How a cliche caught on:

“The phrase ‘the weaker vessel’ originated with Willian Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English in 1526 and became common usage during the next hundred years or more. Many must have encountered it in the King James version of the Bible … It is hard to think of a single phrase which brings together more aptly the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition of the subjection of women wiith the humoral physiology of the ancients.”

Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, Anthony Fletcher, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995, p. 60

As a book it has useful anecdotes, but is otherwise nothing to get excited about.

Women, History

For any woman growing up in, and living in, the Western world, issues of body image, body shape and sexuality can be problematic. For black women, there’s an additional layer of complexity, of danger, of risk of being dangerously misunderstood. In Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Janell Hobson explores the centuries of racist exploitation that have produced this state of affairs – most recently brought into focus by the infamous Janet Jackson Superbowl incident – and ways in which black women creative artists have tried to confront it.

At the centre of Hobson’s account is the life, and posthumous treatment of Sara Baartman, a woman who was brought from what is now South Africa to England and France and between 1810 and 1815 exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus” . Particularly exciting (in several senses of that term) to those who paid to see her sometimes unclad body were her supposedly abnormally large buttocks and genitals. After she died, her body was dissected and her brain and genitals preserved, with casts of her body and her skeleton.

Well, you might say, that was a past, barbaric age. Then you learn that it was only in 2002 that these remains were finally returned to South Africa, after a long campaign, and given a proper burial.

And, Hobson, points out, the history of exploitative, demeaning use of black bodies, particularly female bodies, is a continuous one. Even anti-slavery campaigners used sexualised images of flogged and otherwise abused women for their cause, then images of naked black bodies, both male and female, were used by the National Geographic Society (among others) in “anatomical education”, “primitive-style” nudity being acceptable where “civilised” was not, which of course provoked a suppressed erotic reading of these supposedly pedagogic materials.

Hobson says:

“When this colonial historic imagery combines with the more familiar American popular iconography of desexualised, fully clothed mammy images and celebratory imagery of white female beauty, we may be able to more fully comprehend interstices between race and gender that shape our uneasy responses to sexualised visual representations of black women”.

How, she asks:

“Can a black woman hold up a mirror that reveals an alternative image of herself, free from the iconographic history in dominant culture that cast black female bodies as illicit, hypersexed, primitive and obscene?”

As these extracts suggest, Hobson’s writing is intelligent without being buried in that bane of so many otherwise fascinating texts, academic jargon, despite her position in women’s studies. This is a book accessible to virtually any reader, and one that many black women, and their white compatriots, would surely find illuminating in their encounters with cultural conundrums of competing demands for sexual display and “modesty”.

Some, however, might find confrontational the fact that Venus in the Dark contains representations of the very images that it is critiquing, including those of Baartman. Hobson says: “Such images need to be confronted”. I agree. Surely to write about these images without presenting them is only to magnify their power and malevolence.

Where Hobson, perhaps inevitably, is less successful, is in her prescriptions for dealing with the issue. Her chosen arena is in cultural construction, mostly “elite” art, with some popular intrusions. This is not my specialist area, but I do feel she’s overly prescriptive in her readings of artworks, and her classifications of them as “successes” or “failures” in their treatment of the Hottentot Venus image.

Among the artists whose treatment of Baartmen she addresses are the poet Elizabeth Alexander, the writer Toni Morrison, the artists Penny Siopis, Renee Cox, Carla Williams and Willie Bester, and the digital artist Mara Verna, who has a website dramatisation.

In “The ‘batty politics’: towards an aesthetic of the black female body”, Hobson then looks at aspects of popular culture, from the tennis champion Serena Williams, the entertainers Josephine Baker and Grace Jones, the dancers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, and hip hop musicians. Hobson says of Jennifer Lopez:
“Dominant culture later came to celebrate Lopez’s behind as part of a recognition of “exotic” and “hot” Latinas, women perceived as “more sexual” than white women but “less obscene” than black women … what has not changed is the racism and sexism underlying her popularity”. (p. 103)

Hobson’s prescription is that black women “must confront the prevailing imagery of grotesque derrieres and black female hypersexuality to distinguish the myths and lies from our own truths and the ways we wish to represent ourselves.” (p. 112)

Finally, I have to share one account from the book that I found particularly horrifying, and that every woman should know:

The scientific display of Baartman’s fragmented body would further shape other acts committed against black female bodies. This is exemplified specifically in the founding of gynecology, as antebellum physician J. Marion Sims invented the speculum while practising surgical experiments on enslaved black women in Alabama from 1845 to 1849. One named Anarcha would be operated on thirty times without anesthesia.” (p. 48)

This book isn’t perfect, but there’s much in it that anyone who confronts issues of gender and race should know and think about, and that means everyone.

