The wall of hate


I pass this wall every time I go to the gym. It's down a side street which doesn't get much use, and over the months, more and more graffiti has appeared on it. I'm so familiar with the wall that I can tell which graffiti is fresh, and so have watched vicariously as various grudge matches between teenage girls that I will never meet are played out. You might want to click on the image to see it in its full horrific glory.

The "wall of hate" as I like to think of it, tells me a lot about the ways that girls are cruel to each other these days, and how they take onboard views about women and sexuality that are actually damaging to all women, and then use those views as insults against each other. Reading accusations of someone being a "spacca", having Downs Syndrome or AIDS was initially quite shocking, but as the months passed those barbs seen less impressive when compared to "Tasha has a dick and its huge!" Because suspected transexuality will never run out of mileage. However, always being a grammar bitch, I have to restrain myself from putting a little apostrophe on the "its". I suspect that the writer of the "huge dick" revelation won't be doing very well in her GCSEs.

But all this pales into nothing when compared against the ongoing hate campaign against Ms Watts (of which only part is shown here). I have often wondered what this poor girl did in order to warrant such sustained abuse, and whether she even knows that she has a wall devoted to her. I try to imagine what the girl who wrote such words is like. She is probably quite a bit more intelligent than the others in her class. But nasty with it. Very nasty. She hides it well but inside I think she's unhappy and has a rubbish home life. From experience, there's usually a nasty or neglecful parent behind a nasty child.

She's the sort of girl who uses a cutting, clever humour to make others laugh and herself popular. But her popularity is always at the expense of someone else - some poor, slow-witted victim who is too inept to fight back. Someone who commits a tiny slight towards this girl will never hear the end of it.

First of all Ms Watts was described as being "a walking STI!" (love the exclamation mark). I wonder whose boyfriend she distracted? Later on, this initial proposition was built upon - now she is a "fucked up slag with STIs". As insults go, this is pretty impressive. I like how the vicious little author corrected her initial mis-spelling of "fucked". Even more impressive, she has put a full-stop at the end of her accusation. And you have to give credit to someone who can incorporate an acronym (STIs) into an insult. And not even the unfashionable STDs. Oh no, she's so "with it" that she uses STIs - mirroring the health profession's recent shift of focus from "disease" (which stresses symptoms) to "infection" (which is more concerned with transmission).

With such a good grasp of the English language, I think she will do rather better in her GCSEs than some of the other girls in her class. As for poor Ms Watts - I hope the boy was worth it. At least school-days don't last forever.

The before shot



I think it says a lot about how fucked up society is getting when the body on the left is now a "before shot".

Byebye Facebook

I closed my Facebook account this week, opting out of what's one of the most popular social trends of the present day. I'd been growing increasingly irritated with it, and felt that logging on and reading the mundane thoughts of an ever-growing number of acquaintences was not particularly edifying. By the end, I'd found it unbearable and had become paralysed by it - having felt that my entire identity had been erased...

It started off OK. I had a small number of friends - real ones. The ones I knew in real life and was in regular contact with anyway. Then I started getting friend requests from "friend-whores" - people who I'd never heard of who had thousands of friends and whose sole aim in life seemed to have more. Not realising this, I was both flattered, and afraid of committing a social faux pas as a newbie by rejecting them, so I then acquired a few of those people who seemed to live on Facebook, posting up updates, links and photos every few minutes - although I could never work out how they ever managed to attend the parties and events which they were so keen to document and share with everyone, as they seemed to spend every minute on Facebook. Maybe they lived in families of clones.

Then I got "friended" to members of my family, which was fine, but it meant that I needed to think carefully about how I presented myself. And I also found it unnerving and creepy to be suddenly given unedited details from the lives of my younger relatives who were studying at university - I didn't want to see them in a mankini at some party, or hear about them being "wasted" the night before, or who they fancied. It made me feel like Creepy Uncle Lubin. Or worst still, Judgemental Uncle Lubin.

