Sisters are doing it to themselves

Is it just me or is there an enormous amount of stuff about 'body image' in the media at the moment? Maybe I listen to too much Woman's Hour on Radio 4 but it does seem to be the issue du jour.
I really don't want to trivialise it. I like to think I'm as much a feminist as any man can be. (I use the word as a short hand, but I think it's a valid as it ever was. The modern woman's apparent rejection of the word, I suspect, is more about individualism and the rejection of any labels rather than the rejection of the principals it stands for - which are basically Equal Rights for Women. I don't know any women and very few men who reject that.) I've tended to feel that women are somehow better than men and are treated unfairly almost as long as I can remember. I think it was a common view among women when I was a child that men are inconsiderate, coarse and self-centred and I seem to have absorbed that pretty much whole. Their bodies are smelly, hairy and vaguely repulsive, and their genitalia are ridiculous (chicken giblets spring readily to mind). They are prone to contempt, cynicism and derision, when faced with the unexpected and like to be in charge, even when they have no idea what is going on.
I am aware now that all this is a gross generalisation but it is, if you like, my base line - the idea that I first had about men when I was little. I can't say for sure where it came from but you will understand that when women's rights came to the fore in the 70s I was primed to be on the women's side. Years of experience of actual men and women have made my views more nuanced and rational but I am still on my guard around men in a way I never am around women. On the down side this has meant that I was completely unprepared for what complete and utter shit-heads some women can be. On the plus side, the fact that I genuinely enjoy the company of women means I've got a lot more sex than I might have.

Women today are in any case quite different to how they were then. Young women seem hugely more confident than they were and I'm glad to see that they seem far less bothered about keeping up appearances - in their behaviour at any rate. Women seem just generally more robust - a bit more coarse and self-centred than they were, which is not a bad thing at all. I never saw the appeal of the tearful martyred lady nor the fragile timid virgin. Sometimes maybe it seems to have gone too far but I would defend to the nth a woman's right to go too far, make a twat of herself and generally get it wrong. Some po-faced feminists criticise dramas that portray women as being ignorant or shallow or weak, as if every female character should be a role model, but I believe that, among the many rights that women should enjoy equally with men is the right to fuck up big time.

So for the sake of this essay I'm not going to talk about rape and genital mutilation, domestic abuse or discrimination in the work place. For me the arguments have been had and won and at least in the West it's basically a mopping-up operation - tracking down those who are still getting away with it, but who, like all criminals, will always to some extent be with us.
No, I want to talk about the relations between ordinary men and women in ordinary day to day situations - in the home, at work, out for the evening. There's abuse and harassment in all these places of course and I'd lump those in with the obviously wrong things above. My worry is with the strain of feminism that sees the everyday petty transgressions (the amount of house-work a man does for example, or a man eyeing-up a young woman in the street) as symptomatic and indicative of the greater wrongs listed above. I heard a woman the other day (on R4) say that the lewd comments from some builders as she walked by had to be the overt expression of a wider attitude. My assumption tends to be the opposite - that people who act out in antisocial or criminal ways tend to be the minority.
But in any case, even if all or most of us men are secretly having lascivious thoughts as we walk along the street, is that a bad thing? There is this word - 'objectification' that still springs up in discussion which seem to be practically synonymous with 'admiration' in this situation. That a woman is not (in this case) being admired for her brains, her ambition, her ideas or her talents, but instead for her appearance is seen as a bad thing. I would agree if that was all she was ever admired for, but I'm not at all convinced it is. In any case it shouldn't be assumed and it certainly shouldn't be condemned out of hand, especially when she's clearly gone to so much trouble to look like that.
But isn't that the issue, they say - that she's had to go to all that trouble? She's caught up in this cycle of objectification and insecurity, so in effect, she has no choice - she goes out of her way to look like that but resents the fact that it gets attention.