Women, History, Race

The new “Berliner” (mid-sized) Guardian has drawn much scorn from my workmates (but then I do work for the opposition). Although it is only early days, I’m, however, quite excited by it. As Stephen Glover wrote in The Independent, the question is “whether this is the same old Guardian repackaged in a new form, or whether it has become a different sort of newspaper, possibly more upmarket or even more Establishment in its feel”.

And I think the answer to that is that it seems to be going upmarket, or at least holding its ground, which in a newspaper market fast streaming towards the populist can only be a good thing.

There can be lots of technical objections to the design – it is certainly over-busy at present, and I do think the interaction of the heads with sub-heads wiith bylines is going to have to be worked on, but the overall message is that this is a serious, even heavy, paper. I’d like to think that can work!

They are, however, I’d suggest, going to have a big problem in newsagents with it falling apart – and bagging is a very expensive option.

Yet this all might in the end up being academic. What really matters for the Guardian is that it is the only paper that really gets the web, as evidenced by its remarkably open blog about the development and implementation of the new design.

It has made itself an international brand through its huge and fast-acting web presence – I often notice how often purely American sources cite it – and through that in 10 years it might be the last “newspaper” left, when all of the dead-tree versions have long gone.

Media

First, I should make a declaration of interest. I was working for The Times during the period covered by the bulk of War Reporting for Cowards, and I know all of the people in the London office about whom Chris Ayres writes, although I never met him. And I think he gets their characters and mannerisms well; at least as well as you could reasonably expect anyone still working for them to do.

As the title suggests, there are echoes in this book of a long British tradition of comedy drawn from men behaving ineptly, JK Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, perhaps the originator of the genre, the comedy of course coming from the fact that men are not expected to be incompetent in dealing with physical challenges. (We’ll really have got somewhere when a female correspondent can write a similar book, without provoking a “do women belong in war zones?” debate, and facing unemployment. That, I fear, is still some decades off.)

Yet Ayres gets a long way beyond the limitations of the genre of comedy, and indeed the common line of “war reporting”, into his real feelings of terror and pain during the nine days he spent “embedded” with the US marines during the invasion of Iraq. This is a real book from an observer at the very heart of the war; he’s not a subtle or outright cheerleader for the “sport”, as are so many who write on the subject.

Ayres was indeed as unlikely a war correspondent as could be imagined. His account begins with him as a student in the City University post-graduate journalism course, which, as he reports, gets a remarkable percentage of its graduates into the national media. But he chose the unfashionable business stream, and thence with unpaid work experience on the Times business desk. (Yes this is how many people get into journalism, and goes a long way towards explaining the narrow social pool from which British national journalists tend to be drawn.)

His account of this time does fall rather into the Boat trap; had he been as inept as he suggests, he would never have got a job – and he must surely have learnt what a “nib” was at journalism school. (Connections, unless they are very strong, will still only get you so far.)

Gradually, Ayres reports, however, he became a veteran of the business lunch, and through following e-business through the dot-com boom, an office star. It seems part of the persona that he claims this was an accident, but then it was an accident that he was in New York, on the very doorstep of 9/11, and shortly after at the middle of the anthrax attacks.

He then saw an opening when the current editor of The Times, Robert Thomson, took over, and bid for, and won, the job of Los Angeles correspondent, because, Ayres says, “He apparently had wanted someone on the West Coast who could write about the economics of celebrity fluff, as well as the celebrity fluff itself.”

The reality, I’d suggest, was a bit more complex. The fact is that “serious” national newspapers are increasingly being pushed – some would say by social trends, some would say by newspaper fashion, some would say by desperation for readers – to include more and more of what their traditional staff dismissively call “fluff”. And most staff have to be bludgeoned into writing this material; anyone who volunteers and shows the real desire that Ayers apparently has to cover it is likely to find it a great way to get ahead. This is particularly the case at The Times, where its history as “The Thunderer” is at war with its market position at the bottom of the old “broadsheet” chain, just above the traditionally tabloid Daily Mail. (This was the great unmentionable fact when I was working there.)

So how did he end up in Iraq as a war correspondent? From what I knew (which was not a lot) from the London end, Ayres’ account is accurate. The idea of “embedding” journalists with the troops was a new one, and newsrooms were, justifiably, highly suspicious of how effective it was likely to be. So experienced correspondents – the ones expected to provide the bulk of the coverage – were placed strategically around Iraq – in the Kurdish areas in the north, in Iran, in Baghdad itself. Putting reporters with the troops was seen as a high-risk option, likely to produce little more than military PR, so inexperienced, seemingly ill-equipped, reporters like Ayres were given that role.

