Damaged goods

Google, the lazy way’s person to start a blog post. But if you search “damages children” it gives you a pretty good idea of how prevalent is the idea that many things ‘damage’ children.

Parental separation, child care, attachment parenting, leaving babies to cry, never leaving babies to cry, too many after school activities, not enough stimulation, free range parenting , working mothers, stay at home mothers, tiger mothers, hang on where are the fathers here? Geez it’s not surprising that young people today are the horrors they’re portrayed as with so much stuff ‘damaging’ them.

The nature of this damage is often unclear. Stuff is bandied about regarding ‘self esteem’ or ‘stress hormones’ but a lot of time what ‘damage’ spells is: ‘Mothers this is your fault, why have you perpetuated/not stopped this damage that is happening to your children RIGHT NOW’.

Parental guilt is journalistic catnip, and is yet another thing constantly thrust at parents, most often mothers, until they start believing it because we all feel guilty sometimes don’t we? About how little time we spend with our kids? About how we’re buying their love with material goods? About how our relationship with their other parent didn’t work out?

I’ve never seen, though, anyone talk of another way of looking at this – of understanding and accepting  that we probably won’t bring up our children to reach their maximum possible potential. This is really what media talk of ‘damaging children’ amounts to – all those working mums, or attachment parents or single parents or just somewhat flakey parents are not ruining their children’s lives. The Media and The Internet and Advertising are not going to rot their brains. Because kids are resilient. Humans are resilient. If we weren’t, we’d all be in a state of mental fugue by the time we were 12. We can cope with the fact that Mummy often said she was busy, or Dad shouted sometimes or once Mummy didn’t give us a cuddle once when we were feeling sad, all other things being basically OK.

And yes, the way we parent will most likely have some negative impacts on our children. We may bring up kids to be too averse to conflict, or bad at taking criticism, or too uncompromising or with a short temper. But you know what? Despite that they will most likely still enjoy friendships, satisfying and lasting relationships, educational achievements and decent jobs. Your mum and dad do fuck you up. But only slightly.

Middle class parents are portrayed as agonising over the slightest decision: ‘What if seven is too late to start classes in Mandarin?  He’ll end up cleaning toilets for a living and HATING me’, ‘If I don’t do a good princess castle cake for her birthday no one will be her friend and I’ll have ruined her entire childhood’.  The flip-side implication being, I feel, that those parents who can’t stretch to the cost of cello lessons are assumed immune to this sort of thing because they ‘don’t care about education’ and think good parenting consists of shouting lots at their numerous uncouth offspring and keeping them quiet with expensive gadgets bought with the immense wealth of benefit payments.

Classism aside (mostly as that’s a whole other post) I feel if you are worrying, even a little bit, about whether you’re doing the right thing, you are probably doing the right-enough thing. If you find parenting hard and the decisions a bit worrisome, that’s fine. If you’re being crushed by guilt that your every decision could send their future lives into a swan dive, I’d say ‘Calm down, you’re only their parent’.

The media likes to present research on profound neglect, such as the heartbreaking lack of care suffered by Romanian orphans, as though it is some kind of continuum on which your children may be found if you’re not careful. If, for example, you go to work before a certain age, or don’t constantly hold in-depth conversations with them or don’t have a family meal every day. Not only is this insulting to the genuine sufferings of the appallingly neglected, it’s also insulting to humans’ general ability to be the parents that their kids need them to be in the vast majority of cases.

It also rankles with me that privileged parents are encouraged to cluck over minutiae when plenty of children endure experiences rather more testing than not being selected for the school debating team – persistent poverty, imprisoned parents, being a carer to a family member, childhood illness – and nonetheless come through with flying ‘being a sorted human being’ colours.

A lot of parents need to forgive themselves more, stop looking into the crystal ball of doom and appreciate that, actually, their kids, right now, are basically OK and are very likely going to stay that way. So don’t start saving up for a psychiatrist just yet, and if they do need one later, swallow your pride and accept it might not be all about you.

Battlefield Youth

I think I hate Hollister. Not that this will overly concern that particular brand – after all, their buggy-unfriendly, loud, dark stores are expressly designed to say ‘Oi! Sod off!’ to the likes of me. I’m almost surprised it lets me on its website.

Sour grapes? Embittered at my lost youth and now that some places are too young for me?

Not really. What really sticks in the craw is that Hollister is going out of its way to be alienating for those older than its core market, while peddling the most pedestrian of conformity.

Navy and taupe and grey. Preppy sportswear. Chart music.

The message: ‘Rebel against your parents by conforming with big brands and mass market pop!’

I’m steeling myself for the fact that being a parent now means a constant battle on some level between consumerism and you for your kids’ hearts and minds. It’s scarily easy for some marketing type in his or her Soho office to know more about what your kids like than you do, especially in an environment where kids’ media choices are more and more personalised, and increasingly easy to receive without parental mediation. It’s not so much porn and violence I’m worried about as the drip-drip of precision-marketed material aimed at tuning kids into what marketers want them to be into.