I'm not even slightly convinced by this. In the first place, my instinctive respect for women refuses to accept the idea that women are so easily manipulated. At some point there has to be the invocation of choice. At some level, women these days in The West choose to look like that. Their motives may be mixed and obscure but whose aren't? Unless they have a very oppressive partner, nobody has to look like that (and if they do they fall into the 'definitely wrong' categories above).
My second point would be that appearances are not superficial. The way we look - how we dress, how we walk, what we smell like, how we smile, the simple fact that we choose to take care of our appearance, or not, are all subtle signals and they tell others a heck of a lot about us. Some we can change for effect (clothes) and some are intrinsic to who we are (our basic body shape) but none of them are mere disposable decorations. They are as much who we are as the contents of our minds. That's not to say they always give a good impression.
My third point is that I think this might be just as true of men as with women. I don't mean this just in the obvious way - that men are now spending massively more than they used to on 'product', although that is interesting. I also don't mean that women also like to ogle a good looking young man, although they definitely do. I mean men have always been judged on appearances above all else and the pressure to look good is just as harsh, if not more so. This is a harder one to argue but bear with me.

I spent a large part of my teens and twenties feeling inadequate and undesirable, and I know I was far from alone in this. There was always that group of cool lads who just seemed to have 'it' somehow. It was not just that they knew how to dress (cleverly subverting the school uniform) but they knew how to grin and to slouch and to wise-crack. Some were into the right bands and others were popular because they were very sporty. Yet others had a menace that everyone could respect. Since school I've become aware that the most desirable men are the ones that are concerned about their 'image'. They take up dangerous or glamorous sports or are in a rock band or drink too much or take too many drugs and get into trouble on a Saturday night. Confidence is the thing - risk-taking, the ability to look assured or even cocky in the face of danger. Above all women like men to appear self-confident, a characteristic I totally lacked when I was a young man. When I look back at those blokes they had absolutely no reason to be so sure of themselves. They were no brighter than the rest of us, and in many cases far less good-looking. In some cases they were downright stupid, but they had attitude, and the girls fell for it every time. Those girls weren't interested in finding out what sort of person we really were. It was all a front. I was awkward and needy and tended to spend my time on 'hobbies' (ie things I was genuinely interested in and which really gave me something to think about) which, then as now, are fatal to attracting the opposite sex, but I was also kind, articulate, sensitive, and not at all bad looking, but they weren't interested in that. My 'image' was all wrong. I had no game. Almost always, the most desirable men (leaving aside for now the very rich) are not physicists or writers, statesmen or campaigners but actors, footballers and pop stars and there's nothing very profound about any of that. When I signed up for an internet dating website in my early 40s, looking for a woman closer to my own age, I found to my dismay that the deal breakers were very often height and income. It could be argued that both are a proxy for self-confidence but in any case neither is exactly deep and meaningful.

I suspect a lot of feminist-minded women will look at that list and argue that those qualities that men are judged on are nevertheless somehow more genuinely admirable than mere looks. I would agree that they are more challenging. If I could have made myself more desirable as a young man simply by going to Churchill Square and buying a new outfit I'd have been more than happy to do so. What it takes to look right as a young man though is far more demanding, and to some extent dangerous but it's not in any way more 'real'. It's still just a look. That women find these attributes somehow more genuinely desirable in fact, I think, says more about some unreconstructed sexism on their part - that what men do is somehow intrinsically better than what women do. This connects to the modern woman's desire to be able to compete with men at every level in business and government. Again I would defend a woman's right to aspire to do anything men do, even when what we do is frankly stupid and sometimes plain wrong.

But then another problem with this is to assume that we 'men' are all like that - that women should challenge us 'men' in the boardroom and the House of Commons as well as in the pub and the bedroom, as if we are all somehow unified in this brotherhood outside of which the women can only scheme and crane their necks. But as with those blokes on the builders' site, we are not all like that. I was not alone as a gormless teenager - we were all gangly and uncouth, spotty and somewhat malodorous. Most of us now observe the antics of the alpha males and either aspire hopelessly to be like them or dismiss them as arrogant bastards. Probably many women meet a disproportionate number of these men because they are the only ones with the nerve to approach them at the bar (which, girls, does take an amazing amount of nerve) and many women would openly admit a preference for the Bad Boy.
Most of us though, whether we like it or not, have more in common with you women than we would like to admit. It's not men against women - it's the rest of us against those self-important avaricious cock-sure tossers who want to take over everything and leave the rest of us feeling somehow inadequate, when in fact we are just getting on with life.