And then the work contacts started to happen. Some of my students befriended me. And then my work colleagues. Initially that was OK, because it was generally people I liked from work, and was pretty comfortable with. And by this time I'd already worked out a kind of jolly, avuncular kind of persona on Facebook that wasn't going to shock anyone.

But Facebook is never happy for you to have a static number of friends. Facebook wants everyone to be friends with everyone else. So you keep getting little messages telling you that person X is friends with one of your friends, and you should consider befriending them too. And so, through this enforced network of jollity and togetherness, work colleagues who I'm not that close to began asking to befriend me. And unless you want to shatter the fake yet utterly necessarily civil work relationships that you've spent years creating, in order to deal with people that you actually don't like very much, you end up having to befriend such people on Facebook. Because if you didn't - they'd know that you really didn't like them. And staff meetings and all those times you bump into them in the corridor would be even less pleasant. (There's a professor at my workplace who hasn't figured out how to make his profile private so everyone can see when he's playing Mafia Wars when he's claiming to be busy working on his book - he's a laughing-stock.)

There were also the people from my past. Old school and university friends, who tracked me down and sent me kind emails, not realising that there were good reasons why we lost touch. I am still in contact with the girl I sat next to at school when I was 7. She was the first person I came out to. We don't live in the same town but we make the effort to see each other several times a year. We had a connection then, and we have one now. Most other people - we just happened to be at school together at the same time. That doesn't give us a real connection. We don't have to be friends.

And then there were the gays. Ex-boyfriend gays from many many years ago, who tracked me down and then befriended me, perhaps so they could demonstrate to me and all their other exes just how happy and exciting their lives were. Gays who loved naked men and porn so much that they wanted to share every new naked gay porn star with all of their Facebook friends. Every day. And then all of their other porn-loving friends would post up messages about they would like to do with the porn star. And don't forget the slightly older gays who harboured not-so-secret fantasies about me, and would immediately post sexually flirtatious responses to my updates, attempting to turn my most boring post into a double entendre, while hinting about aspects of my personal life which made me rather more exotic than I actually am. I would agonise over whether to delete these responses - knowing that my besotted admirer would be hurt and not understand, and that probably half my workplace and family had seen it anyway.

So in order for me to survive on Facebook, I would have to put aside my 20th century social skills (humility, respect, discretion) and replace them with a set of 21st century social skills (self-publicisation, endless flirting, indiscriminate indiscretion). I would have to become Paris Hilton. I simply couldn't do that, so I stopped posting up altogether - any piece of information about myself that I wrote could be read by someone who would misinterpret it or see a side of me that I would prefer to keep hidden from them. As a result, I became nothing - no-one. Not posting anything. Not logging on to read other people's postings, because I didn't want to know about aspects of their lives. Or worse still, I didn't care.

When things get worse gradually, it can be difficult to put a stop to them, because it's hard to define the point when they tip over from irritating to unaccepable. At this point there has to be an additional event - one which hammers home how unbearable things have become. For me, this became clear last week when Facebook decided that in response to the hegemony of Twitter (a word which once meant annoying and banal chatter and is now elevated to the highest form of communication), it had decided to change its default privacy settings to make everything potentially accessible to everybody. A spokesman for Facebook said that this "was the way that the world was going". It's the final extension of Facebook's pressing desire for everyone to have more and more friends. Why not turn everyone in the world into a friend-whore - in one swift blow.

The way the world is going.... Maybe so, but it's not the way that everyone's going. And that statement suddenly made me realise how at-odds I was with all of this.

So it's over. If you want to contact me, you'll need to do it the old-fashioned way - by a private email. And please don't send me photos of the last party you went to. I don't care. Really.