Does this mean I’ll be battening down the hatches, banning media and banishing brands from my children’s lives? No. It does mean that I will make it my business to understand what they’re into, to watch what they watch (or as much as I can bear) make sure I listen to their music and read some of their media (if I can find out what it is, given it probably won’t be off a shelf in WH Smiths). Nor do I plan to tell them if I disapprove – God, if that isn’t stoking a fire for adolescent fuck-you-ness, what is? But if they’re into something I feel unhappy about – be it music with violent messages or TV programmes that purport to tell girls to be themselves and live their dreams but are actually telling them not to be smarter than boys and to make themselves pretty – I want to talk to them about what they like about it so hopefully I can open some discussion about the messages from it that make me uncomfortable. And yes, I can hear the laughter of parents with older kids reading this and thinking ‘Yeah, and you’ll be lucky to get anything beyond a “Dunno” or “I’s’alright” out of them. Discussion – LOL!’

But I still feel it’s worth a try, and that certainly there’s nothing to be gained from rolling eyes and going ‘Oh God! Why are you watching this crap again?!’ – because that’s really put generations of kids off being into something and not at all been the subject of countless unnecessary arguments.

Like Hollister, but in a different way, modern pop seems to have this generation-gap/conformism mismatch. You get music that sounds squarely aimed at the under 12s, but which comes with Parental Advisory stickers. You get cheery pop accompanied by a video of a woman in a latex bikini dry-humping a Cruise missile.  There’s this constant low-level-outrage drone behind a lot of pop that’s become so boring as to be not worth commenting on, but I suppose it might still catch the imagination of kids who haven’t seen it all before.

I’m someone who isn’t especially bothered by innuendo in music – it seems obvious to me that either a kid won’t know what it means, or if they do know what it means, then it’s not the song’s fault. I’ll confess that until I was in my early teens I thought all those lines about ‘Doing it all night long’ and ‘Getting down’ were about dancing. Admirably quaint, I know. But pop songs and imagery still send out strong messages about things like how much clothing a girl might be expected to wear on a night out and What Makes a Bloke a Real Man. And it doesn’t distress me because it’s oh-so-rebellious or impure and I can’t take its freakyness, but because behind it beats the pulse of mass marketing, stereotyped and unhealthy gender roles, materialism and shallowness.

Oh, and don’t forget hypocrisy – dollybirds who portray getting their kit off as empowerment, which maybe it is with a million downloads behind you, but maybe not for the majority of women involved with the ‘getting-your-kit-off’ trade. Men who make their money off glamourising violence and objectifying women, but spout platitudes about ‘Yeah, there’s too much hate in the world, we should all love one another more’ to make up for it.

This, to me, is the world represented by brands like Hollister – selling back a sanitised, marketing-approved vision of youth that’s actually all about not changing anything and slotting neatly into the groove assigned to your social cohort.

Mark Easton wrote interestingly on the BBC website about that old chestnut ‘kids today’, noting that there does seem to be less rebellion in the air. But at the same time, some things do speak very well of da yoof – drinking, drug use and smoking are falling significantly among young people. I don’t know if this is really a reaction to anything so much as a cycle of fashion, and getting hammered has become boring and kids have realised that smoking is expensive and unpleasant. And the kids would be absolutely right about all of the above. A strong suggestion is that, with social media replacing hanging out at the bus stop, and giving a forum for chatting, flirting and, unfortunately,  bitching and bullying too, far less need for the social fuels of booze and drugs.

The internet does make kids more vulnerable to targeted marketing, but at the same time gives opportunities for some bright sparks to create alternative voices for young people, for example Rookie from the very talented Tavi Gevinson – a magazine by and for teenage girls who want to explore feminism as well as fashion, with articles on everything from girls who box to ‘How to look like you weren’t just crying in 5 minutes’.

It’s not about ersatz rebellion, it’s not about following a brand or affecting a particular style – it’s about girls expressing themselves; articulately, geekishly, individually, funnily.

In other words, generally the things advertisers don’t want young people to be – exploring, questioning, creative. Then they might buy less stuff and generally be more immune to messages that tell them they need to be more like everyone else than anyone else. Kids by nature are exploring, questioning and creative, and not dumb – we need to give them credit for that so that their bullshit detectors are ready for those who want to sell them someone’s conformist ideals and motivations and call it their youth.

Being a girl

I have long had an awkward relationship with ‘Being A Woman’. To the point that, on learning that I didn’t change my bra every day, my husband asked if I might somehow check that this was normal. I had to acknowledge that I don’t generally come over as connected to the supposed female grapevine, so that’s why he might have been worried that I was Getting Being a Woman Wrong.

I was still pissed off as hell about his asking, though.

But the fact was I knew I was normal in this respect not because I have a bunch of girlfriends to refer to but because I have access to the folklore of womanhood through ‘women’s’ media. I knew that the world was not full of women who have a fresh bra for every day, because if it were, I would have picked up something about it from magazines. I personally haven’t a clue how frequently my female friends change their bras and frankly I don’t have many friendships where it’s the sort of question that comes out in conversation. As it was, I sorted it out by asking the mums on a small online mum’s community I frequent (the joy of relative anonymity), and they obligingly agreed that no, I wasn’t being abnormally skanky at all.

