by Laurie Penny
Capitalism is just a story. Religion is just a story. Patriarchy and white supremacy are just stories. They are the great organising myths that define our societies and determine our futures, and I believe – I hope – that a great rewriting is slowly, surely under way. We can only become what we can imagine, and right now our imagination is being stretched in new ways. We’re learning, as a culture, that heroes aren’t always white guys, that life and love and villainy and victory might look a little different depending on who’s telling it.
That’s a good thing. It’s not easy – but nobody ever said that changing the world was going to be easy.
I learned that from Harry Potter.
THE VIEW FROM SOMEWHERE
There’s no such thing as a view from nowhere. One night in May 2012, I stayed up until dawn waiting for the night coach to Chicago with a busload of young Occupy activists headed to the G20 conference. I shared a smoke with a gang of lads who weren’t more than twenty, whipping out the recorder from time to time to collect quotes for the piece I was writing. I began to ask them about their politics, their understanding of economics, when one of them, an eighteen-year-old high-school dropout called Sean, whipped out a dollar bill from his pocket, set light to it and used it to light his cigarette. ‘That’s debt, and that’s what we do with it,’ he said. He wasn’t a rich kid, not by anyone’s standards. He owned the clothes he was standing in, a rucksack full of random belongings and half a cigarette. He needed that dollar. But he burned it anyway.
I keep coming back to this moment every time somebody asks how I can possibly claim to be objective when covering radical politics and youth movements as I have been for the past few years. Little Sean burning his money on a Manhattan street corner at two in the morning. His friends laughing and whooping, and me knowing that there’s no way they’d have done that if I hadn’t been there.
Every reporter changes the story. In this case, I was wearing my second-nicest tights and a bit of makeup and holding a recorder, and hence appeared old enough and professionally polished enough to be someone they felt the need to impress – but not so much older and more polished that they didn’t suspect there might be an outside chance of me shagging one of them in the hostel bathrooms later on. I eventually gave up the attempt to disabuse them of this notion and simply watched the peacocking until it became dull.
In fact, a fair few articles I’ve filed from the frontlines of the global protest movements over the past few years have featured young men at moments of crisis and violence lighting up cigarettes dramatically, exhaling meaningfully and saying something cheesy and rousing. This is not a coincidence. This is because, at moments of social interest and in the presence of an averagely attractive woman who seems suddenly very interested in their ideas, your garden-variety young male activist, anarchist or student troublemaker has the tendency to produce a cigarette, light it dramatically and say something they think is deep. They do this because it makes them look cool and sometimes gets them laid. I promise you, I’ve seen it happen. Meanwhile, my straight, male, suit-wearing colleagues, brandishing exactly the same recorder in front of exactly the same interviewees, often come away with suspicious grunts and stock quotes.
I’m only telling you this to make it clear that there’s no such thing as a ‘view from nowhere’ – that weird mainstream media orthodoxy that holds that the perfect journalist, the ideal journalist, can only discover truth by adopting a posture of invisibility, that the perfect journalist should be little more than a human recorder himself – always himself, because this perfect reporter is invariably imagined as male, usually as a middle-class white dude from an English-speaking country. Those are the only people whose race and class and gender and nationality ever get to be ‘invisible’, whose views get to be from ‘nowhere’, because they are everywhere.
That’s just one of the reasons that in-the-field investigative journalism jobs are still given mostly to white men: even if they’ve never visited the country in question and don’t speak the language, editors still trust those people to tell the story over and above local reporters. The net result of all this is that anyone who isn’t a white, heteronormative Western man has to fight doubly hard not to get stuck in an office rewriting press releases . . . on this, trust me.
The whole notion of the ‘view from nowhere’, the idea of completely objective reporting that’s supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic practice in America in particular, is of course utter hogwash. Every view comes from somewhere, and who you are as a writer, reporter, filmmaker or blogger changes how people behave in your presence. It changes what they say to you; it changes whether they speak to you at all. That’s as true for your average white dude reporter as it is for anyone else, and it matters even if you don’t care a bit about equal representation in the media industry. It matters because the fallacy of bland and faceless reporting hurts journalism, by allowing bias and prejudice to masquerade as hands-off objectivity, by giving reporters licence not to be honest about how their outlook affects their output.
When the August riots ripped through London in 2011, it was Guardian journalist Paul Lewis who got the story. The Orwell Prize nominee filed an unbelievable number of reports from every flashpoint in the city, following young people on every side of the fighting on Blackberry Messenger, chasing the chaos on Twitter, sleeping in snatches over those five frightening days. He went out, as he wrote in the days that followed, ‘wearing a hoodie and riding a bicycle; to blend in, and because no one could have got through in a car’ – and that changed the story, too. People who went out dressed as ‘journalists’ that day got their cameras stomped on and their teeth kicked in by kids who knew perfectly well that the vast majority of the mainstream press in Britain was going to call them thugs and hooligans, because they’d been doing so for decades under the guise of objectivity, and these kids just didn’t care any more.
