Mark's examples are conspicuously male bodies - are there female utopian bodies? Does utopian thinking demand they are disciplined in similarly gendered ways? Mark replied these representations tended to fall into either 'mother' or 'loose', but required more thorough investigation both in and of themselves and their interaction with male utopian bodies. For example, how does this play out in pornographic culture? Does it uphold the utopian body? Another interesting point was on the depiction of utopian bodies throughout history - they are a-relational. They stand alone because the utopian body fights shy of contagion - individuals relating to one another, especially outside sanctified structures, run the risk of degeneration. Hence the proliferation of cultural organisations under the 20th century's totalitarianisms.

Returning to gender, on reflection there is an important point that comes to mind. Utopian studies offer a interesting angle to begin a sociology of the body throughout the ages, but the gendering of women as an undesirable other to the male utopian body is a theme long explored and critiqued by feminists. For example, is utopian studies really saying anything new when it talks about the marginal status of female bodies in ancient Greece and Nazi Germany?

Sunday, 17 May 2009

Gastric Bands and the Body Beautiful

A couple of weeks ago I attended a paper by Samantha Murray of Macquarie University, Sydney. Her piece, 'Gastric Banding and the Trans-En Abled Body', looked at the cultural anxieties surrounding weight gain and obesity and the discourse that justifies medical solutions to "the epidemic". Sam's arguments were interspersed with reflections on her own experience as someone who has had a gastric band fitted.

Sam started with a short description of the cultural framing of obesity. Everyone is aware of the discourse of bodily aesthetics that informs the vast dieting industry. For women shedding those pounds it is about acquiring a desirable body. For men the emphasis is on shedding the feminine flesh and becoming masculine. The medicalisation of obesity feeds on this and in turn gives it legitimacy. Obesity is coded as an infectious public health hazard, and in extreme cases requires medical intervention to normalise fat bodies. In Australia the favoured method is gastric banding, a procedure that has become increasingly popular in Britain and the US thanks to high profile patients like Sharon Osbourne and Fern Britton (a detailed description of gastric banding can be found here). Gastric banding is able to effect rapid weight loss and convey an appearance of a healthy and normal body. It is also an operation that is theoretically reversible, but one that is ethically dubious - as we shall see.

Prior to her surgery Sam herself had suffered with a series of pathologies that, in the opinion of her doctors, were caused by and in turn reinforced excessive weight gain. She however was unconvinced by this medicalisation of he weight. But after going through all the familiar weight loss plans without much progress they persuaded her on the grounds of health (she suffered a great deal of pain and exhaustion) to have a band implanted, which went ahead in October 2005. Over the following six months she lost 40kg and has continued to lose weight. So from the medical point of view, a success But one thing Sam wasn't prepared for were the psychological effects of a rapidly shrinking body. She spoke about seeing people in the street who made a point of congratulating her about the weight loss, and the difficulty of transitioning to strict new eating habits.

Turning to what she accurately dubs 'medico-moral' discourse, the normative and the medical work together to produce an anxiety about the body. They contrive to conceptualise fatness as something that exists beyond individual control and is used to code bodies as morally weak, completely ignoring the diverse literature on the complex psychological causes of obesity and emerging evidence pointing to the role of genetics. This takes place against a backdrop where fat exists as the last acceptable prejudice, and one that has provoked the development of fat acceptance movements. These not only lobby for the rights of fat people (for example, in favour of recognising obesity as a disability) but have contributed to the questioning of the normative body - a questioning reinforced by Sam's experience.

Banding is positioned by medico-moral discourse as an unproblematic technology that can enhance and preserve aesthetic appeal. It is sold as an operation that can be performed through keyhole surgery (no scars!) and can be manipulated post-operatively as the patient adjusts to life with the band. All the before and after imagery imply a seamless and linear transition from a fat to a slimmer body, but conspicuously fail to mention the after effects. Sam experienced gall stones (leading to the removal of her gall bladder), a scarred oesophagus (thanks to repeated acid reflux), chest pains, vomiting, and hair loss due to depleted nutrient levels. Despite the marketing of banding as a route to good health, in Sam's case a slimmer body has not meant a healthier one.

