The Future's Bright...?

Barack Obama’s victory speech made me cry.

There. I’ve said it. Perhaps I’m just a sucker for well-crafted optimistic rhetoric. I mean, after all, what a catchphrase: "Yes, we can!" But perhaps there was something in Obama’s evocation of a brighter, better future which resonated with the masses of people out there waiting, desperately waiting, for positive, progressive change. Invasions, atrocities, globalised exploitation, economic turmoil, ecological disaster: things seem bleak for humanity at the moment; repetitive, even backward. For every step along the road of progress, sometimes we seem to take three steps back. But Obama’s speech gave expression to the hope, that glimmer of possibility, that Things Will Get Better.

Here’s the bit that made me cry – I’m going to have to quote at length because it was the cumulative effect of the speech that got me blubbing:

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes, we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes, we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbour and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes, we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "we shall overcome". Yes, we can.

A man touched down on the Moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes, we can.

Now of course it doesn’t take a genius to spot that this version of twentieth-century American history writes a heck of a lot of bad stuff out. Ann Nixon Cooper was also there to witness her country wage pointless, destructive wars – in Vietnam, for example, or in Iraq. She was also there as her country leant financial and military support to barbaric dictatorships. She was also there to watch it stifle fair trade and ignore climate change. She was also there to witness the perpetration of human rights abuses in the name of counter-terrorism. Yes, we can...

So is the future as bright as Obama (and Orange) would have it? Change is slow and (as Nyx put it in relation to my last post) society is stubborn. But I can’t help that little voice inside me crying out with optimism. For every step back, maybe, just maybe, we take three steps forward.

I’m reminded of Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. In one scene, two soldiers (Vershinin and Tuzenbach) debate exactly this point: Tuzenbach sees life as meaningless, but is ultimately a much happier person than the older (and more optimistic) Vershinin, who sees his own suffering as serving a purpose in the great scheme of things:

VERSHININ. How can I express this? It seems to me that everything on this earth must gradually change, and it is changing already in front of our eyes. After two or three hundred years, perhaps after a thousand - the exact figure is not important - a new and happy life will emerge. We ourselves will not be a part of it, of course, but that is what we are living for now, we are working for it, even suffering, but we are in fact creating it. And that is the sole purpose of our existence now, or, if you wish, our only happiness.

[…]

TUZENBACH. It is not a question of two hundred or three hundred years, for even after a million years life will still be exactly the same as it was before. Life does not change, it remains constant, following its own particular laws, laws which are outside your scope or, at the very least, laws which you will never know. Migratory birds, cranes for example, keep on flying and flying, and no matter what thoughts wander into their heads, whether they are sublime or petty it is no matter, they will still keep on flying and not know why they are flying or where they are flying to. They fly and will keep on flying whatever philosophers might be born amongst them; and let them philosophise, as much as they wish, as long as they keep on flying…

At the end of the play, Vershinin leaves his lover Masha, and both return to their unhappy marriages. His final speech, as he waits to say goodbye to Masha for the last time, is almost heartbreakingly optimistic (bear in mind that this was written before World Wars 1 and 2):

VERSHININ. … Life is such a harsh thing. To many it appears as a lonely and hopeless place, but all the same, we have to admit, it is becoming much more clear and more enlightened, and the time is not far away, evidently, when it will become entirely bright and clear. … Formerly humanity was engaged with warfare, filling all its existence with expeditions, incursions, conquests, but now all that has outlived its time, and it has left in its space a huge emptiness, which, for the time being, there is nothing left to fill… Humanity passionately seeks for something, and, given time, it will surely find it. If only it could find it swiftly, swiftly!

Chekhov's play is about the seductive appeal of the brighter, better future. And it's depressingly cynical about it.

The Sexual Politics of Voyeurism

I was teaching a session on ‘Gender in Performance’ on Monday. We did much of the kind of stuff you might expect: a discussion of the week’s reading (extracts from feminist writers like Butler and Cixous), a practical exploration of ‘gendered’ movement (How does one move ‘like a girl’? ‘Like a guy’? What lies behind these distinctions?), and a further discussion regarding some of the ways in which we create our genders, or have our genders created for us (talking of which, check out this clip for an amusing and rather terrifying example of the ways in which we force stereotypical gender roles on kids at a ridiculously young age - it's a few minutes in).