When you put a story together, you change the story. It doesn’t matter if the report you write doesn’t use a single first-person pronoun, if your face doesn’t appear in the video: you’re there, whether you like it or not, and the most dangerous thing any journalist, ‘citizen’ or otherwise, can do is buy into the myth of their own objectivity.
The idea of the standoffish white Western bloke in a tie as the universal journalistic eyepiece was able to develop because we have spent centuries seeing the world purely through the eyes of white men. Right now, that’s changing. Journalism is changing, and the Internet is driving an explosion of media production from people all over the world who understand that subjectivity doesn’t have to mean inaccuracy, especially when you’re telling stories.
Several months after that Chicago bus trip, I saw Sean again, sleeping on the streets of New York, outside Wall Street, in the dead of winter. I remembered how I’d laughed at his trick with the dollar. I remembered how he was so pleased with himself, how he told me about the new life he was hoping to build somewhere on the West Coast where the streets were warm. I understand that for some journalists, impassivity is a virtue, but I believe one cannot maintain it and tell true human stories with any degree of justice. In these anxious times, passivity is a stance in itself – and a dangerous one.
ON QUOTAS AND MERITOCRACY
What we measure reveals what we value. Right now, in business and politics, there’s a movement to measure and promote women’s participation – and an equally energetic movement against it. Much has been made of the new Labour shadow cabinet, which, for the first time in history, is over 50 per cent women. Celebration has been met with outrage: all of these diversity hires must surely be diluting the quality of the work being done. Why not just appoint the best people for the job?
The governments of Britain, America and almost every other Western nation are overwhelmingly male, and they always have been – but every time an argument is made for actively promoting women’s representation, much less instituting any sort of quota system, the backlash is instant and vicious. The same thing happens w
herever women and people of colour begin to take power and achieve recognition in larger numbers – from the boards of major companies to the winners of prestigious literary prizes. From fiction to finance, people with a vested interest in the status quo are fighting against diversity.
Here’s what people say whenever you make a case for gender quotas: it should always be about getting ‘the best person for the job’. Aren’t you worried about people being promoted just because of who they are, not what they can do? Isn’t that discrimination? Isn’t it unfair? The answer to that is: of course it’s unfair. It’s extremely unfair. I’m categorically against people being parachuted into positions of power and influence just because of their gender or the colour of their skin. It’s a social disease. It stops us making full use of our collective capabilities. And that’s precisely why we need ‘diversity hires’. That’s precisely why we need quotas.
In this society, plenty of people are promoted just because of their gender and race. Almost all of those people are white men. What, you think all those Bullingdon boys in government got there by their wits alone? You think the men who make up 81 per cent of the US House of Representatives did not benefit from centuries of racism and sexism, from the promotion of men and white people at the expense of absolutely everyone else?
And yet, across the board, it is women and people of colour who are accused of using their race and gender to get ahead. Let me break it down for you: Winston Churchill used his race and gender to get ahead. Franklin D. Roosevelt used his race and gender to get ahead. So, now we come to it, has Donald Trump. All of these men may have been great at their jobs – but it doesn’t hurt that every time they take the stage, they personify the image of power that still dominates the political imagination in the West and beyond. We would do well to recall that for centuries, there was a quota for representation of men in politics and the press, sometimes legally enforced, sometimes so universally accepted that it didn’t have to be codified in law. The quota was 100 per cent.
We’re doing better these days, but change isn’t coming fast enough. It should not have taken Britain eight decades to appoint the first shadow cabinet that is not majority male. It should not have taken four generations since the first British women gained the vote in 1918 to achieve 30 per cent representation for women in parliament. Hannah Jewell at BuzzFeed estimates that at this rate, getting to equality would take another twenty-two elections – or 110 years.
Many explanations have been put forward for why women aren’t achieving equality in practice when we have it on paper. But the reason that makes most logical sense is the one nobody wants to talk about. It’s simple prejudice. Simple sexism.
Sometimes overt, sometimes backhanded: women of childbearing age are still seen as a ‘maternity risk’ by recruiters, as opposed to men, who it is assumed will be able to have a family without damaging their performance at work. Women make up over 50 per cent of graduates, and tend to match or outperform men in any test where intellect and aptitude are the only measures of success – school examinations, for example. But whenever large numbers of men are involved in the hiring or selection process, women fall behind. Sexism is standing in the way of social change – and quotas are the only proven way to speed the progress of equality.
Time and again, however, we are told that quotas themselves are the worst form of prejudice – that they might prevent ‘the best people for the job’ from being hired. Let’s stop right there. Let’s unpack that assumption. What are you saying when you tell me that a political outfit, for example, that made a point of hiring 50 per cent women, would not be getting ‘the best people for the job’?
You’re saying that the best people for the job aren’t women.
