McQueen had a sinister view of women’s bodies
Independent on Sunday, 14 February 2010
Fashion isn’t usually a matter of life and death. People who work in fashion take it incredibly seriously, but you have to be a stylist or a fashion editor to care passionately about the cut of a pair of trousers. So I wouldn’t be surprised if many people were baffled last week when they heard fashion industry insiders responding to news of the death of the British designer, Alexander McQueen. Even making allowances for the fact that some of the interviewees knew him personally and were speaking while the shock of his death was still raw, they struggled for a language which would make sense to ordinary human beings; if you weren’t acquainted with McQueen’s work, you might come away with the idea that he put men in bottom-exposing “bumster” trousers – or that he was a wayward genius.
The word used over and over again was “edgy”. McQueen was a showman and fashion editors emerged from his collections stunned by the extravaganza; when you’re basically there to write about clothes, what are you to make of models tottering along the catwalk in ripped dresses, looking like blood-stained rape victims? It’s not cool to break ranks and ask what’s behind such supposedly “ludic” misogyny. Even when commentators talked last week about McQueen’s fascination with death, religion and violence, they did it in a disturbing way, as though such themes were simply expressions of his theatricality. Friends mentioned his mother’s very recent death – her funeral hadn’t taken place when McQueen hanged himself – but very few seemed willing to mention the subject of depression.
It’s a taboo subject in the fashion industry. Zandra Rhodes acknowledged an “undertone of depression” in McQueen’s last collection, but it’s more comfortable to talk about “edginess” than admit that aspects of someone’s work signal deep-seated unhappiness or clinical depression. The reaction to McQueen’s death reminded me of the suicide three years ago of his close friend and mentor Isabella Blow, whose eulogies offered a similar impression that the fashion industry is utterly at a loss when it collides with painful reality.
McQueen’s work was disturbing from the start. His 1992 graduation show (bought in its entirety by a wildly enthusiastic Blow) was entitled Jack the Ripper Stalking His Victims. Three years later, he defended the title of his Highland Rape collection as a reference to the Battle of Culloden, but his repeated use of images reflecting violence against women was shocking from a gay man.
Born in 1969, at a time when many of his contemporaries were consciously rejecting an older generation’s misogyny, he played with it in show after show. In 2001, he sent a model on to the catwalk in Paris representing a dying bull, her torso apparently pierced by two lances, while his autumn 2009 men’s collection featured Jack the Ripper types in leather butchers’ aprons. His final women’s collection used models wearing hats made of bin-liners and aluminium cans, and wearing make-up which gave them garish faces and huge clown-like lips. Rapturous fashion editors explained that his use of rubbish was an ironic commentary on the fashion industry, but avoided asking why McQueen associated women’s bodies with rape, murder and trash.
More men commit suicide than women, and the death of someone so young is an unnecessary tragedy. But I don’t think that the world of fashion is any more able to make sense of Alexander McQueen in death than in life. He provided spectacle after spectacle, and it was taken in by the show.
Maya by Alastair Campbell
Sunday Times, 14 February 2010
Alastair Campbell’s new novel is about a man with an obsession. Put it another way, it’s supposed to be about fame and friendship, but I can’t imagine that many of us would want a friend like Campbell’s creepy narrator, Steve Watkins. Steve is a geek and his sole claim to fame is that he was at school in west London with Maya Lowe, a movie star so hot she can barely move for paparazzi. He’s her oldest buddy and confidant though not, I have to say, in a good way — more an Iago to her slinky, trusting Othello.
When the novel opens, Steve is hiding out in a cabin on a lake, thousands of miles from home in Hammersmith. Just what has happened — whether we are talking about a tiff or cataclysmic events — gradually becomes apparent in a lengthy flashback. Steve’s wife Vanessa is expecting their first baby, but the most significant thing in his life is his old friend and the reflected glory he enjoys when he drops her name into conversations. This is unsettling enough, but soon Steve is interfering in Maya’s marriage to a ghastly television presenter. In no time, he has Dan under professional surveillance and the material that turns up — drugs, extramarital sex and leaking his wife’s movements to journalists — thrills Steve while presenting a dilemma. Not wanting to be the bearer of bad news, he manipulates Maya’s family into revealing Dan’s infidelity (and creates an unresolved plot problem involving an incriminating piece of evidence which Maya’s father improbably fails to spot).