So far, so enlightened. Everyone seemed to be getting it: yes, that’s it, we’re coerced into adopting patterns of gendered behaviour according to social norms, and that is Not A Good Thing. Then I played a DVD of DV8 Physical Theatre’s excellent dance-theatre piece Enter Achilles (video here), a performance which playfully deconstructs British ‘masculine’ behaviour. At one point, two of the male performers almost kiss. A classroom full of enlightened university students cringed, and one student emitted an audible ‘Ew, no!’

Why this bizarre taboo about men kissing? Why does it (much like kissing between older people) seem to prompt involuntary shudders among onlookers, not to mention laughter, catcalls and exclamations of protest? Certainly it breaks a social norm, but that doesn’t quite seem to account for the physical effect it appears to have on a large number of people.

I suspect it’s something to do with the way we’re primed to view physical expressions of affection between people. On television and film, we’re encouraged to identify with the character of our own gender when watching a heterosexual love scene. Sometimes it’s straightforward: boys empathise with Ross, girls with Rachel (theoretically, anyway – of course this doesn’t account for gay viewers, and their perspective tends to be marginalised on mainstream TV). Sometimes the film only really gives us one point of identification: in action films, for example, it’s generally the (young, heterosexual) male lead, so the (young, heterosexual) female character with whom our hero engages in sexual activity becomes an object rather than a subject. The female/other viewer is excluded from the film’s assumptions regarding the desires of its audience and thus the film takes on its identity as a (young, heterosexual) ‘boys’ film’. And the same thing works in reverse: in many romantic comedies, for example, our central character is a (young, heterosexual) female, the object of her affections is a (young, heterosexual) male, the male/other viewer is excluded, and the film becomes a ‘chick flick’.

Naturally there’s something depressingly black-and-white about all this. But there’s also something oddly voyeuristic. We seem to be primed by the media now to imagine ourselves in the position of one of the sexual partners in any physical expression of sexuality we may witness. The implication of any public display of affection seems to be: I may be engaging in this activity, but you, the watcher who is like me, must imagine you are in my position.

Watching gay men kiss, we feel the voice of television telling us we must imagine we are one of those gay men. And because of social taboo, many of us are unwilling to play that role – to the point that we shudder as if we are being forced to put our own bodies through such taboo-breaking. In a sense, we are.

Why, incidentally, does the taboo seem to be heavier around male-male kisses than female-female ones? (Of course both are taboo, but the latter seem to be actively encouraged at drunken student parties, for example - widely construed as ‘hot’ - while the former occur more rarely and are seen as comic or disgusting.) I suspect it may be something to do with the mediatisation of kissing again: it’s more usually the female character who is objectified in filmed love scenes, and in our culture, women are more used to being forced to adopt the position of the y-h-male viewer than the male viewer is of adopting the y-h-female (or any other) perspective. Put simply, we’re more used to the objectified female figure than we are to the objectified male. Objectifying the woman rather than the man is our cultural default position.

In any kiss, then (screened or otherwise), the imagined voyeur – regardless of his or her actual gender or sexuality – is a young heterosexual male. The female-female kiss says to this voyeur: ‘Identify with one of us! Either of us! Both of us are kissing an objectified female! You’re overloaded with choice!’ Whereas the male-male kiss says: ‘Neither of us are kissing an objectified female! We refuse the cultural assumption behind voyeurism! Your position is untenable! You can no longer imagine you are a young heterosexual male!’

So that’s why boys kissing is gross. ;)

Noel Coward's orgy

I'm going to give the achingly self-aware stuff a rest for a bit and post something I started a while back and finished today. The central idea is simply: what would a Noel Coward song be like without the need for innuendo?