Like many women, I don’t fit the woman’s magazine profile of Womanliness – I have no interest in shoes, I have only ever sat down to a gossipy girls’ lunch or dinner as part of a hen night, and only a handful of times at that, I don’t have any friendships where I could imagine talking about my sex life with anyone, or sharing any other intimate information or secrets, I seldom wear makeup (I certainly don’t feel a need to wear it every day), I don’t do diets and am not interested in spending time criticising my body. All of these seem to be part of the female lives reflected in magazines.

At the same time as taking it all with a pinch of salt I know that the media reflects society’s standard narrative of womanhood, and it acts as my guide to being a woman to at least some extent, especially as I don’t have a strong network of female friends.

I like to imagine that it doesn’t really shape me, but I suppose I have to accept that it does. Yes, I can spend an inordinate amount of time looking at clothes. I can window shop for an afternoon, whilst intermittently thinking ‘This is quite an odd thing to be doing, really’. I can often identify a designer by an item they’ve designed, and I do keep an interested track of trends, though I have neither the money nor the energy to actually do fashion. I mean, bag, coat and shoes to precisely match several outfits? Exhausts me just thinking about it. I’ll stick to biker boots, trainers, work shoes, a couple of bags and two coats a year, thanks. But I’m happy to admire people who can really pull together an outfit. My attempts to get together a chic and grown up look for my new job starting next week (hey, 35’s not too late, is it?) seem doomed to not quite work due to me just not being able to stomach the expense and effort, and still not knowing how to use a belt for anything other than holding trousers up unobtrusively.

I grew up surrounded by Vogues and Elles that my mum read, and I loved looking at them too. Fortunately my mum early on instilled the idea that these were not realistic portrayals of womanhood, that the models were far too thin and the clothes far too expensive for almost anybody. Didn’t mean we couldn’t admire a beautifully cut Le Smoking, though.

As time goes on my daughter will also look at my magazines, and I hope we can enjoy them together. But I will be sure to have one eye on making sure she puts them in their proper context as ‘aspirational’ and usually aspiring to something rather shallow and ultimately not desirable.

I want my daughter to be able to get something out of beauty and fashion if she so chooses – I’m not someone who says either than they hold women back, or that they are necessarily ‘empowering’. But they can and should be fun and positive aspects of life if one wants to engage with them. What they shouldn’t become is a chore or a duty – having to apply a full face of make up every morning from the age of 13, having to endlessly renew your wardrobe in order to keep everything up to the precise minute. That’s when it can hold us back and when it stops being fun and positive.

An interest in fashion and beauty is not what makes a woman, or a woman who’s good at being a woman, or bad at being a woman because she happens not to give a toss about either. This is probably not the message that media aimed at women puts across. Media woman is groomed and shaved and knows how to use her belt to really make an outfit (as well as probably in debt to Topshop).

I treat the media as much like fashion and beauty – fun to be engaged with, but I fit it into my life, I don’t build my values and priorities from it. And I cannot be arsed with buying a matching handbag.

Just?

They can just move to where there’s work

Really? Is there available, affordable housing and/or social housing there? Or will that be at even more of a premium in a place where there are jobs compared to somewhere there isn’t?

They can just move somewhere smaller

There’s a lack of one-bed social housing, and a private rentals ain’t cheap.

They can just move back in with their parents

Unless they have an abusive parent. Or no dad and a mum who’s since had another two kids. Or their parents have been forced to move to a one-bed flat (and been able to find one) due to the bedroom tax.

They can just take any job and not be picky

When there’s hundreds of applicants for the most menial of roles? And will that job give them stability and rights, or might it, say, dump them back on to benefits after however many weeks or months when they decide their services aren’t needed anymore?

They can just travel further afield to get to work

As long as they can afford the transport costs, that is.

They can just find a job that fits around their caring commitments

Ha!

They can just find a job that they can manage with their health problem

Because the world is filled with understanding employers who will reorganise their office to accommodate a disabled person and will be totally understanding about time off for medical appointments or acute episodes of illness.

They can just make do on a little less

When mum’s gone a week eating just bread so the kids can have warm meals, and she’s scared what will happen when they grow out of their current shoes and coats?

Future skills and food pills

In the ancient history before our kids were born, my husband and I went for a country walk with an old school friend of his.

As we trundled across the Chilterns, this friend, for one reason or another, ended up narrating to us a history of England’s not-very-English monarchs from William the Conqueror to the Tudors. It was fantastic and pretty awe-inspiring stuff; I truly envied the depths of his knowledge.

I got thinking about this as there is brouhaha in the air concerning teaching, and for the purposes of this post, I’ll focus on history teaching, where it seems many of the issues collide. The ‘sides’ are portrayed by the media as the right wingers with their refrain of ‘Let’s teach British history and bring back names and dates and damn everything else’ and the left wing ‘Boo to your “facts” and Dead White Males and let’s be empathetic and build skills’ crew.