When Maya demands a divorce from Dan, Steve is on hand to comfort her. Soon she’s in New York making a movie with Matt Damon — there are endless cameos in the novel of real people, including Stephen Fry, Bob Geldof and Bono — and having an affair with a French location director. Steve and Vanessa are invited to New York to provide cover for Maya’s affair with the very Gallic Bernard, and Steve instantly decides that the Frenchman isn’t good enough for her. He can’t resist interfering again, although by this time even the long-suffering Vanessa is getting a bit fed up.
The problem with Campbell’s novel (it’s his second, in case you missed the first) is that it has few likeable characters. This may be deliberate, given that his subject is the corroding effect of celebrity, but Maya’s solipsism makes her almost as unappealing as Steve. Campbell enjoys himself hugely, writing with relish about the fatuous nature of 24-hour rolling news, yet his own style is journalistic; it’s easy to read but bland, and he doesn’t do anything with the documentary-style scenes of news anchors exchanging banalities or the corrupt friendship at the heart of the novel.
Weirdly, when he knows so much about the inner workings of power, Campbell has chosen to write instead about the less compelling subject of fame. The mystery is why someone who spent years observing Tony Blair and George Bush at close quarters is interested in this bunch of nobodies. Oh, and if you’ve set out to write an excoriating exposé of celebrity culture, maybe it’s not such a smart idea to have a gushing endorsement from Piers Morgan on the cover.
Maya by Alastair Campbell
Hutchinson £18.99 pp416
Amnesty shouldn’t support men like Moazzam Begg
The Independent, Thursday 11 February 2010
One of the things I admire about the British section of Amnesty International is its commitment to opposing violence against women.
In the past, subjects such as domestic violence, rape and sex trafficking were not always regarded as an integral part of the human rights agenda, and Amnesty’s decision to highlight them was brave as well as controversial. I am delighted to have been asked to speak at and chair meetings for the human rights organisation, and sorry that I now have to join critics who accuse it of very poor judgement.
Amnesty’s mistake is simple and egregious, allowing its name to be associated with an individual who has publicly expressed admiration for an Islamist movement which denies women’s rights. It has compounded that error by its treatment of a dissenting member of staff; last weekend, Amnesty’s international secretariat suspended the head of its gender unit, Gita Sahgal, after she voiced concern about the British section’s links with a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Moazzam Begg. Since his release from Guantanamo, Begg has campaigned forcefully against it. He has written a book about his experiences, speaks fluently on TV and radio, and is a director of an organisation called Cageprisoners Ltd. Sahgal does not deny that Begg and other prisoners were treated dreadfully and she has consistently opposed “the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror”.
What worries her is the assumption among some of her Amnesty colleagues that Begg is “not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights” (my italics). Sahgal raised the issue in two memos before her concerns became public at the weekend. But what she has identified is too important to be dismissed as an internal matter, namely an intellectual incoherence which isn’t confined to the higher echelons of a single human rights organisation.
The thinking goes like this: someone who has suffered terrible human rights abuses must necessarily be opposed to similar abuses against others. It’s a nice idea but history tells us it’s wrong; today’s prisoners of conscience may turn out on release to be doughty campaigners for human rights, but they might just as easily become tomorrow’s apologists for extremism.
Let’s return now to Begg. In 2001, he took his wife and children to live in Afghanistan, then under the control of the Taliban. Women scurried from place to place in burkas, risking a beating if a passing Talib spotted an inch of flesh, and could not even speak to a doctor except through a male relative; the horrors of the regime have been brilliantly described in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. In Begg’s own book, he describes his interrogation by the CIA who wanted to know why a young man from Birmingham was living in Afghanistan. “I wanted to live in an Islamic state – one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world,” was his reply. When they expressed scepticism, he complained: “I knew you wouldn’t understand. The Taliban were better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past 25 years.”
Begg’s enthusiasm for the Taliban is shared by another British Muslim who went to see the regime for himself: “They were amazing people. People who loved Allah. They were soft, kind and humble to the Muslims, harsh against their enemies. This is how an Islamic state should be.”
That is the verdict of Omar Khyam, now serving life for his part in a plot to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub (chosen, don’t forget, because it was likely to be full of “slags” enjoying themselves). Khyam appears on the Cageprisoners website, which says it exists “solely to raise awareness of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror”. He is in illustrious company: the site also lists Abu Qatada – once described by a Spanish judge as Osama bin Laden’s spiritual ambassador to Europe – and the notorious preacher of hate, Abu Hamza.