So welcome to our world girls. We all feel inadequate on some fairly spurious basis much of the time and especially when we're young. The fact is though that I know I am far from alone in finding skinny women a bit off-putting. We don't care how much you spent on cosmetics or how fashionable your frock is anything like as much as you do. This oppression, for once, is not our fault. This, I'm afraid is all yours, and at some point you will have to take some responsibility for your willingness to give in to the fashion designers and the PR men, whose only motivation, lets face it, is to sell stuff. You compare yourself with your so-called sisters, as we do with our so-called brothers, and we all find ourselves wanting.

If you want real emancipation - stop comparing yourselves with some ideal and start being who you are.
Or am I being very old-fashioned?

Anti-competitive practices

How many times do I hear it said that competition has just got to be a good thing? We need to be more competitive and raise standards they say. Competition must be introduced in the health service and education. Doing things just because they need doing is anti-competitive. How long before doing your own housework or giving to Oxfam is outlawed as anti-competitive – denying other people the opportunity to make money cleaning your house and feeding the poor? In business, competition is how you ensure that you get the best.


I can’t think of any other area of life where this would be considered a sensible way to get the best out of people, except maybe sports. In an art class or at a party or even in an office you wouldn’t expect the best results from the most aggressive, controlling, ruthless person there – quite the opposite. (If materials were scarce they might be the only one to produce anything at all, but materials are not scarce – no matter what they tell you. It’s just that some people – the most aggressive, controlling, ruthless ones, hog it all and force the rest of us to squabble over what’s left.)


It’s always assumed that the winners must, ipso facto, be the best. It’s an equation that seldom gets questioned and one of the basic tenets of Free Market Fundamentalism. But it can’t be true. People have different talents. There are all sorts of expertise out there – in my field there are plant propagators, plant breeders, garden designers, gardeners, pest and disease experts, various technologists, writers and so on and so forth. Each has various areas of specialist knowledge – some scientific, some artistic, some commercial, some practical. There are also character traits and outlooks appropriate to their roles – patience, attention to detail, creativity, physical fitness, love of nature and so on, and yet to compete successfully in the market the gardener must be preoccupied chiefly with management, money and publicity. Materials will need to be as cheap as possible. Labour must be as unskilled and low paid as possible. The ‘Products’ ideally should be as gaudy and short-lived as possible so that the customer comes back for more.
In my experience the modern commercial horticultural business is often run by rich retired business people who think they know about plants. (Sometimes they employ actual gardeners but play down their role and pay them very little.) Highly competitive people typically believe they are more knowledgeable than anyone else on their staff but have no real idea of what it means to be an expert in anything (except making money). It's almost impossible to convince them otherwise. Their self-belief is unassailable.
The characteristics that go to make up an expert nurseryman are not the same as those that go to make up a commercially successful nursery owner. In my experience there is very little overlap. People who really care about plants are generally not ruthless careerists. And yet it will be the latter that ends up running the garden centre and putting the real gardeners out of business. In the free market you can be the very best gardener in the world with a generous mix of the qualities mentioned above, but unless you are a good competitor you will get nowhere. On the other hand you can be a good competitor and a mediocre gardener and do very well indeed. (The same applies in almost any area of commerce. I just happen to know a bit about horticulture.)
Being the winner, in practice, is not at all to do with being the best man, but with making the other man the loser.
How then does competition lead to higher standards?


There was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy some while back where Christina Yang (who is proud to tell everyone that she is highly competitive) says that limiting the length of doctors’ shifts is wrong because it favours the weak. It doesn’t. It allows doctors who are in every other way excellent (or possibly better) to work. The requirement to be able to work twenty hours straight is an artificial criterion caused by bad management (like the artificial scarcity mentioned above) that trumps all other qualities. It doesn't matter how good you are - if you can't stay awake you are out. Who knows, perhaps Christina Yang is not the best doctor. Perhaps she is only the best of those that can function without sleep.