I repeat: if you think that a truly meritocratic society would not be one in which men and women were equally represented, from politics to pop culture, what you’re saying is that men are fundamentally better than women. That might be hard to hear, but we can only confront a thing by naming it honestly. And the fact is that if you truly believe in meritocracy, you must also believe in diversity – any other position is prejudice of the most insidious sort.
The opposition to full equality runs deep. Patriarchy can cope with the notion of a few women in top positions – but not 50 per cent, or anything approaching it. That would mean that women would no longer be a special interest in politics and finance; we would have real power, and men would be obliged to share it with us. When culture reserves only a few places for women in a world of men, women are forced to compete against each other for that smaller space. I vividly remember being told that there was no more room for another young woman at one media organisation that I won’t name – after all, they already had one.
The more women there are in the room, the less we’ll be fighting each other for crumbs, but rather competing with everyone in the room for a fair share of the whole cake.
The backlash to the mere suggestion of a quota system is strong even when mutual interests are at stake. The notion, for example, that corporations pay financial penalties for hiring too few women was rejected by British businesses – but that notion is almost redundant, because they already do pay a penalty. Study after study has shown that firms with more diverse management perform better and deliver bigger profits for their shareholders. In four centuries of exploitation, corporations have been prepared to do anything to protect their bottom line – anything except break up the boys’ club.
The truth is that equality is really scary. The truth is that promoting more women in parliament, on prestigious panels, in the pages of print magazines – anywhere in culture where the number of positions is finite – ultimately means promoting fewer men. There’s no getting around it. This is the part of feminism that actively requires men to give up the special privileges they have enjoyed for centuries in the name of equality and of excellence. It means that men and boys will have to work harder and be better – at least as good as the women going for the same roles. I can understand why that’s a challenging idea. Building a career in politics or the media already feels like the Hunger Games, and who wants to suddenly be competing against a whole new phalanx of contenders who have been honing their skills in adversity, who are hungrier and more determined than you because they’ve had to be?
When accusations of prejudice fall flat, small-c conservatives start in on the concern-trolling. Of course we all want better representation for women, they say, but might that not hurt women’s self-esteem? Might it not be, as Peggy Drexler writes at the Daily Beast, that ‘women whose hard work earns them professional success [find their] achievements are downplayed in the shadow of enforced quotas’?
It’s funny that the only time conservatives concern themselves with women’s self-esteem is when they’re trying to hamper our progress, rather than, say, give us more power, money and influence, all of which, I hear, can be great confidence-boosters. Shall we ask all those Olivers and Marcuses who got their City internships through friends of their fathers how their self-esteem is doing? I imagine it’s doing just fine.
Women are always asked to consider what men will think of us before we take any step towards freedom and justice – but that’s no way to get ahead. Even with greater diversity at work and in politics, society will find a way to undermine women in the workplace; but the more women there are the harder they’ll have to work at it – as well as everything else.
Ultimately, I suspect that it’s not women who need to be worried that their mediocrity might be exposed. It’s not women, after all, who have been over-promoted for centuries. We have been comfortable for generations with mediocre people drifting into positions of influence and power, as long as those mediocre people happen to be white, wealthy and male.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve met a great many white men in media and politics who are stunningly good at their jobs. But they don’t always have to be in order to make the rent. And that’s the difference.
In an ideal world, quotas would not be necessa
ry. In an ideal world, a true meritocracy, the most talented people would be put forward, and that would automatically mean diversity. But quotas may be the only way of achieving, eventually, a world where quotas are obsolete.
We need diversity, and we need it now. We need the best brains and the best hearts in positions of influence to steer us through what may be the most challenging chapter in the long story of the human race. And the fact is that for thousands of years, the potential of at least half of humanity, at every level of society, has been battered by bigotry, squandered on obligatory pregnancy and domestic labour, ground down by violence. We have lost so much, as a society and as a species, by not putting women forward. It’s time to make up for what we’ve lost. It’s time for equality – by any means necessary. It’s not just about fairness. It’s about survival.
THE TRAGEDY OF JAMES BOND
There is something rather tragic about James Bond. In advance of seeing Spectre, the latest instalment in the super-spy sex-murder franchise, I watched several of the old films again.
The experience was like having your forebrain slowly and laboriously beaten to death by a wilting erection wrapped in a copy of the Patriot Act: savage and silly and just a little bit pathetic.
James Bond is a guilty pleasure but one in which the pleasure is increasingly overwhelmed by the guilt. Even Daniel Craig seems to know this. The actor acknowledged, just before the premiere of his latest turn as Bond, that the character ‘is actually a misogynist. A lot of women are drawn to him chiefly because he embodies a certain kind of danger and never sticks around for too long.’ Craig, who has fronted a gender equality campaign affiliated to Amnesty International and appears to be about as unsexist as anyone who has worked in Hollywood for twenty years can be, gives us the Bond the twenty-first century needs: a character who is aware that he is both a relic and a thug and is surprised that he still gets to be the hero.