On top of this comes a new diet regimen. For four weeks after the operation one's diet consists solely of fluids and purees before moving on to small and soft foods. Because the passage to the stomach is restricted eating has to be carefully paced between and during meals. Therefore the tyranny of the diet returns with renewed vengeance, on pain of frequent and potentially embarrassing trips to the bathroom. If that wasn't bad enough only foods with little nutritional benefit can easily get through the band - medical instruction more or less advises against healthy eating! This however is ignored by medico-moral discourse which prefers to code patients' "lapses" into bad diets as a manifestation of their uncontrollable food addiction.

Taken together this calls into question monolithic notions of health and what constitutes a healthy body. If we accept fat bodies are disabled (if not physically, then at least socially), and that gastric banding is marketed as a strategy for "enabling" them, for Sam we have reached the advent of a 'trans-enabled' body. Far from overcoming disablement gastric banding encourages the internalisation of disability. Successful procedures present a normative body to the world which is coded as 'healthy' while behind the facade, bariatric enabling calls its disabling opposite into being. Sam for example may have suffered a set of medical problems that have disappeared as her weight loss has got underway, but in their place have come other ailments. Furthermore medical practitioners prefer to close their eyes to the complicated consequences of their procedure. They will remove a band if it has damaged the stomach or has produced other serious complications, but it is nigh on impossible for a surgeon to remove one simply because the patient wants the operation reversed. Having spoken to large numbers of fellow patients, Sam is not aware of one reversal of this type. This itself is unsurprising seeing as it's tantamount to practitioners admitting to failure.

Therefore, despite the promise of being liberated from the fat, gastric banding imposes its own set of social constrictions.

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Filipinas and Catholicism in Israel

It's high time some sociology was written about around here! Today's lunch time sociology seminar at Keele heard from Claudia Liebelt with her paper, 'The Mama Mary of the White City's Black Underside: Reflections on the Filipina 'Block Rosary Crusade' in Tel Aviv, Israel'. This was an exploration of religion and identity in the growing Filipina domestic worker community in Israel (the majority of whom are young women). Claudia spent several months with these women documenting their lives, daily rituals and practices.

The diaspora of Philippine nationals is somewhere around the eight million mark, and is scattered all over the globe. The majority are female and a good proportion of them are well educated, but they tend not to fill highly skilled occupations. Instead the fall into low-waged work that is often insecure and can involve their abuse by unscrupulous employers. In Israel underpayment, passport confiscation, and harassment by immigration officials along with gruelling workloads is the lot of many Filipina migrants. But they are not passive vessels content to let the daily grind wash over them. They have developed strategies of coping and resistance, which, for the group studied by Claudia, was very heavily coloured by religious belief.

The Philippines were ruled by Spain from the mid 1560s to 1898, when it was ceded to the USA after its defeat in the Spanish-American war. Over the 300 year period the archipelago was drawn under a unitary authority and was more roundly developed than Spain's other colonial possessions. Waves of missionaries were drawn to the islands, who in their turn established a network of educational and medical institutions. This way Catholicism was able to strike down very deep roots - today some 81 per cent still list that as their religious affiliation (according to the CIA World Factbook), which is remarkable considering Islam reached those shores three centuries prior to Magellan's expedition.

Many commonplace religious practices are not necessarily 'officially' sanctified, which is the case with the block rosaries. For the group studied here, this was the primary manifestation of their belief. The workers live in the southern districts of Tel Aviv, typically in three-room flats occupied by up to 10 people (this overcrowding is relieved only by workers spending much of their weeks at the employers' homes). Their statuette of the Virgin Mary ("Mama Mary") travels from home to home, taking with it the block rosary prayer meet. The meets themselves are very crowded affairs. Upwards of 25 people can show up. When they enter, they pay their respects to Mama Mary, who is now placed prominently on a home made altar alongside other iconography and paraphernalia. Once everyone has entered the meeting and settled down, the prayers begin. Typically they pray for their families, the health of their employers, safe travel, and the overcoming of their problems and difficulties. The prayer leader then reads an extract from a holy text, passes around the rosary beads, and follows this with a reading from the lives of Mary and Jesus. And it proceeds over and over again, finally ending with a farewell prayer to Mama Mary. Now the prayers are over the workers can help themselves to the generous buffet and share news and gossip. The leader of the group has a link to the community of Catholics in Tel Aviv, and shares parish news and upcoming events.