Amnesty protests that “any suggestion that cooperation with any group or individuals has influenced our work on behalf of victims of religiously inspired abuses and violations is simply false”. But that isn’t the charge against the organisation. What worries its critics is that Amnesty’s name is being used to provide a platform, and legitimacy, for a cause inimical to its core values. Qatada, Hamza and Khyam are not prisoners of conscience. The Taliban aren’t a little bit misguided about women’s rights. Amnesty should consider its reputation – and keep its distance.
Consumer choice is the new corset
Katie Price has taken control of her life and is hailed as a role model, but she is no Simone de Beauvoir
Independent on Sunday, 7 February 2010
Once upon a time, little girls dreamed of marrying a prince and living happily ever. Now it seems they aspire to have breast implants, date a footballer or two, marry an Australian crooner, get divorced and marry a transvestite cage-fighter. Isn’t that what social commentators mean when they describe newly married Katie Price as a role model for younger women? And not just younger women: one of my relatives, who is in her sixties, was devastated when Price came to a nearby town on a book tour and she couldn’t get a ticket. “I love her,” she told me. “I don’t know why. I just love her.”
My relative regards Price, who married for the second time in a quickie ceremony in Las Vegas last week, as a woman who has transcended the boundaries of her upbringing. Price is undeniably brilliant at providing stories: in one of the best twists yet, her “surprise” (warning to readers: adjectives seldom retain their original in meaning for long in Priceworld) wedding to Alex Reid made headlines by being a “private” affair, unlike her previous wedding to Peter Andre. On that occasion, the tutelary deity was OK!, which reportedly bought the rights to the event for a sum in the region of £1.75m “Lucrative” is one of the few words in this convoluted tale that displays an adamantine resistance to alteration.
How do we know that last week’s wedding was private? Because Price said so on a TV show, of course. That didn’t stop pictures of the happy couple flashing round the world, along with reports that they’d celebrated the marriage by visiting pole-dancing clubs in Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Price’s ex-husband Andre broke down on Sky TV when the presenter, Kay Burley, asked him how he’d feel if Reid wanted to adopt his two children with the former glamour model. Andre seems to be a nice if rather emotional chap and this possibility, which hadn’t actually been raised by any of the principals as far as I can tell, had him weeping buckets. Almost 4,000 people promptly joined a group on Facebook calling for Burley to be sacked, drawing yet another character into an already complex narrative of passion, rejection, sponsorship, “reality” TV and themed pink accessories.
Price is a phenomenon, described by Wikipedia as an “actress, author, writer, businesswoman, media personality, philanthropist, glamour model, producer, feature artist, songwriter and television personality”. And she’s only 31, for heaven’s sake, which makes Napoleon Bonaparte look a bit of a slouch; at a similar age, he had had no elective surgery and had barely launched his first coup d’état.
I might want to argue with some of those Wikipedia designations but the one I don’t question is “businesswoman”. Price has made millions out of a talent for giving the public what it wants; from being just another Page 3 girl, she has turned herself into a figure whose every move commands attention and even received a scolding from the UK’s most celebrated male feminist, the novelist Martin Amis. His sour remarks did no damage to Price, one of a handful of women whose astute business brains are often overlooked – Victoria Beckham and Elizabeth Hurley are other examples – but their success raises fascinating questions about contemporary feminism.
There is a school of thought that celebrates Price as a feminist icon, a woman who is doing something which has achieved almost sacramental status in modern culture: she makes choices. This magic formula is used to defend everything from pole dancing and cosmetic surgery to wearing the burqa; choice is so clearly a good thing that it can’t be questioned, even if the consequence is damage in one form or another.
The personal is no longer political, while justified scepticism about some of Freud’s work has banished the idea of the unconscious; people are insulted if you suggest they might be doing something for motives they don’t fully understand. Add to that a distortion of feminist ideas in popular culture, and it’s easy to see how Price has achieved a weird form of cultural domination: she has the body she wants, not just the one she was born with, and she deserves every bit of power and money she can get her hands on. She has more clothes than you’d find in a little girl’s dressing-up box, plus houses and ponies – a keen horsewoman, she has come up with her own line in riding gear – and she usually gets to keep them when a relationship ends. In the 21st century, that’s women’s liberation, surely?