Sport is held up as the paradigm of healthy competition. Sport is all about winning after all. Here it is truer than anywhere else that the one who wins is the best. The winner of the gold medal for the one hundred metres sprint at the Olympics really is the best sprinter in the world, isn’t he? Well no. For a start he’s only the best of those who could afford to take the time off to go through the training regime – not a trivial consideration in very poor countries. So in fact he’s only the fastest of the rich kids, which doesn’t sound quite so impressive.
But even beyond that, sheer physical prowess is not the only thing. There’s a lot of psychology involved. A weaker athlete might win by intimidation or bluffing. This may be more of an issue in other sports and games. A weaker chess player can make a stronger one concede defeat by manipulation. Ok, it’s just a game. Sports are entered into voluntarily, unlike the market, which is most emphatically not ‘just a game’. Everyone must take part or starve – a fact many businessmen seem to forget.
In business almost all the success is down to bluffing and manipulation, marketing, pricing and power, and only tangentially about the sheer quality of the goods and services - assuming the customer is well-informed enough to know the difference (more about that another time.)
Competition therefore favours entirely spurious qualities and ignores the real – it’s the Law of Unintended Consequences again.


A highly developed competitive spirit is supposed to be a sign of strength. Women are attracted to it in men apparently. I just wonder though why those men seem to have so much to prove. You see them sometimes when you’re out driving. You’re doing the speed limit (or if you’re honest, somewhat more) and yet this guy’s still got his nose up your arse, trying to get you to go faster. Or you can watch him tailgating the guy in front – his brake lights flashing on and off. What’s he trying to prove? Does he think he looks cool? Does he think we’re all going ‘Wow! Now there’s a Real Man.’ Maybe he’s just mad. Maybe (giving him the benefit of the doubt) it’s an emergency. Then you see him overtake on a bend and you know, if it wasn’t an emergency before, it very soon will be. To me a highly developed competitive spirit is a sign of inadequacy. (There are also those city gents who drive their Jags everywhere at forty mph – presumably to let the rest of us know they’ve arrived. Either way they seem overly preoccupied with impressing the rest of us. Or maybe they're just very old.)
The free market is like a road system without speed limits or traffic lights or roundabouts.
Most people consider themselves to be above average drivers.


Of course I'm not proclaiming that henceforth there must be no competition. I understand that quite a few people rather enjoy the odd kickabout of a weekend and I myself am quite partial to the occasional game of scrabble. Nor am I saying that competition cannot improve services and keep prices down. Some people seem to respond to that sort of motivation. But it can't be trusted. It has a logic all it's own that has nothing to do with what people actually need or want. Like natural selection, to which it is obviously related, it has no forethought and no conscience. It just does whatever works and doesn't care what it extinguishes along the way (including itself). And yet we have elevated competition to the level of a universal panacea for human shortcomings. 'Make them fight' we say. 'Let's see who's the better man.' But instead we only find out who's the most devious, the most amoral, the most venal. And once they have taken what they can, what can the rest of us do but squabble over what's left?
I like the analogy of the football crowd. Once one person stands up everyone behind him has to stand up in order to see. In the end no one can see much more than they could before but everyone's more uncomfortable.


So if you’re planning a garden you don’t just accept that the whole place is going to be taken over by brambles and bindweed. No, if you’re a keen gardener, chances are that a lot of the plants you want will require special treatment and protection. Your veg will need extra nutrients and protection from pests and diseases. Those prize alpines will fail if they get shaded out or overcrowded. No gardener thinks that the best thing is simply to let the biggest most aggressive weeds take over on the grounds that it ‘maximises growth’. The word ‘weedy’ is usually applied to weak and needy people but in the garden it’s the invasive and the opportunistic we need to weed out...

Bank Stains

Not surprised this morning listening as usual to the Today programme on Radio 4 to hear of the bankers once again awarding themselves vast bonuses. Well who wouldn't, in their position? If you're in charge of the money, and no one can stop you, well you'd just take everything you could get your hands on wouldn't you. There's no need for any clever economic theory. This is simply what happens when a small sector of society (I hesitate to call them an elite) is essentially outside the law. They do what they want - and they want money.
That's no surprise either. To get where they are they don't have to be especially intelligent (I mean no more than a nurse or a teacher) they just have to be into money. No surprise then that those most interested in money end up with far too much of it.
They claim of course to be smarter than the rest of us (they've got more money, so that proves it) when in fact all they have is an area of expertise, as many of us do. Theirs happens to be making money. I'm not saying this isn't a crucial role in society, only, can it really be that much more crucial than everything else?