The former would have you believe that the latter just want schools to teach kids to write letters to ethnic minority historical figures, the latter that the former want every child to filled Gradgrind style with dry, droning facts and to unconditionally cheer the wonders of the British Empire – huzzah!

Right wing rags are full of delighted nodding at the removal of ‘PC’ Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano from the curriculum and joy at the return of monarchs and battle dates. The left wing meanwhile shakes its head that slavery is therefore going to be glossed over, triumphal, jingoistic nationalism will be promoted, and that young people will never relate to facts rather than history-based skills exercises.

It may seem these are both extremes, but otherwise intelligent people seem to be taking these in as some true reflection of what’s at stake.  I have found myself especially annoyed at the insistence that names and dates are dry and dead, and somehow inimical to individuality and self expression – Mr Dickens, you have something to answer for, there.  Or that somehow facts are right wing, and empathy uniquely left wing. As the ever-excellent Old Andrew tweeted: ‘It’s all: “How dare these right-wing bastards suggest that things actually happened in particular countries and in a particular order!”’.

The cant on names and dates goes that fact teaching is mere repetition, flat and uninteresting, and contributing nothing ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’. Yet our friend’s ability to talk in such a lively and fascinating way could not have come about without facts. There would be nothing to build that enthusiasm upon. He wasn’t just listing facts, he was able to give opinions, to paint pictures in words with his knowledge.

This is not to say that every child who studies history and learns the facts will be able to do the same – but it is to say that facts don’t somehow kill imagination, individuality or creativity, as some commentators seem to suggest.  In fact they are the basis of all of those. We can’t be skillful or imaginative, individual or creative, without some context to put those things in. No author creates in a vacuum – I know that my own paltry fiction and poetic efforts have always sprung from a nexus of folklore, current affairs, history, myth and simply the better stuff that other damn people wrote before me. It wouldn’t matter how much ‘creativity’ someone might attempt to have taught me at school – it couldn’t have come about without me being attentive to the world and having that wider world brought to my attention.

‘Facts’ seems to be a dirty word, but really it’s just another word for knowledge, and arguing against teaching them seems to be rather ill judged.

And I don’t see why it automatically follows that focusing on British history means that the intention can only be to erase women and ethnic minorities and brainwash kids into harking back wistfully to the days of the Raj or into an uncritically Brit-centric, isolationist worldview. That would of course be willingly assisted by those well known right-wingers, teachers.  Or perhaps it’s just felt it wouldn’t hurt for kids to know a bit more about the context of the place in which they live.

Having more focus on British history doesn’t equal some conspiracy to create a load of xenophobic mini Tories any more than the previous historical curricula were a conspiracy to create militantly PC multiculturalists who reject their homeland. British history, it appears, is ‘right wing’ history (according to the standfirst of this Suzanne Moore piece, at least) and I’ve certainly seen the same inferred elsewhere. Makes me wonder where good old left wing history resides.

It’s not clear there’s much in the way of strategy in Gove’s proposals when it comes to greater focus on knowledge – there’s no sign at the moment that it has been declared that chalk, talk and repeat is the way to go. But increasingly, educators who profess themselves to be on the left wing are busting the unbustable wall of political partisanship and actually being sensible enough to come out in support for more knowledge, rather than rubbishing education that gives kids some credit because it comes from an direction with which they disagree.

Sadly, there’s still influential people spouting the tired ‘We need skills not that boring old knowledge stuff’ line as if there never were a time before when we didn’t know what the future would bring, therefore we ought to start guessing at a style of education that will fit this world of whizzy futuro-skills. We all know where that line of thinking goes – the learning skills equivalent of jetpacks and food pills. Stuff that sounds almighty smart, but in fact no one needs or would really want when you think about it, and that doesn’t actually get you anywhere.

Time and again we hear ‘But you can’t prepare for tomorrow by giving kids the same old education’ – but things changing doesn’t mean that holding on to certain aspects of learning and knowledge makes one lost in the past  or unable adapt. We need to build on the past, not make a break with it in the vague hope we’ll get some amorphous outcome by doing things differently more or less for the sake of it. Consultation is now open on the new National Curriculum – initial responses from teachers suggest ‘not as bad as we feared’. I hope that whatever the outcome of the consultation, knowledge comes out on top, giving kids the context in which to develop those skills that are, at base, the same ones that they have always needed. Let’s give them the past they deserve to know about and worry about The Future when we get there.

Working it out

jhonnyt @ sxc.hu

My daughter is four and a half. It seems to be expected that at some point I’ll have to give her The Talk. No, not That Talk. The Other Talk, aka ‘Can women have it all?’, ‘Babies or career?’, ‘High flyer or muddling alonger?’

