Dear Auntie Useless
I have a bone to pick with the fashion section of the Guardian’s tiny supplement G2. To do so, of course, means that I must first justify the fact that I bothered to read that section despite being well aware that it would be petty and superficial in the way that only fashion writing, allowed to be so by its very definition, can be.
Yesterday, I went to an induction for prospective team members of the Essex Human Rights Review, held at the University of Essex in Colchester. The journey back isn’t brief under ideal circumstances, but yesterday the buses were on strike. One of the drivers who came in had driven me to the campus for no fare; there was no sign of anyone intending to take me in the other direction. I set off walking, only to find at the first junction that there were no signs to Colchester. Luckily, there were signs to the town centre.
Somehow, I have still not learned never to blindly follow signs to the ‘town centre’.
I eventually ended up at Hythe station. I’m sure Hythe is lovely – it was a bit late for the tour – but it was definitely not the town I was aiming for. But worse than watching the trains for London speed past (in both directions), and worse than the terrible sandwich I was eating, was the knowledge, deep down inside, that the signage probably was adequate and I had almost certainly just made a balls-up.
Luckily, the time I spent on the platform gave me plenty of time to read the paper. All of the paper. And of course, this included the painfully grim Ask Hadley column, in which the seemingly well-adjusted but slightly insecure Suzie asked:
I have fallen in love with a Norwegian who is into hiking. Where can I find outdoorsy attire that I am not mortified to wear?
There are a number of sensible answers to this, even if your primary interest is sartorial acceptability rather than offering a well-balanced view of the world. Luckily for Freeman, she was working in her capacity as a fashion columnist, and so was under no obligation to be sensible or well-balanced. Her answer was that there is no way to look good while being appropriately dressed for a walk, or for any other vaguely active pastime, so you might as well leave the people you love to live interesting lives and chuck them out if they worry about how much you love sitting on your arse.
You don’t need me to tell you why this is stupid. But what really rankles me about it – beyond all proportion, really, given it’s a fashion column in G2 – is that she treats the question like a stand-up treats a heckler. It’s a jumping-off point for her own lacklustre routine; she does nothing to actually help Suzie with her question. It might not be entirely her fault, of course: her answer certainly suggests that she has no appreciation for how the beauty and expanse of the outdoors, and the joy of actually doing something with another human being, is more alluring than the daintiest of dresses. But it seems to be a tendency among writers of advice columns to ignore the central conceit of their inches of newsprint and just riff on the general theme they’ve been left with. Why even bother, if that’s what you’re doing? You might as well pick your topic by drawing cards from Pictionary.
A journalist has a number of responsibilities, and they can be complicated. But if you’re writing a fluffy advice column in the supplement, your serious obligations are very limited: you have to offer decent help to the people who write to you, and you have to entertain your readers. I can see the temptation to prioritise the latter; it certainly involves a much larger group of customers. But however trivial their concerns – and in a fashion column, triviality isn’t exactly thin on the ground – the people who write in are looking for help, and they deserve to be treated as more than a source of newsprint. Besides, if you can’t write an entertaining column and offer a useful answer at the same time, it might just be that you’re not very good at your job.
Mummy, Where Do Atheists Come From?
According to Ed West at the Telegraph:
...atheists are a dying breed. Austria is the only country which records the religious belief of parents but their figure, of 0.85 children per atheist woman, is far below replacement rate (2.1) and below even the most barren European country’s average rate, which is about 1.2. And since most people inherit their parents’ political and religious world views, this is bad news for Team Dawkins.
The unarguable sense of this statement is demonstrated by the incredible shrinking of cities we've seen over the past decades. People who live in cities have fewer children than those who don't, and of course people are more likely to live where they were born, so it's no wonder the urban centres of the world are shrivelling like a drying plum. As you might expect from a minor contribution to an increasingly tedious debate, West takes the opportunity to tag a few patronising remarks to his slightly-evidenced wild hypothesising:
...this is bad news for Team Dawkins.
Team Dawkins? What a perfect combination of naffness, childishness and the pointless implication of confrontation! Even if he'd bothered to spend more time thinking about his article than most teams get in the Crystal Dome, I don't think he could have done better.
Personally I find the New Atheists’ anti-Christian aggression tedious: criticising people for their privately-held religious beliefs shows a lack of class and maturity
Ed West is writing for a national newspaper but hasn't yet learned that colons imply pretty direct connections between what's on either side of them. A sad state of affairs.
...this sudden outpouring of bile against Christianity seems clearly motivated by a secret fear of another Abrahamic religion
Clearly, Mr West, and if I may say so it's a very astute case you make for your broad-brush accusation of Islamophobia. If there's one uniting reason to dislike, say, having an established church, crippling children's education, withholding reproductive rights or scuppering efforts to combat HIV, it's because of all those dreadful foreigners.
Of course, this is all pretty standard in the land of comment pieces. I wouldn't normally write about it, but the first comment on the article really riled me:
They can’t die off fast enough. What an annoying lot they are!
It's just sat there, right at the top, gently combining an affably reactionary remark with a borderline endorsement of genocide. Nearly 24 hours have passed, West has made three comments in the thread, and still it sits there, unedited and unchallenged. I've reported the comment, and I'll be interested to see if the Telegraph really does think it's OK for someone to use its website to wish death on me and everyone else who shares one tiny component of my view of the universe.
Cancelling My Subscription
I've bought Private Eye enough times over the last few years that it would certainly have been worth my while to subscribe. And it seems like every fortnight they publish some stupid inanity like this.
In the past, it's usually at least seemed like the unpleasant collateral damage from the Eye's scattergun journalism: they run with everything even slightly dodgy they can find, and so uncover the bad at the cost of occasionally looking like a bunch of petty, unimaginative tits. There's something noble about that – or perhaps not noble, but something altogether more useful. It's captured by the name of the magazine, and it's the reason Hislop spends so much of his time defending libel cases.
But this is such self-parody it would be better placed in the Eye's back pages than its front. It takes the usual tenuous, unfounded accusation of self-interest – the disfigured heart of many a Private Eye column inch – and gives it that magic sprinkling of satiric absurdity. The reasons that the cabinet is mostly made up of white ex-public schoolboys are exactly the same as the reasons that high-up positions in the media – or in law, or in medicine – are dominated by white ex-public schoolboys. So no, it isn't a coincidence, and that's surely the point?
The funny thing is, I don't think this would annoy me at all if it weren't for that irritating little Private Eye 'er'. That tiny syllable, nestled away safely between its commas, is apparently the Eye's way of making it's stupid accusations without acknowledging how ridiculous they are. If the point was made outright, it would show off its own silliness. But more revealingly, if that little 'er' were taken away, the last sentence would magically transform into a supporting case for Viner's point.
I shall be taking out a subscription and cancelling it immediately.