The world being as it is, what a person deserves hardly enters into the conversation. In the free market, we get what we can afford, or what we are in a position to demand, and so it is with wages. It all depends on scarcity. If what you have to offer is rare you can demand more for it. But is the kind of talent needed to work in The City so incredibly much rarer than almost anything else? The way they talk about themselves you'd think they were practically superhuman - with an uncanny ability to function without sleep, an almost god-like ability to withstand stress, and a quasi-omniscient understanding of how the world works. Wow! They're almost too good to be true.

I could say something similar about other high-earning groups - doctors, lawyers, footballers, heads of large corporations, but almost immediately we get into questions about what they do to justify their money. Doctors, probably most uncontroversially get a lot of money because they save lives and we're all grateful for that. We also take into account the length of time they trained and the number of hours they have to put in, especially early on in their careers.
Lawyers are a similar case. If you get into trouble with the law your life could be not worth living without proper representation. Lawyers also go through lengthy and costly training. Unfortunately paying lawyers is a less straight forward 'good' than paying doctors. It's as if we were required to undergo a lot of medical treatment that we weren't entirely sure was necessary and were then forced to pay whatever the doctor happened to come up with. In short, we're not at all convinced that lawyers really deserve what they charge, which often seems extortionate, but we have no choice, because we don't understand  what they do and they all charge more or less the same anyway.
Any profession that involves a specialised training has the rest of us at a disadvantage - even plumbing. We simply have to trust them to know what they're doing and not to rip us off.

Sportsmen and women and other entertainers do what most of us do for fun, but for cash, which doesn't sound very onerous. Certainly there's long hours of training and rehearsals, a lot of travel, a lot of meeting other celebs, but generally the salaries of the best paid entertainers are justified in terms of revenues, both from ticket sales and merchandise. There is a fairly straight line between a celebrity's name and the stuff associated with them that people want to buy. Top entertainers are also considered, by definition, extremely scarce, so they can command very high prices. Whether, for example, good singers or footballers really are that rare is doubtful but because we make them compete, it gives the illusion that only a tiny number are really worth looking at, and everyone else is mediocre or rubbish.
More reasonably, careers can be brief in the sports and entertainments industries, so it makes sense to make as much as possible as quickly as possible. (They could just save it up and then get a job like normal people, but that's not very rock'n'roll I suppose.)

Heads of large companies justify their money in other ways. Long years of training is definitely optional and may be considered detrimental by some, in favour of just some sort of 'common sense', or 'business acumen' or 'killer instinct' or whatever you want to call it. Certainly such people are often very driven and single minded (but then, so are train spotters), ruthless and manipulative almost to the point of psychopathology. They justify their income (if they feel the need to justify it at all) in that they tend to see their enterprise as entirely their own work, with the staff as mere human resources. It's their firm, they worked hard and long hours to make it what it is - therefore it's their wealth, to do with as they alone see fit. Of course the firm might sink without trace and they might lose everything, so they see the ability to take risks also as a justification for taking whatever they can, whenever they can. There's a lot of luck involved too, so there's a large element of gambling.

There is also the emergent property of The Going Rate - a level of remuneration that is accepted as normal. In theory the free market should bring this down to an affordable level as businesses try to undercut their competitors, but in practice it can result in an arms race as companies try to outbid each other for scarce resources, such as talented staff. This is ostensibly why UK banks have been unwilling to reduce exorbitant bonuses - because they are afraid they won't be able to compete for employees with other parts of the world. As a result the going rate has rocketted. This probably also accounts for the inflated prices of legal advice, medical care, bank charges and a whole lot of other unusually expensive items. You'd almost think there was a conspiracy.