It’s actually the triumph of consumerism, which has got mixed up in the minds of many young women with the notion of freedom. It’s just over six decades since Simone de Beauvoir considered women’s second-class status and came up with a brilliant formula: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”. Beauvoir wasn’t so much arguing that becoming a woman was hard work (thought it was), as suggesting that what women were taught to aim for was inauthentic. They had to suppress feelings and ambitions to concentrate on fulfilling male ideals of womanhood, and the result was the female eunuch that Germaine Greer would go on to write about.
Generations of women set about throwing age-old ideas out of the window, demanding the right to education and work outside the home, and ditching underwear and make-up. It was a thrilling experiment, and it became possible to play with notions of pleasure and femininity in a way denied to previous generations. Bras and lipstick came back – not for all women, of course – as writers like Gloria Steinem, Shere Hite and Nancy Friday showed how to navigate between patriarchal puritanism on the one hand and the commercial sex industry on the other.
So how did we get from 20th-century notions of equality to today’s pole-dancing glamour models and footballers’ wives? Price is their poster girl, and it would be easy to see her success as a riposte to old-fashioned (some would say outdated) notions of gender equality. But it’s vital not to confuse ubiquity and popularity, and the public response to her second appearance on the “reality” TV show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here suggests that she inspires mockery as well as admiration. Price is the butt of constant jokes about breast implants while her taste and aspirations – sparkly tiaras and other childish accessories – inspire ribald humour. Indeed, the precise function she fulfils in popular culture is to supply an apparently endless stock of new narratives which are akin (and often as ridiculous) to tales about the gods in Greek mythology; her desires are as transparent and uninhibited as those of Zeus or Aphrodite and, on present form, almost as transient.
One problem with this is that real people, unlike gods, get hurt. Many of the people who follow Price’s adventures know that, and wouldn’t want her life for themselves. If they connect her with feminism at all, it’s only in the primitive sense that she’s a self-made woman. That’s an achievement of sorts, but it certainly isn’t what Simone de Beauvoir had in mind when she sat down to write The Second Sex.
The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell
Sunday Times, 7 February 2010
It is hard to think of a crime novel with a more grisly opening: the inhabitants of an entire Swedish village, 18 adults and a child, are slaughtered in a single night. Henning Mankell has never been reluctant to depict graphic violence in his hugely successful Wallander novels, but this non-Wallander thriller, The Man from Beijing, sets a new benchmark for gore.
Many of the bodies have been hacked to death with a sword. Stunned local detectives are under intense pressure to solve the crime, and they quickly decide they are looking for a lone madman. They aren’t interested in the anxieties of a Swedish judge, Birgitta Roslin, who realises she may have a family connection to the village where the killings were committed; Roslin’s late mother was adopted by a family called Andren, a name shared by many inhabitants of the village.
Roslin contacts the police in Halsingland and discovers that her mother’s elderly foster parents are among the victims. She also discovers family documents written in Swedish from Minnesota in the 19th century, and is sufficiently intrigued to go on the internet and search for any mention of her long-ago step-relatives. What she encounters is a recent story in the Reno Gazette-Journal about the slaughter of a local family called Andren, who have been murdered at home with a sword.
Astonished by the coincidence, Roslin drives to Halsingland, but gets the brush-off from the police even when she recognises one of the few clues left behind by the killer. Bizarrely, it comes from a lantern at the local Chinese restaurant. A communist in her youth and a fervent supporter of Mao Tse-tung, Roslin enlists the help of an old friend from the communist party who has become a Sinologist.
Events unfold on three continents: in modern China, where the murderer’s identity begins to become apparent; in Africa, where another killing takes place to protect his identity; and in America, where the motive emerges from the terrible treatment of 19th-century Chinese labourers who worked to extend the railroad across America. These parallel narratives are unwieldy, and as in another Mankell novel, Kennedy’s Brain, they are informed by simplistic anti-colonial attitudes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a scene in Zimbabwe, where a member of a Chinese delegation listens to a speech by Robert Mugabe and reflects that he has been “ruthlessly defamed’ in the West.
This is a long way from the massacre that opened the novel, and it begins to feel like a deliberately shocking device to allow Mankell to write about a subject close to his heart. There is no doubt about his passion for social justice (he works with Aids charities in Africa and is the director of a theatre in Maputo), but this is more a tract than a genuinely gripping crime novel.
The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, trans Laurie Thompson
Harvill Secker £17.99 pp388