Yup, somewhere along the way I am expected to tell her whether she should go for careers or babies, or maybe even give her an inspirational pep talk about ‘having it all’. Yes, ‘tell’ her seems to be the way it’s reported. Not discuss, not suggest. Of course we mums are all going to tell our daughters what they must do. And if she gets it wrong, woe betide me, because then I’ll be blamed for telling her to go for the wrong thing, or deluding her into thinking she could do both at the drop of a hat. Grazia magazine was in on the act last week, asking whether girls ought to be ‘taught’ to put career ahead of having babies.

So what side do I take with my daughter? Neither – I think that unless something changes radically between her generation and mine, my approach has to be ‘When you finish your education, think about what you want family-wise, and plan for it’.

Because when planning his future, if he does at all, a man generally does not have to factor in children and having a family. He can expect his career to be relatively unaffected by his having a family or wanting one.

The same is not true for women. If we have any specific ideas relating to having a family, it’s my opinion that we are much better off planning, given the obstacles that we face. We don’t have to, no, but if we have children in mind, I feel some thinking about our priorities  for our lives and careers is a seriously good idea, and men who want families don’t really face this consideration. And that’s what I’ll be advising my daughter – that by the time she leaves education, whenever that is, I’d recommend having in mind whether she wants kids at some point or not, and, if she does, that she sets the groundwork for it from then on.

It doesn’t mean creating creepy timelines and being obsessed with having children or finding eligible fathers, but it does mean considering your choices and bearing in mind their impact on your future ability to get the outcome that you want:

Do I want to be at home with my kids and for how long?

Should I leave this role that I’m finding a bit unfulfilling and start at square one with something else, or should I stick with this field and be more likely to be financially secure and maybe find it more rewarding in five years time?

Would I want to be the main breadwinner in the household? (Which will probably necessitate you going back to work, unless you’re both seriously Alpha types)

And the overarching questions of how family-friendly your chosen field might be:

Am I likely to find part-time/flexible work in it?

Would I have serious difficulty returning due to losing up-to-date skills if I took years out to raise a family?

Obviously, many of these shouldn’t be a woman’s problem – workplaces mustn’t take less seriously those women who take time off to have family, they shouldn’t be putting barriers in the way of returners. Sadly, the #standingup hashtag on Twitter in the last week, spread by the excellent @EverydaySexism produced numerous tales of gross discrimination – women asked at interview about whether they were going to have children or more children, colleagues dismayed by a mother being passed over for a richly-deserved promotion and so forth.

Both men and women should continue to fight barriers and discrimination, and to be forthright about claiming what rights they can for flexibility, and demonstrating how well these alternative approaches can work.

And on another constructive note, I think we actually ought to encourage boys and young men to ask themselves the questions about family and work, the better to forge strong relationships and to build empathy and maybe, just maybe, alter expectations and gender roles that little bit. Or maybe a great deal.

I know there is way more in this topic than I can reasonably cover in a blog post, all kinds of stuff about why things have come to be this way; hey, blokes sometimes do have to change their expectations too; why people conform to these ideas and roles; why does everyone expect women to be desperate for babies anyway? etc. So perhaps I’ll get back to you on some of that stuff when I can get my head around it.

I would love for my daughter to be able to go out into the working world knowing that things would fall into place for her, that her needs would be met, rather than her meeting with compromise and steps backwards. I suppose I don’t feel that optimistic so far, so for the foreseeable, women who want to combine family and a career are going to have to think ahead to get what they want. And if the guys will join in, all the better for everyone.

Friends without benefits

saivann @ sxc.hu

There is evidently something wrong with me.

I seem to have a chronic inability to be angry about people claiming benefits. I know I’m supposed to be furious. I’m meant to be incensed that people can have 10 kids and not work. I’m meant to be incandescent that a family where no one has a job brings in near to my previous salary in benefits.

But nothing happens. I’ve tried reading the Mail, the Sun and the Express, I really have, but somehow it fails to make me cross at all. (Well, the people claiming benefits don’t.)

Multiple pictures of people who were fraudulently claiming incapacity benefit running marathons, going down waterslides and auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent have summarily failed to convince me that there’s an epidemic of fraud. It’s not like I’m especially perceptive, or too rich to care or in quite the same boat, being currently a comfortably-off claimer of JSA.

Though I would say that I am extremely disinclined to jealousy, which might have a lot to do with it. In adulthood I’ve been jealous of someone approximately once –  I hated it, found it futile and unhelpful and haven’t been back there since. It’s OK, I make up for that by being a git in all sorts of other ways.

This much-tweeted Independent piece brings home the powerful effect of media misrepresentation of benefits. It’s so easy to believe that because something’s reported, it’s common – whether it be benefit fraud, child murder or paedophiles jumping out from behind bushes. Of course, the reason that it’s news is that it’s an exception, but like so many things, the knee-jerk reaction is likely to win over the counter-intuitive truth. And when jealousy comes rears up its ugly head, doubly so.