Don't put your son on the stage

I was interviewed for the One Show yesterday, for a short feature that might come out in January. My mother is the One Show's biggest ever fan. She retired a couple of years ago, and has a lot of free time (although complains most of it is spent brushing the dog). She writes letters to the One Show a lot with "ideas". She is very against animal testing at the moment, and thinks the One Show should do more on this topic, preferably with her in. Her latest thing is going around department stores "disguised as a researcher" (!), asking poor shop assistants if their products have been tested on animals, and then marking their responses in an official-looking folder. (I sometimes think I should devote my entire blog to what my mother says, thinks and does).

So when I told her I was being interviewed, I thought she might explode with joy. "Can I come on it?" she asked. I told her that due to the whimsical and transitory nature of television programming, and the fact that I become inarticulate and odd when a camera is pointed at me, that it is unlikely that they would use any footage of me anyway. I also told her not to tell anyone. I should have known better - she told her entire street to watch it last night - not understanding that I was only being interviewed yesterday, and that the feature, if it comes out at all, would be months later.

I had to travel down to London and then meet the interviewer and film crew in an art deco style bar in a basement in Soho, where the interviewing was being carried out. Fortunately it will all be edited, so they can reduce 20 minutes of me trailing off mid-sentence into about 10 seconds of something vaguely articulate. The weirdest bits were the "establishing shots" where they film you walking down the street, going down the stairs, or just sitting at a table and talking about nothing. In order for it to look like we were having an authentic conversation the interviewer said "Just tell me everything you did yesterday from when you woke up". So I did and then they all laughed at how boring my life is.

The interviewer was a reasonably well-known (if you live in the UK) comedian. He kept commenting on how he had been expecting me to be camp because I was gay, and I wasn't. "The other one we interviewed before you was camp, and he was wearing very flamboyant clothes," he said. I looked down at my sensible Marks and Spencer pullover and said "Although for an academic, I'm about as glamorous as you can get."

Afterwards, they invited me to lunch (a steretoypically Soho sushi place), there was various talk of which celebrities were "difficult" etc. I hadn't heard of any of them. The only celebrities I know about anymore are academic ones, and rather than read Heat magazine, I get my celebrity fix from an evil piece of computer software called Harzing's Publish or Perish. You type in the name of an academic and get a list of all their publications and how often each one is cited. This is then converted into a score called the H Score - the higher the score, the more famous you are. Mine is 13. That means I've had 13 things cited 13 times or more. To go up to 14 you have to 14 things cited 14 or more times. 13 is reasonably respectable for a linguist, and over the last couple of years I have begun to gain a tiny amount of academic fame. This means that at conferences I get more than 8 people at my presentation, and sometimes a Chinese student will come up to me and tell me that they've read one of my books. I rather like the strange parallel yet inverse world of academic celebrity. Real celebrities need to be physically stunning and stupid (Paris Hilton). Whereas for acaedemic celebrity, the more grotesque you are, the more introverted and socially stunted, the better-known you seem to be. I am thinking of developing a facial tic. It will do wonders for my H Score.

Did I fall asleep?

I've been watching the Joss Whedon sci-fi series Dollhouse, and just learnt it has been cancelled. Damn. It's Firefly all over again.

Dollhouse has an interesting premise. Young, attractive people sign away 5 years of their lives to become "dolls" - they have their memories and personalities wiped and then they are rented out to the wealthy and well-connected, having been downloaded with temporary new alter-egos. This results in a kind of Charlies Angels type of structure, whereby every week, the cast are put into new situations: one week you're a hostage negotiater, the next a pop star, the next a sex slave. The dolls all live in a giagantic underground spa/rehab centre and sleep in little coffins. When they're not been hired out, they're kep busy doing crafts or yoga in a kind of endless dream-like state, where they have a mental age of about 7. The Dollhouse is run by a (stereotypically) crisp British woman who wears nice skirts and blouses. There's also a geeky, wise-cracking tech guy who downloads all the personalities, and a morally confused ex-policeman who acts as a minder to the dolls. Then there's a sexy member of the FBI, played by a very gruffly-voiced Tahmoh Penikett, who is on a mission to prove that the Dollhouse exists and set them all free. Tahmoh looks and acts like a doll himself. Maybe he is. Almost every epsiode there is a twist where someone turns out to have been a doll all along.