So what do we have so far? Being important to society, training and expertise, scarcity, brief career, risk taking, going rates.
A lot of this is bogus. I could not justify charging an extortionate rate as a gardener on the grounds that I was afraid I wouldn't be able work in a few year's time. Many people train hard and work long hours all their lives for almost no return at all, and gambling is just gambling.
In fact only two things on the list really count - being important to society, and scarcity, but they are completely at odds. The former might be considered a left wing approach, the latter, right wing. Those most committed to the free market consider supply and demand the only factors worth taking into account when considering the price of anything, including labour. It doesn't matter how long you work or how hard, or how crucial to the smooth running of society, if you are easily replaced, you can't expect much in the way of remuneration.
Most ordinary people on the other hand will quickly bring in questions of how vital a person's job is, how hard, dirty or dangerous it is. (How tedious it is should probably be included. The hardest job I ever had was on the tills in Sainsbury's before the days of bar code readers. The job was incredibly boring and repetitive but you couldn't drift off for a second. A friend of mine had an agency job standing at a conveyor belt all day watching vitamin pills go by, looking out for misshapen ones. He lasted a week I think. At least with weeding I can think about other things.) The more menial the job, the more easily the workers are replaced, and therefore the less money they attract, and yet if I had to say whether bin men, or hospital cleaners, or potato growers or merchant bankers were the more crucial to society...  well. Its certainly not obvious.
The question is even more pointed when you think about footballers or TV presenters. We routinely use the language of fairness and deserving when we talk about wages but the economy does something completely different. This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about Economic Reality as opposed to Real Reality. Bankers talk about deserving their money too - they tell us how stressful it is and what long hours they work, but lots of people have stressful jobs and work long hours. My Brighton friend has spent a large amount of his working life in group homes for adults with various kinds of 'challenging' (i.e. violent) behaviour and you can be sure he didn't get millions in bonuses. For most ordinary people, the greatest stress is the fear of losing your livelihood. (There seems to be a belief that low paid people don't care so much because they have less to lose!) Entrepreneurs and financiers on the other hand pride themselves on being risk takers. They love that stuff. If remuneration is compensation for stress it follows that they should be paid less, not more.
The most well paid people among my friends design websites, write press releases or do research for London companies. In fact it seems that those with the most fulfilling creative jobs also get the most money. Pay is not in any way 'compensation' for hard work.

The difficulty for those who would argue that banker's pay is undeserved is the argument that they get paid what they do because they bring in all this revenue, and bin men just don't create that much wealth. If a market trader is involved in a deal that brings in millions or billions - shouldn't he or she be rewarded? This relates exactly to the sports celeb who's name sells millions in tickets and merchandise, or the businessman who risks his house to build a company. Shouldn't they get their cut, for what they did? Isn't that fair? Don't they deserve it?
Frankly I'm not sure. I don't think so, but I'm not sure as yet why not.
When it comes down to it, they haven't actually done that much, any of them, in pure hard work and intelligence terms - not more than a lot of other much less well paid people. Their relatively ordinary amount of effort and intelligence nevertheless can produce massive returns. Probably remuneration should be related to productivity. If I grow more plants - I sell more plants - I make more money. An employee who comes up with an idea that saves his company a fortune should be rewarded. I'm not convinced though that this logic can be extended indefinitely. For bankers, the relatively small amount of work is completely unhitched from the magnitude of the results. Plus bankers, unlike entrepreneurs, are usually in a 'Heads I win, tails I don't lose' situation. The risk is actually rather low.

And there are consequences. The massive wealth of the minority does directly mean that others go without. Even within the UK, the buying power of the few means that most people cannot afford to live in the capital. Natives of rural areas have to move to the town and commute to work in the country because houses are bought up as second homes by the rich. Globally the spending power of the rich nations means that resources are wasted on those who already have more than enough instead of going to those in need. We are all in the West somewhat guilty but the gargantuan extravagance of this bloated minority should be liable for far more of the burden. Instead they pay lawyers and financial consultants to ensure that they pay no tax whatsoever - a luxury the rest of us cannot even imagine. They should be made to pay, or better - not given such ludicrous sums in the first place.
The world is not infinite. It is a closed system - a zero sum game. What is gained by one is lost to another, or in this case, many others. Growth and technology will not save us.
And these people run the world for Christ's sakes, or soon will. Surely we don't want the most powerful people in the world to have the emotional intelligence of spoilt toddlers?

But wouldn't we all, given the opportunity, do the same thing? If we could make millions by doing almost nothing for a few years - wouldn't we all do it?
Of course we would.
But perhaps the issue is that we shouldn't be faced with those sorts of opportunities.
No doubt there are many sordid things we might be tempted to do, given the chance (and if the law turned a blind eye). But that wouldn't make them right.
And there is such a thing as resisting temptation - unfashionable as that might be.
Most people, I believe, think that the pay should reflect how valuable and how hard the job is - that remuneration should be properly deserved, and individually tempted as they may be, they believe that the kinds of incomes we see in certain areas of the economy at the moment are at least undeserved and unfair, and at most, a wank-stain on the underpants of humanity.