Perhaps the best example of this is the insistence that ‘People have kids so they can get benefits’. Yes, previous to the imminent cap on benefits, more kids = more benefits. But it doesn’t take an economic genius to work out that that doesn’t equal more wealth. Because somewhere the ‘kids for benefits’ ranters miss the point that kids cost money. Quite a lot of money. Quite a lot more money than you might get for each one in benefits. My main thought when I see this sort of article is ‘That’s really not much money at all for a household of eight’ and that it can’t be at all fun to live that way. No one’s thinking ‘Let’s pop another one out, then all eleven of us can go on a Caribbean cruise’.

One of the most reprehensible tricks in the media book, to my mind, is the ‘benefits outrage’ piece. Evidently these sell papers, as it’s not unusual to see them on the front page. The basic outline is this:  person on benefits, usually a single mum or absent father of several, ‘boasts’ of how much benefit they rake in, ‘moans’ about having too small a house and so forth, or it’s a rant at the foreign family who gets a ‘luxury house’ in ‘millionaires row’, as if it’s their fault that it’s the property chosen by the council, and that obviously  they ought to be in mildewed prefab in Zone 6.

I don’t imagine that journalists approach these people saying ‘Please can we interview you about how you’re living the high life on benefits so that we can vilify you on our front page?’ I suspect they come with heads tilted sympathetically, asking whether they can talk to them about how hard it is to be a single parent/jobless and on benefits. And then they ask leading questions, quote out of context and downright misquote. After all, these people aren’t likely to go running to the Press Complaints Commission and even if they do, the most they can hope for is a tiny apology tucked away somewhere, but probably not even that.

You can see how easy it could be to change ‘My kids eat out once a week at McDonalds, it’s the only treat I can afford’ to ‘“My kids always eat at McDonalds” she boasts’; or how ‘I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs, but I feel like giving up now’ somehow becomes  ‘”I can’t be bothered to apply for jobs” he moans’ somewhere between the interviewee’s mouth and the printed page.

Fish in a barrel, as far as an unscrupulous journalist is concerned. It’s possible, I concede, that some of these people are lazy good-for-nothings so eager to appear in the media that they’ll open themselves up to national vilification by boasting of their lack of work and luxury lifestyle. But I also think it’s rather more likely that it’s journalists participating in the fine art of ‘making shit up’.

Papers also love cases of ‘fakers’ caught out on holiday or doing sports, while claiming disability benefits. So now we’re seeing people with intermittent illness being ‘shopped’ to the DWP by neighbours who didn’t take the time to consider that some people live with conditions that may only occasionally require a wheelchair, or mean that can manage without a stick on a good day. But the ‘Benefit Avenging’ high kicks in, and all empathy’s out the window – it’s in the papers, so obviously it happens all the time.

With so many imaginary illnesses, we must need the heroic ATOS, with their miraculous healing powers. They’re so effective that they repeatedly visit people who’ve won appeals, or those with chronic, degenerative or fatal conditions just to make sure that they derive the full benefit (no pun intended) from their magical abilities. Hang on, I thought they were supposed to save the government money?

Then there’s the stats about all those people who’d ‘rather lose benefits than get a job’ triumphantly crowed about in a number of papers. Look, there’s your proof – lots of people are so lazy, they’d rather lose their benefits than work. No mention of the fact that some of these people might be ill, that their mandatory placement could present any number of practical barriers, that the support offered by the authorities for childcare might have been insufficient or they may have other caring responsibilities that are not taken into account. I read recently about what is on offer for childcare, and as far as I can tell it equates to just under three days’ childcare per week round where I live, so leaving a Londoner out of pocket by over £120 a week for working unpaid, unless they have family support at hand. No data, of course, on the reasons for turning down these placements, just the assumption that it must be because they are monumentally lazy.

As well as selling papers, this is all very convenient for the government, of course – it gets the public behind welfare cuts (as long as they’re not the ones affected) and thinking less of those higher up the chain who bear far less of the burden of taxation than those on far lower incomes. The DWP’s latest adverts about closing in on benefit fraud yet again suggest that this is such a massive problem that it clearly deserves a lot of the DWP’s time and attention. But I hazard to put forward that maybe it ought to be giving more of that attention to work, pensions, benefits and supporting people who need it rather than running down convenient imaginary fraudsters.

Torch song

I’ve wanted the Tories to be better, I really have, but the time to give up seems to have come.

I’ve always hung back from the subtle rhetoric of  ‘All Tories are utter scumbags who deserve to be tortured slowly, then killed’. Why? Because I know that isn’t true – my parents are Tories, were local councillors for many years, and very active ones at that. Both of them despise and reject prejudice in all its forms, support the idea of drug legalisation and more rights and better treatment for immigrants and other views unpopular with the Daily Mail, but they are actually Tories. They have not always toed the party line and don’t much like it at the moment, and I’ve never wanted to believe that they believed in something wrong at its base. And I still don’t think Conservatism has to be wrong at its base, but what’s going on now is wrong by any definition.