As befitting an icon, a certain life is attributed to Mama Mary. Ever since the statue was acquired by the group (September 2007 on), her "moods" have been the subject of group speculation. For example, on one occasion 'Gina' dropped the statue and broke something on its leg. Afterwards she herself experienced leg pains until it was fixed. Likewise miracles are acknowledged as the work of Mama Mary. One woman who had spent seven years in Israel had been having trouble with her daughter, who remained behind. She had sent back $1,000 payable to a recruiter who was going to find her daughter work overseas. However, once the money had been handed over the daughter had changed her mind, having fallen in love with a local boy. She prayed to Mama Mary that she would again change her mind and agree to work in Italy and, on this occasion, her prayer came true. As thanks she gave the statue an embroidered coat that it would wear during its procession through Tel Aviv's neighbourhoods.

For those familiar with Philippine processions as busy evangelising affairs may be surprised to find their analogues in Tel Aviv are just the opposite. The procession from one flat to the next is low key and eschews attention, preferring to stick to the dark back alleys of the city (if the next destination is beyond walking distance, or, the weather isn't suitable, then it will take a minibus). In one sense, in their eyes these processional activities sacralise their urban space, one which many of them liken to the latter day Gomorrah in the Holy Land. But the main effect is inward, on the members of the block rosary themselves.

The Filipina workers are from all corners of the Philippines, but what they do have in common from the outset is their religious belief and gender. Mama Mary gives them a focus to gather around, a means of tying together their disparate experiences, and form a solidarity against what could otherwise be an atomised existence. Hosting Mama Mary is a privilege as it blesses the home and the hosts it resides in, but more than that it is also an icon underwritten by nostalgia - prayer meetings offer an opportunity to collectively reflect on the homes and families left behind, which is assisted by the food made available at the buffets. It provides a meaning for being in Israel beyond the need for money and confers a religious value on their care-giving work - as Mama Mary looks after and pities the women, so they too pity their charges, at the same time viewing their work as a sacrifice of their youth so others may benefit. Indeed, it can be read as a way of transmitting patriarchal values in a social space inhabited solely by women.

As far as I was concerned, this type of study shows how useful sociology can be for those of us involved in socialist politics. As a case study it has its own set of unique properties, but there are generalities that can be distinguished that are common to most migrant groups - namely the importance attached to a particular set of rituals and practices that confirms the validity of their selves to themselves, and generates a sense of "we-ness" that gives them the strengths to face the challenge of the social contexts confronting them. These solidarities do not necessarily have to be religious, but in most cases of migrant populations in Western Europe, they have tended to assume that character. If socialists want to work with and influence these groups then it must be done with tact and sensitivity.

Friday, 26 December 2008

Girls of the Playboy Mansion

It is said that "respectable" men when confronted with their collection of Playboy magazines claim they "buy it for the articles". Alas, no such argument is available for Girls of the Playboy Mansion (or The Girls Next Door, as it is known in the US). In the UK it is screened on E! channel, the international purveyor of TV chintz, celebrity hagiography and conspicuous consumption. If there is a television show worse than Girls, chances are it will be on the E! schedule.

Each episode follows a familiar and well-worn format. Hugh Hefner's three girlfriends, Holly Madison (until recently, "Hef's" girlfriend number one), Bridget Marquardt (#2), and Kendra Wilkinson (former girlfriend no. three) typically run about, exclaim everything to be "awesome!", show a bit of skin, and have a party. Their lives seem a relentless round of shopping, meeting the latest Playmates, eating out, playing pranks or buying presents for Hefner and going on tour; in other words, lives lived completely without effort. Their existence outside of the 24 hour party narrative the show constructs sometimes receives the skim treatment. Holly does the occasional bit of sub-editing for Playboy; Bridget has a masters in broadcast journalism and has appeared in several celebrity-based "reality" shows; and Kendra "works" by inhabiting a similar niche in the TV ecology as Bridget. All three have regularly posed for spreads in Playboy, which scarcely rank as drudgery.

