So I've a great deal of admiration for those bloggers on the left who go into, as it were, enemy territory to call the media on their bullshit. Me, I'm quite content to stick with the Guardian (nice and inoffensive to everything except fascists and the Queen's English), or failing that, the Indie. Sure, I'll join in the chorus - albeit as the quiet kid hidden at the back because he's tone-deaf - when the likes of the Mail , but by and large I just can't get worked up enough about it most of the time.
Curious, then, to find myself blogging about something I think the Indie have got wrong. But then, these are curious times at Northcliffe House. Most notable is the looming spectre of halfwit misogynist, racist and patron saint of black cab drivers Rod Liddle as editor - luckily, there's a Facebook group protesting this eventuality. After all, if anything's going to change the mind of an ex-KGB man (new owner Alexander Lebedev), it's got to be four thousand disgruntled broadsheet readers**. But that's not why I'm pissed off. At least, not mainly. It isn't even the usual idiocy on the Letters page:
(But good God, if you're going to share your prejudices in a national newspaper, at least have the decency to start with Sir-comma-new-line before launching into the vitriol.)
'a few years down the line [...] our RAF gently morphs into the European Air Force, UK Arm'
'Now is the appropriate time to disband the NBPA [National Black Police Association] and the Muslim Police Association...'
No, rather it's a column by Joan Smith that gives me a rather uneasy feeling. It's not quite the certainty of knowing someone's being a dickhead in print that I feel when I read, say, Rod Liddle's oeuvre. Just a small, polite voice in the back of my head. And so, after three paragraphs, I finally get to the point. The column's called 'McQueen had a sinister view of women's bodies'. And, faintly, it reminds me of Jan Moir. Maybe that's an unfair characterisation, but I can't quite shake the feeling off. Call me paranoid.
Not that I ever really blog about fashion (do you really want to know how many pairs of shoes I own? Because it's entirely too many), and I can't say I had any real affinity with, or even knowledge of, Alexander McQueen. Nonetheless, to rake the man over the coals before he's even in the ground is a state of affairs I was always taught to think of as not, as it were, cricket. Not to suggest that the dead are exempt from criticism - Hunter S Thompson's obituary for Richard Nixon is just about perfect for me, for one thing - but the man designed clothes, for heaven's sake.
But I can get over that; selling papers is selling papers, after all, and sometimes you're pressed for a column. No, what really got my attention was a tiny little phrase about three-quarters of the way through. I wonder if you noticed it.
'...his repeated use of images reflecting violence against women was shocking from a gay man' [emphasis mine]Now why mention that? I suspect there is an undercurrent of something here. Again, maybe I'm paranoid. But it seems to me that Smith is playing into (let's be generous and say unconsciously) a well-established idea about gay men and misogyny. And whether Alexander McQueen was indeed the deranged misogynist the column paints him as or not, it seems a little unfair and, frankly, a little suspect to be going 'cor, wasn't he a bit weird?' and then to tack on a perfunctory 'tragedy he's dead though' at the end.
Echoes of Moir here, at least to me. Maybe it's something about prurient female newspaper columnists that look somewhere between forty and mouldering*** doing hatchet jobs on dead gay men in the public eye that gets my hackles up, I don't know. That plus the vein of 'course, you're not allowed to talk like this these days' so familiar from invented stories of the likes of 'Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep':
'It's not cool to break ranks and ask what's behind such supposedly "ludic" misogyny'All of this is a hell of an allegation to lay against a man with no right of reply, setting aside the people McQueen left behind having to read it. And just for the record? I've encountered plenty of artists, photographers, writers and the like who've used violent imagery and women in service of an artistic point, and not one of them ever struck me as a misogynist; not least because the first two examples that spring to mind are themselves women. Disturbing imagery does not a sexist make, and speaking personally I'd think about whether I had any evidence to support a claim of the calibre Smith is making beyond a heuristic jump from 'gay man' to 'hates women', stopping off at 'sexual deviant' and 'mentally ill' along the way.
(Smith never actually says what's behind this alleged misogyny, presumably because the people she's writing for are way ahead of her)
'It's a taboo subject in the fashion industry'
'Rapturous fashion editors [...] avoided asking why McQueen associated women's bodies with rape, murder and trash'
...this turned out to be a rather longer post than I had anticipated. Maybe I'll have to stick to the Socialist from now on.
* A lesson taught to me at Dulwich, by the best teacher I've ever had. At one point, we were herded into the Edward Alleyn Theatre to hear a talk from some print media high-up [curious googling reveals this to have been Lionel Barber, editor of the FT and Old Alleynian - yeah, Dulwich was that sort of place]. It was intended to have been a sort of show-the-flag exercise, which was thoroughly derailed by said teacher nailing the bastard with questions that would've done Paxman proud. When I think back on the tangible benefits of a private education, a major one is having seen the editor of a national newspaper doing his best guppy impression. God bless you, Mr B.
** Yes of course I bloody joined it.
*** Sorry, that was misogynist of me, wasn't it?
2 comments:
That "from a gay man" hits like an elbow in the ribs, I agree.
However. However. However.
McQueen was not a writer or a photographer. You might argue he was an artist, but at a basic level he made clothes for women. The works of Robert Mapplethorpe or Philip Roth (to pull some names out of the ether) don't filter down to the high-street, as haute couture does. Rape does not sit well in BHS and Next.
McQueen's designs were edgy and arresting. But were they wearable? Did they make women feel good about their bodies? If the answer to either of these questions is no then that's a #fail.
I don't think there's anything personal or homophobic in Joan Smith's piece. (Rather it's you Alex who seems to be suggesting that after women hit the menopause their opinion isn't worth listening to.)
Where I think this piece falters is that it's too short. I think she could have argued her point harder. McQueen was part of a larger culture, after all, an industry which often dehumanises and degrades the women it should work for.
My two cents.
Joan Smith is trying to have her cake and eat it, isn't she?
On the one hand, gay men are fellow-fighters against the patriarchy, and so (alleged) misogyny on the part of a gay man is especially shocking. And then, on the other hand, she's relying heavily on the old meme that gay men are virulently misogynistic, and the preponderance of poofs in fashion means it must be their fault that the industry is a cruel charade aimed at torturing women. (The actual reality of the fashion industry - that, overwhelmingly, it's women who are torturing women - is uncomfortable to consider, because it undermines notions of sisterhood.) Of course, the great advantage of running contradictory arguments simultaneously is that both give her the opportunity to get the boot into a dead bloke who's no longer in a position to answer back.
It's disappointing that she chose to mention his sexual orientation at all, since it's not actually relevant to any of her criticisms of McQueen's work. To respond to la, I think that she did to choose to 'go there' is evidence of a personal attack, and raises the possibility of homophobia - there's an implicit suggestion that McQueen behaved in ways that Smith found deplorable because he was gay.
I can't really get into the specifics of the fashion, because i don't know enough about it. I know that the relationship between high-fashion catwalk shows and clothes people can actually wear is the same as the relationship between fine art painting and house painting - i.e., they're superficially similar, but they're trying to do very different things. At the same time, sexual violence is in a special category, and is something that shouldn't be made use of in any artform just for shock-value, or to create a sensation. It's possible that McQueen's shows were using the imagery of violence to unambiguously criticise the harm the fashion industry causes to women, in which case the use would have been fully justified, but it's also possible it was just a way of getting his collections noticed.
It's certainly legitimate for Smith to raise the question, but it might have been better to wait until after his funeral, at least. The fact that she didn't is what gives the article a vaguely Moir-ish feel, certainly.
Post a Comment