The stereotypes of Tories are interesting. Growing up, I’d be asked if my parents were terribly strict. No, they’re about the most liberal parents I know. When I told people they were local counsellors, active in social services, health and education committees and other voluntary bodies, I’d get the response ‘Labour, then?’ as though Tories ought to be on Baby Killing and Dog Kicking committees.

I have difficulty on a number of levels with rabid Tory-hatred, not least that it makes simplistic reductions, which  discourage rational debate about politics. People believe the Tories are irredeemable, socially unacceptable, and will remain so whatever they do or say, and so it doesn’t really encourage the Tories to be better than they are. There are decent Tories out there, and it would be better to at least listen to them and let them come to the forefront of the party than to drive them all out of town with flaming torches.

I used to snort, and still do to some extent at people saying things such as ‘The Tories hate poor and disabled people and want them to die.’ But, by God, they’re sure as hell acting as though they do.

One thing that is really disappointing is that Iain Duncan Smith and the Social Justice Unit started off sounding as though they actually had a decent approach to the benefits system – before election, of course. The concept of ‘tapering off’ benefits so that rather than losing a host of them on taking up a job, more benefit could be retained while working  (let’s not forget how many benefit claimants are people employed in low-income jobs), seemed to be a positive way of helping people into work, rather than punishing people for the difficulty of finding jobs they can sustain themselves on. Obviously, I am no economist, maybe I’m totally off bat, but it sounded like a good idea to me.

This idea appears to have vanished utterly – presumably due the expense of implementing, and largely due to the media’s sustained campaign against benefit claimants. Yes, even though welfare is far from being the cause of the UK’s economic situation, the Tories knew that they would have wide backing from the media if they pursued this as a way of improving the state of Britain’s economy. So they took it and ran with it.

The resulting situation is disgusting. Not to mention illogical and expensive. And unless they burn themselves to the ground and entirely rebuild themselves as something else, this time I don’t think I can forgive the Conservative Party. Laugh away, say you knew it for years, but I wanted them to be worth my vote, I wanted there to be forward thinking, caring people to take the reins and make it a party worth supporting.

I wanted them to show they didn’t have to be the Nasty Party, but they’ve gone, put a smiley face on it and horrendously victimised the most vulnerable members of society without making efforts to go after the people and organisations who could cough up enough money to make an economic difference and still have enough phlegm to buy yachts with. And there’s going to be further economic and human disaster when housing benefit cuts bite, with low-income people becoming  unable to afford to live in places like London. Or to live anywhere safe and habitable.

I’m on benefits myself. I was made redundant four months ago, so I’m enjoying the fun and jollity of the JSA right now. If I remain unemployed for much longer, I probably (and quite rightly, in my case) lose entitlement to JSA and I’m somewhat relieved given everything I hear. We can manage without it, though things will be tight, but at least I can’t be threatened and cajoled at every turn. I’m distressed by the thought of the countless people for whom cessation of benefits is terrifying – people who are understandably wondering how they will live, how they will feed their children, with nothing.

The government’s line appears to be that ‘they’ll just have to manage on a bit less’, when they have no concept of what it is to be on a low income – hell, I don’t even have much of a concept of it, but I can see it is pushing people’s lives into a state of emergency.

Is the answer revolution, as the usual corners are muttering? Probably not. But social media is beginning to flex its muscle in terms of shaming or withdrawing custom from those who don’t pay tax or use ‘workfare’ free labour to replace paid jobs – the last few weeks have given several examples of effective people power fuelled by Twitter and Facebook.

And I still believe it is incumbent upon us to vote. The Coalition presumably decided to focus on welfare because they knew it would ‘play well with the voters’ and voters these days are more likely to be the sort of people who look down on those taking welfare. If voters were people with whom this kind of thing didn’t go down well, they may not have taken that decision. Staying silent at the polls is not helpful, but if everyone, or even a significant chunk of everyone, who is ‘not the kind of person who votes’ voted in the next election, that would scare the living shit out of every politician far more than any protest.

I can’t say it’s been a pleasure, Conservative Party, I can’t say it’s been anything at all. I gave you the benefit of the doubt for as long as I could, but if you’re cutting benefits, then so am I. I would say this is written more in sorrow than in anger, but screw it, I am seriously angry.

Pefect women

As with everything, it starts young. It’s all ‘little rascals’ for your sons, but ‘perfect princess’ for your daughters. No pressure, like.

Perfection appears to be a feminine attribute – who knew? Would be nice to think it were so, to think it’s empowering, but in fact it’s the opposite.

It seems to be the case that women beat themselves up about things a lot more than guys do. Blokes are happier to muddle through and get shit done, while women, it seems, agonise over the minutiae (‘What did it mean when she said “fine”? Was that “fine” or, you know, “fine”? Oh God!’). Women notably initiate divorces far more than men, and I wonder how many blokes a demand for divorce has hit utterly out of the blue when they believed, reasonably or not, that everything was just dandy.

So the girls are expected to get it all right, dammit, as perfection is one of our attributes. A bit like God, but more hormonal.