Most of the "missions" that the dolls are sent on are a bit silly, and I have some difficulty in believing that the super-rich would want to pay for this kind of service. There's one guy who just seems to want someone to have motorbike races and slightly kinky sex with. He's young, rich and good-looking so I can't work out why he'd want or have to pay for that sort of thing. The show occasionally expands its central premise - for example, by showing how the Dolls could poentially allow people to live forever - if you die you simply download yourself into another person's body. And in the season 1 finale, which is set several years in the future, half the population of America have had their personalities wiped (via telephone) as an act of war, and replaced with that of a murderous psychopath, resulting in the breakdown of their society.

My favourite doll is Victor who occasionally malfunctions by getting erections in the shower, when he isn't supposed to.



Enver Gjokaj, who plays Victor, is good at doing different accents - he's done a passable posh Brit, been a member of the Russian mafia, a good ol' Southern boy and an all-American one. In a sense, acting is kind of like being a doll - you pretend to be someone else, show off your body and get paid a lot of money for it. I wonder if you can actually buy dolls of the cast? I imagine Victor would be a best seller.

The damning glee of making fun of people



There are quite a few sites and blogs I read which make fun of people. From the rather gentle My Mom is a Fob (which depicts Asian mothers who have poor English) and Passive Aggressive Notes (which often turn out to be downright Aggressive), through to the often horrific People of Walmart (which shows a the post-apocalyptic American underclass that Britain edges closer to every single day) to the toe-curlingly embarrassingly Lurid Digs, which comments on the tacky interiors and kitsch soft furnishings of gay men's self-porn portraits, to Awkward Family Photos, where bad hair + blue denim = shame shame shame. These sites seem to be springing up with alarming regularly. Or maybe it says something about me that I notice them and read them.

These sites are often funny - the commentaries read like they're channelling Karen and Jack from Will & Grace. And if someone puts up a naked picture of themselves on the internet, then really, I guess they deserve what they get. I'm a bit less sure about People of Walmart, who are snapped without realising (although if you will insist on wearing your Halloween costume ALL YEAR ROUND or decorating your car with hundreds of toy trolls, then maybe you deserve to be made fun of).

What's happening here though? It suggests a shaking up of the usual figures of fun. In the 1970s, before minority groups started to get rather mouthy, it was de riguer for comedians to tell jokes that featured mother-in-laws, racial stereotypes and sissified gays. Of course the minute that these groups started saying "that's not really very nice is it", conservatives invented the phrase "It's political correctness gone mad" and set out trying to turn the clock back and install all of that racism and homophobia that had been enshrined for decades. The Daily Mail (that nasty little snot of a newspaper) was the biggest advocate of PC-gone-mad, and seems to have had a remit to publish at least one bonkers PC story per issue over most of the 1990s and 2000s.

However, after a 20 year, often rather bloody battle - there are signs that the PC-gone-mad "brigade" are winning. The article by Jan Moir which I wrote about in an earlier posting actually wasn't that bad compared to some of what the Daily Mail has been saying about gay people for decades. Yet it produced an unexpected wave of criticism. I remember about 5 years ago, often feeling that I was the most bonkers PC person in the world. On various gay social forums, I'd complain about some instance of homphobia, or some sportscaster or celebrity making a gay joke, and be told that I was getting my knickers in a twist over nothing. Now I sometimes feel that my position is relatively calm in comparison to others. Maybe it's greater awareness of hate crimes towards minority groups - but it seems that more people are making a link between violence and those "funny" jokes that enforce stereotypes and get us to laugh at someone who's different from us.