Likewise with Sex and the City, Girls displays a universe in which class and work is bleached out by opulence. But unlike SATC, this bourgeois effortlessness extends to Hefner too. The impression this supposedly behind-the-scenes look into life at the mansion gives is of a man who spends his days draped in silken dressing gowns and his captain's hat while selecting what photographs the next issue of the magazine should feature. The really interesting stuff, such as the political economy of Hefner's (apparently faltering) empire never gets a look-in. The nearest we got to a "true" look at the operation was during a fifth season episode when Holly candidly revealed the Barbie-like criteria required for an anniversary playmate.

Girls is interesting because of the demographic it aims for. The show does feature nudity from time to time, but it is primarily about selling image and lifestyle to young women. Anyone hoping for titillation are guaranteed disappointment. But for those who stick with it, they can expect exaggerated displays of conspicuous femininity and consumerism. The TV environment the "girls" (aged 29, 35 and 23 respectively) inhabit sees them regress to infantalised states, with regard to their styles of speech, their emphasis on play over work, and in their relationship to Hefner. Needless to say, this doesn't convey the most empowering of messages. It suggests that if women conform to the slim-but-large-breasted body type, your best bet at success is to play up your femininity, flaunt your body and submit to the heterosexual ideology of the male gaze. This is where the value of being a woman lies.

This neatly synergises with the rest of the Playboy empire, and the world of pornography at large. The kinds of subjectivity and body image Girls encourage not only helps develop the habitus appropriate for the incoming generation of women entering the porn and glamour industries, but also reinforces the conforming pressures on women to serve the economy of heterosexual male desire heavily shaped by the images it promotes.

Girls is shamelessly trashy, but far from harmless. Disinfect your TV after viewing.

Wednesday, 17 December 2008

Playing God

When I'm not doing university work or party stuff my relaxation time is divided up between blogging, flapjacks, reading, oatmeal and raisin cookies and (occasionally) the classic seven-year old computer game, Civilisation III. For readers unfamiliar with the game, the player begins at the dawn of human history with a single settler. You found a city, build military units, erect an infrastructure, build more settlers, found more cities, and so on. For you to succeed in winning the game the player needs to successfully combine the roles of chancellor, scientist, diplomat, cultural patron, and general to ensure you retain that competitive edge over your rivals.

Assuming almost God-like powers over your civilisation, building an empire over 6,000 years of human history can be completely absorbing. Each victory condition requires different strategies to win, and all the opponents are pursuing their particular take on world domination. You might want to build cultural artefacts and great wonders in peace, but you'd better be prepared for enemy armies snaking over your borders ...

What is interesting about Civilisation III are the things it says about the nature of the nation, its gendered division of labour, the character of history and bourgeois consciousness. Who knew computer games could brim over with all manner of not-so-obvious ideological goodies?

Beginning first with gender, the first point of interest is the graphic representation of population in the game. These come under two broad types: the units and the citizenry. The former are characterised by their mobility and manipulability. There are dozens of different units capable of particular functions and tied to a certain level of technological development. Workers and settlers respectively build infrastructure and found cities, while military units provide the means to defend the home territory or attack the neighbours on land, and later sea and air. The second kind of representation is more or less passive. These are the population of the cities themselves. Here the player directs the citizenry to produce whatever is required, be it units or infrastructure that increases the city’s performance. The population is graphically rendered by a row of faces along the bottom of the city screen indicating whether they’re happy, content, or sad. The player has to ensure that the latter do not outnumber the enthusiastic citizens or the city will fall into civil disorder, ceasing production and tax contributions until the balance has been restored. Finally, the player is provided with five advisers whose responsibility is to oversee the domestic, military, trade, diplomatic, cultural, and scientific aspects of the civilisation. Their function is to provide advice.