The perfection bug is especially notable around weddings. When I got married one of the associated clichés that especially pissed me off, among many – don’t get me started on ‘Every woman has dreamed of her wedding day since she was a little girl’ – was the old ‘Every bride wants her day to be perfect’.

Well, for a start it wasn’t my day – it was a day for me, and my husband and our families and our friends. Additionally, I had no expectations of it being perfect, that would be deranged.  As it was, in the end it was a mixture of triumph, slight disarray and absolutely torrential, apocalyptic rain.

But naturally, we’re supposed to be bridezillas, tearing limbs and crushing buses when the napkins turn out to be ‘Brightest Azure’ and not ‘Vibrant Turquoise’ as requested. In our case, it was my husband who had far more of an idea of what sort of wedding he wanted than I did myself, and despite my hesitation on the practicality of our scenario (barn, countryside, 200 miles from home and seriously pushing their seating capacity) I decided it would be churlish not to go along with things when it wasn’t as though I had a better idea myself. Fortunately, one thing we totally agreed on was that ‘perfection’ was not part of the plan.

It’s not just weddings – we always read about ‘perfect’ homes, men, little black dresses, children, lipstick, dates, holidays. But material aimed at men doesn’t seem to have anything like the same emphasis on perfection. Blokes are laid back, blokes can improvise and go with the flow, we are lead to believe.

So the flipside can be that women are seen as unreasonable, unrealistic and not to be taken seriously because we have a lower threshold for coping with the messiness of life – which is funny, because we’re usually the ones cleaning it up, too.

Women beware women

Those men, eh? Always trying to upstage one another with sexier outfits. Always getting into catfights, and, my God! The jealousy, they just can’t be happy for one another. They may be sweetness and light on the surface, but really they’re at each other’s throats – don’t let that ‘brotherhood’ act fool you.

No, I haven’t heard about that either. The concept of female rivalry seems to be one of the most insidious accusations and weapons in the media to undermine high profile women. The underlying message, as with so many things is ‘Don’t take women seriously. They’re all hormonal and irrational and will only do silly things if you give them an inch.’ Yet I have seldom seen it challenged.

Where did it come from as an idea? Why don’t we hear about football players who used to be in the same club bitching about who gets the best table at an award ceremony and how they ‘don’t speak to one another’ anymore. The other month Grazia had a headline about how, shock horror, J-Lo and Victoria Beckham haven’t had a cosy chat lately. My God! Obviously they can’t stand the sight of each other, there must be something up. It’s not as though they’re people who were moving in the same circles for a while and one of them moved away. When a female celebrity says of another ‘We haven’t talked for a while, but I wish her well’, it’s reported as though it’s some sort of chilly, hissed brush-off, not the comment of someone in reference to a person who is effectively a former work colleague. Apparently in the female celebrity world,  if you’re not BFFs, then surely you’re deadly enemies, stalking one another through the press to make sure the other woman is not getting thinner/younger looking/more popular than you.

It’s a no-win situation for high profile women, of course – the more they go on record claiming there’s no rift between them, the more insinuating headlines you see about them insisting there’s ‘no rift’ between them.

This attitude sneaks down to the more prosaic world of normal women too – the press delights in stories about research that allegedly proves that female bosses don’t like to promote other women, that women in the workplace look down on other women for being fat, or thin, or ugly, or pretty. In fact, when you think about it, there’s an awful lot of reported analysis of what women do in the workplace compared to that about men, as though it’s still some sort of marvellous novelty that women have jobs.

I think that just about every major TV series than involves a largely female cast attracts stories of how the women concerned fight at photo shoots, bicker over dresses or are ‘furious’ that one actor earns more than them. You don’t see headlines like that for mostly male series. The message is that if you get enough women in one place, you’ve got a fight on your hands. What seems to be being said here, again, is that women can’t cope with status – men are natural leaders and gracefully accept the ‘top dog’, but women can’t deal with it and must take part in a neverending and graceless struggle for dominance.

In the X-Factor and its ilk, there’s a lot of talk about what the judges say – usually the male judges. But if there are two young women on the panel, well, then it’s a week-by-week scoreboard of who has ‘won’ the essential female struggle of being the best dressed, with reporting that suggests it’s platform stilettos at dawn for these two ladies, and no mistake. (See articles like this, ad infinitum) Note that it doesn’t happen if one of the women is older – she’s an old hag and out of the running, effectively, even if she’s Darcy Bussell.

I find it difficult to imagine that women are somehow so much more competitive with one another than men are. In fact I suspect it is about the same between genders, but whereas it’s socially and historically acceptable between me, if it’s women being competitive with each other, it’s shallow, jealous and destructive. Men, though, are healthily competitive, it’s in their nature and it helps them get through life and contribute. And if men traditionally achieve through competing, therefore women are supposed to achieve through being collaborative and all getting along, but not doing anything, y’know, world changing.

The media’s catfighting (or passive aggressive) women are unattractively taking on male traits in a big, bad world that their little ladybrains can’t cope with it would appear. The media will allow us our little triumphs in life, but it makes sure to keep successful women’s dignity in check.