So the rise of these new "snarky" sites is perhaps to be expected. We can't make fun of the blacks, Jews and gays anymore. So who can we make fun of instead? And the answer is the clueless. The People of Walmart are so uneducated and "out there" that they can't dress themselves decently. Those goons on Lurid Digs have terrible taste in rugs. The FOB (fresh off the Boat) Moms can't even speak English properly - ha ha ha! They say the funniest things.

A new underclass is emerging - one which I suspect is going to stick around for quite a long time - because unlike gay people and ethnic minorities - very few of them will rise up to complain in an articulate voice. Many of these people may not have internet access so may not even realise they are objects of fun. Will they be able to reclaim their "bad taste identities" and demand that people not laugh at them? Will there be FOB Pride? Or will they remain oblivious under their mullets?

I'll probably continue to read those sites, because as I said, I find them funny. But I'm not comfortable with it. And although I could probably come up with about a dozen ideas for similar sites myself, I wouldn't do it. Once you start actively making fun of people in that way, well - a piece of your soul falls off, or a fairy dies somewhere.

Yet maybe humans have a deep-rooted need to laugh at other people, and we'll always find a way.

The Daily Mail's Fail

Musing on the death of Stephen Gatley, Jan Moir of the Daily Mail, wrote a spiteful little piece today. It was originally called "There is nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gatley's death", although the title has now been changed at the Mail's website.



In the article Moir first insults Gatley by saying he couldn't sing, then she makes several insinuations about his death, suggesting that there is something fishy about it. She also implies that he died because of his lifestyle. She then makes it clear that the idea of happy gay people in relationships is nonsense by writing "Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships."

Reading it made the blood drain from my face. Then I got very angry. I immediately complained to the Press Complaints Commission (along with several hundred other people), causing their site to crash. It seems that Moir and the Daily Mail have hideously misjudged national attitudes, and the power of social networking. The story swept around the internet like a crazy, out of control fire. High profile twitterers like Stephen Fry and Derren Brown urged people to report her. A Facebook group was set up. Charlie Brooker of The Guardian posted one of his quick ripostes. Marks and Spencer, who were advertising on the Mail's site, asked for their advertising to be removed. Moir has issued a response to the furore, where she basically insults the complainers further by implying that none of them have read what she wrote, and that anyone who did simply didn't understand her. So, she's basically saying that thousands of people misinterpreted her article - somewhat worrying, considering that journalists are supposed to be good communicators and get the message across easily. She's admitting to being rubbish at her job really.

I'm taking a special interest in the story. I've been tracking the Daily Mail and its homophobia for several years. In a book I published on how gay men are represented in the media I looked at over a thousand articles about homosexuality that the Mail has published and found some common themes. These are the 10 "rules" of writing about homosexuality that you have to abide by if you write for the Daily Mail.

1) Gay relationships don't last
2) Gay is not a proper identity, it's just filthy sex
3) Being gay will lead to crime and violence
4) Being gay is something to be ashamed about
5) Beware - many gay people hide their gayness for some reason - making them liars and morally dubious
6) Despite (5) many gay people are "obvious" and/or "shameless" so they won't shut up about being gay - and we don't want to know!
7) Gay people are promiscuous
8) Gay people are everywhere - they are many and they are strong
9) They want to infect your children with their ways
10) They are strident, loud and militant. They will never stop demanding "rights" they don't deserve.

To Moir's credit, her article follows the Daily Mail's "rules" on how to write about homosexuality, almost to the letter. She's at least toeing the line.

While the article is upsetting and horrible. The response from the public has been incredibly encouraging. Ten years ago, The Mail got away with this sort of bile on a daily basis. Now they know that if they try it on, they'll get an instant fight, and it'll hurt. Times haven't changed yet - but we are witnessing them changing...