As it turned out of course, the northern front never rolled, thanks to the Turks, and it quickly became clear that it was horribly dangerous – and several journalists paid with their lives – to attempt to report on your own. So it was left to the “embeds” to report the progress of the war – in the case of Ayres, as he presents himself, a hypochondriac, physically inept, overweight man, with no military knowledge or background whatsoever.

Yet as I remember at the time, and is clear from the book, he made a great war correspondent. He described what he saw, what he felt, what he heard, from the perspective of a naive, unknowing viewer – exactly the same as the position of the reader on the 7.50 from Saffron Walden. So War Reporting begins:

The day, like most of my days in Iraq, had got off to a bad start. I awoke that morning, as usual, shivering violently and aching from another night in the Humvee… The first thing you notice is the contortion necessary to sleep inside the vehicle: the head dangles inches from the bare metal floor; the right leg is somewhere behind the left ear. The spine feels as though it has been splintered like a cocktail stick …
Then comes the mental replay footage from the night before – the hollers of ‘Lightning! Lightning!’; the absurd 3am fumble for the gas mask, welly boots and rubber gloves; the casualty reports over the radio …

And even Ayres, perhaps the least likely marine in history, gets caught up with the feelings of the men with whom he is enduring all of these deprivations, and on whose protection his life depends. His account is their account too. When Ayres resists being taught how to fire an M-16, he tells what happens next:

Murphy … looked me in the eye and drawled, ‘So if there’s a shitstorm, and you can shoot an Iraqi and save my life, or NOT shoot an Iraqi and let me die, what you gonna do?” It was more of an instruction than a question. And I had to spend the rest of the war sharing a Humvee with Murphy … I wanted Buck and his men to beat the Iraqis as much as they did. After all, my own life was at stake. “I’d shoot the bastard,” I said quickly. Then I took the weapon from his hands.”

Here is a reporter who can write, can tell a story, can make you laugh and make you cry. (And speaking as a sub-editor, I can say that is far from a common case.) Reading War Reporting for Cowards will give you lots of laughs, and many squirms of uncomfortable self-recognition at your own condition as a 21st-century human being. You’ll also finish up knowing a lot about war, and newspapers, and how they fit together.

***
What the New York junior cousin thought of it is here.

Books; Media

Hacking through my 1,600 emails from a week away – yes I do belong to too many email lists – I came across a couple of pieces about Australia that can only be cause for further depression about its prospects.

The unlovely Halliburton is apparently taking over most of South Australia, and getting army contracts without tendering. Well of course John Howard wants to keep George Bush sweet, even though I doubt the President could find Australia on a map.

But American activists are another question. Not content with locking up children of asylum-seekers, the government is now calling activists of the Greenpeace ilk “security threats”. Norties McCarthyism anyone?

I saw, or rather heard, an astonishing number of Australians in Biarritz last week – well it is a surf town – but they say one million Australians (one in 20 or so) live abroard, and I can’t but feel this is only going to increase.

Arrived at Stansted at 10.50pm last night: huge queue for passport control, long wait for bags – well this is the budget airport, so you can’t really complain.

Outside is a fair attempt at a setting for a Sherlock Holmes movie – a thick yellow fog that quickly forms a greasy film over your face.

Just caught the 11.59 Stansted “Express”, which should have just connected me to the Victoria line before it does its usually half-after-midnight shutdown (when IS Ken Livingstone going to do something about this?), had it not sat for 15 minutes or so in the middle of nowhere. (No idea why – the driver did make an announcement, but it was unintelligible).

So, to the joys of the N73 night bus, to be caught from the middle of a dodgy industrial estate at Tottenham Hale. But yes, it was a joy.

First, there was the Korean Elvis impersonator, with, if not in a biblical sense – although not for want of his trying – the American “from LA”, dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. (Not a look I’d recommend, overall if you’re over 40 and have a really bad blonde dye job.)

Then, there was the sailor from Plymouth who sat beside me and tried to chat, but whose muscle control was so far gone that at each stop he slowly slid from view along the mixture of chewing gum and general grime on the seat, ending up crouched on his haunches, swaying gently, but politely trying very hard not to brush against me.

Then there was the sober soldier-boy (had to be with that haircut), grimly hanging on to his temper after copping an elbow to the head from a drunk who really didn’t look like he should be able to stand, and the bloke who’d fancied his chances for the evening, until his “date” had caught a nightbus 40 minutes in the wrong direction, so now they were heading, he hoped, on the route to her bedroom. Whether she intended the mistake I don’t know – a 50/50. But certainly his ardour was cooling by the minute.

The woman behind me who’d said in an ominous tone “I feel sick” didn’t throw up, so it was a successful return to the old home town. And I was reminded why I love living here – all of life is at your side, if not in your lap.