What is significant to note is that all units are either male or gender-neutral. The settlers are men with backpacks and the workers go from bare chested loin-clothed slaves to men in dungarees. Up until the discovery of motorised transport all land military units are discernibly male, from Conan the Barbarian look-alikes to extras from Saving Private Ryan. Then they come to be replaced by tanks, mechanised infantry, and modern armour. On the sea and in the air boats and planes represent the military. The only female unit to have appeared in the Civ franchise – the spy – did not survive the cross over from the second to the third game. Women however do have equal graphical representation on the domestic front. The gender split in the cities and on the advisors panel is 50/50. Yet it is the positions occupied by women and men on the latter that is most telling. The domestic advisor, alongside the trade and culture representatives are women. The men on the other hand are responsible for the military, science, and foreign affairs. In terms of the game mechanics, the ‘female aspects’ are concerned with the internal operation of a civilisation whereas the aspects that explicitly attempts to provide a competitive edge over rival nations is the preserve of men. Therefore Civ III sets up a privileged binary in which men perform the active and visible role of exploiting the land, conquering new territories whereas women are effectively privatised and invisible, relegated to the boring tasks of advising the player on the budget or recommending the building of more temples. Yet despite this graphical privileging of men over women, the game engine does not deny the importance of the domestic space. A civilisation with a well-run economy, high cultural rating, and happy populace in all likelihood implies a powerful and technically advanced military. The male/female binary operates at the surface of the game, at the level of graphical representation whereas the actual mechanics itself recognises their dialectical interdependence.

There is a more fundamental ‘forgetting’ that is located in the way the game plays: a repression of conflict. At first glance this appears an absurd claim to make. One of the chief pleasures of Civ III is amassing an army and sending it over the border to annex a juicy city or territory, repulsing the counter-attacks as you go. The game encourages this style of play; three out of the victory conditions depend on military action. But what the game does is perform a ruse similar to that found in bourgeois philosophies of history: conflict is externalised. Using my most recent game as the English as an example, it began at 4000 BC with a settler, a worker, and a scout. The first act was to establish London, then found more cities and eventually colonising/conquering a good proportion of the world’s surface. In that time the English went from spear-chucking cavemen ruled over by a despot to a vast metropolitan democracy with a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Despite these dramatic changes, the civilisation was as English in 2000 BC as it was in 2000 AD; it remained orange on the territorial map, and the rule of Elizabeth I was uninterrupted. In other words, the game evokes a discourse of the nation and constructs it as an essential continuity. This is reinforced by the way the player has to relate to their chosen civilisation. Civ 3 positions the player as a god-like manager who has to guide their nation through 6000 years of history, therefore the essential continuity is also established at this level, through the act of playing the game.

What does this continuity have to do with conflict? Earlier it was noted how the player must manage the happiness of their city dwellers otherwise the city would fall into disorder, temporarily suspending the contribution it makes to the civilisation. From the standpoint of game management, when it does occur it is usually a small inconvenience. However, when the player wishes to progress to a more efficient kind of government the whole civilisation tends to fall into anarchy. This is the most threatening moment in the game. Being unable to adequately feed the population, raise money, or build anything; it is a potentially life-threatening situation that other civilisations could take advantage of. Though order is eventually restored and the game continues, the moment of anarchy is where Civ III’s discourse starts to unravel. Despite trying to repress internal conflict by programming it as a transient phenomena and not allowing it to alter the distinct identity of the civilisation, it nevertheless erupts out of this moment and begins to destabilise the discourse of national continuity that the Civ III game engine evokes. It suggests that not all interests are identical with that of the nation and that there are always struggles that cannot be assimilated by a frame that reads history through nationalist spectacles. Therefore from this ‘inconvenient’ moment in play, the beginnings of a repressed history of patternless conflict between classes and groups begins to infect the national-continuity metaphysic, threatening the discursive foundations on which Civ III is based.

Then there is the standpoint of management itself, which is the distillation of the individual bourgeois point of view. As we have seen time and again in the various posts to this blog on Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, reality confronts the bourgeois individual as an unalterable and alien set of laws that can nevertheless be plotted and responded to to satisfy one's egoistic needs and accumulate capital. All the elements - levels of resources, luxuries, entertainers and specialist citizens, production - are so much objects to be managed. There appears to be no qualitative differences between them. The game engine of Civ III confronts the casual gamer in much the same way as any other computer game - one acquires a feel of the game, an understanding of its mechanics and develops strategies that can makes the best of the situation. But control is illusive (unless you dig into the game code) and there is always a possibility your opponents could turn against your carefully-crafted position, you suffer several nuclear meltdowns, or the world slides into runaway global warming.

All that said, it does not mean one cannot enjoy games like Civ - it just means keeping your wits about you and realising the habits of mind so-called God-games engender ...