Hurrah for the failures of BBC4



As far as British tv goes, BBC4 is about the best that it can get. No wonder that turkey-faced Rupert Murdoch is always complaining about the BBC. While the Beeb has plenty of content that is populist, dumbed-down or cheapo, it can also do enlightening, sensible or minority shows as well - and BBC4 is full of them. They are always having little themed weeks, where they take a topic and devote their whole 6 months budget to making about 8 programmes (which of course then get repeated and repeated). Their themes are usually pretty good though, and when you tune into the channel it's a bit like popping into one of those Arts Cinemas (the Watershed in Bristol, the Tyneside in Newcastle or the Dukes in Lancaster) where all the patrons wear black square glasses and seem very intense.

I especially like it when BBC4 cannibalises its own history, and produces a biopic of one of its stars of yesteryear - usually blending comedy, drama and tragedy in equal proportions. These shows are invariably set in a version of the 1960s or 1970s where the colour has been turned right up. Everyone wears lurid lime green jump-suits, rooms are pine-panelled, carpets are white shag. They make the Austin Powers films appear rather restrained and shy by comparison. However, I get the impression that the (probably quite young) people who make these programmes have a wry passion for the period they're recreating.

The acid dropping Kenneth Williams and cooking monster Fanny Craddock have been perfect fodder for these scandlous stories. Julia Davis plays Fanny as a kind of piss-elegant, angry version of Jill from Nighty Night: "You could kill pigs with that menu." Poor Fanny was just ahead of her time though - had she been starting out now, Channel 4 (whose remit is to teach Britain how to bully other people), would have simply given her a ten year contract and a whip. In the BBC4 show though, it all ends in tears...



I expect that in 30 years time BBC4 will be recreating the lives of its current stars. Russell Brand would give them enough material for a mini-series. And Matt Lucas will be strait-jacketed as the Kenneth Halliwell of the current age. Not only did he have a disastrous high-profile gay relationship that ended tragically. Not only is he bald and fat. He was also playing Halliwell in a stage version of Prick Up Your Ears when his ex-partner committed suicide.

I suspect that BBC4 has got a bit bored of the 1970s though (or they ran out of avacado bathroom suites), and so they have now moved onto the 1980s with a new season on the Micro Age. At the heart of this season has been a documentary/dramatisation of a power struggle between two computer creators of the early 1980s, Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong pretending to be Blackadder) and Chris Curry (Britain's favourite everyman: Martin Freeman). It is all played out against a backdrop of genteel Cambridge, and there is humour in the fact that these men are basically nerds acting like they're involved in something very important (in fact it was).



I had one of these when I were a lad.



It was always over-heating. You had to load in games via a tape deck. It took ages, and sometimes it just wouldn't work. The graphics were blocky, the sound annoying. The games themselves were often impossibly difficult (usually to hide the fact that there wasn't much content). I would sometimes spend hours typing in program code (in BASIC) from computer magazines, and the games rarely worked - usually due to misprints. But despite all that, I loved my little Spectrum with its funny-smelling rubber keys and its huge (for the time) 48K memory. I was/am such a Spectrum geek that I noticed an error in Micro Men when one of the characters talked about their son being on level 8 of Jet Set Willy (impossible as JSW didn't have levels).

The interesting thing about Micro Men (for me anyway), is that it explains how those early microcomputers and their associated games were conceived by somewhat autistic men who didn't really have much concept of usability. It is like they wanted to make them difficult to use. Because they were boffins themselves, they didn't seem very good at putting themselves in the shoes of the average consumer. If only they had used a few focus-groups or carried out more market research, the British computing industry could have been very different. As it was, it got swallowed up - first by "barrow boy" Alan Sugar (who, in the 1980s looked like a serial killer - now he just looks like the victim of one), then by Americans - who Got it Right.



It's a peculiarly tragic tale of British failure, as are most of the BBC4 biopics. Fortunately, as a nation, I think the British are very comfortable with failure. We are a nation of under-dog lovers, and failure gives you a chance to reflect and grow... or just become very bitter. It makes for much more interesting drama at least.