[to be read aloud over piano music in the voice of Noel Coward]

On Friday I thought I’d persuade Jim and Georgie
To go to an orgy with Margie and Maude;
I pleaded and pleaded and soon they conceded;
It was just what I needed, though Georgie was bored.
The boy was dismayed when there weren’t any ladies
(I’d told him that maybe he’d find one to kiss);
The dear boy was maddened that sadly I hadn’t
Invited one madam, one girlie or miss.
‘Where’s Margie? Where’s Maudie?’ the dear boy implored;
‘It’s a sham! It’s a fraud! There are no girls in sight!
‘Jim and I were assured there’d be girls in their hordes,
‘And we wouldn’t be bored for one jot of the night!’
I said to him, ‘Georgie, what kind of an orgy,
What low-level bawdry did you hope to see?’
Meanwhile Jimmy was cross and somewhat at a loss
As to why he was tossing off Georgie and me.

U-turns

I think I should post an explanation as to why I suddenly got cold feet about this blogging thing, and why just as suddenly I changed my mind again.

As the post below indicates, I was determined to use this blog for the purpose of 'making contact' - which of course means being honest. 'Invent nothing, deny nothing', as David Mamet has it. But there's a thin line between honesty and (as a friend of mine put it when I discussed this with her earlier on) 'private splurge'.

I spent the afternoon writing 'private splurge'. I then realised that said splurge was indeed private and best left private. And I hit the 'delete' key.

So what now? In all honesty: I still don't know. Perhaps it's best not to think too much about who's reading it and just write, regardless. I don't know why I'm writing, but it seems a shame to give up before I've even started.

First post (second attempt)

I've been having some trouble with this blogging idea. Why am I writing it? Who's reading it?

I wrote the following post, then had a change of heart, and deleted not only it but the whole blog. The idea that I was on the verge of displaying my soul to an anonymous audience frankly terrified me. Then decided I was being a coward, and now I'm reinstating it with this brief preface.

----------------

Earlier today I found myself skulking in the biography section of Borders, flicking surreptitiously through celebrity autobiographies in an attempt to locate the sexy bits.

I admit to this with some shame, of course. Other books, challenging ones, books which are intelligent, bold, subversive even, are being pushed off the bestseller shelves by precisely these sorts of marketing ploys. Purchase the ghost-written memoirs of tabloid favourite [insert celebrity of the week here] and buy your access to the few salacious details not already published in Heat.

But why this fascination with the most meagre of scandalous celebrity titbits (no pun intended)? Why is it that the intimate anecdotes of Strictly Come Dancing’s Craig Revel Horwood (or whoever) have such a magnetic hold over so many? I mean, honestly! What feeds this incessant, insatiable appetite for the very last scraps of the private lives of the rich and famous?

The odd thing is that however intimate the revelations, they never seem to be quite secret enough. As the most personal information becomes ever-more accessible (whether through the glossy pages of the gossip press or the virtual pages of social networking sites), it becomes cheapened; its elusive value becomes all the more apparent. We want to know people: to crack through those neat little packages of identity we make for ourselves in which even our most personal experiences are commodities to be traded as truth-or-dare Top Trumps or listed under ‘Info’ on facebook. We want to see our fellow human beings laid bare, and the more they strip, the barer we want them. There’s no disguise like nudity.

So where does blogging fit into all this? Until very recently, I’d assumed it was merely part of the same package. ‘Hello world: here I am, in easily-digested form! Now notice me!’ Indeed, at first glance, a blog like The Virginity Project is participating in the very same activity as the celeb memoirs and the gossip magazines: ‘Details! More details! And more!’

But of course that’s not quite it. These details aren’t commodified. Blogs don’t exploit that fundamental need for human contact for seedily commercial ends. Nor do these details have to be reduced to vox-pop nuggets.

And it’s not straightforward. In the digital age, we exist to a very great extent in the coded ones and zeros of our mobile phones and facebook pages just as much as we do in ‘real’ life (‘meatspace’, as second-lifers so charmingly call it). By writing this first blog posting, I am in a very real sense ‘creating’ myself: what voice should I adopt? what level of ironic distance? How can I translate that indefinable something that is essentially ‘me’ into words on a screen? A good friend told me recently that in writing as in conversation, I lapse frequently into cliché, falling back on pre-packaged, pre-formulated turns of phrase. How can I ever hope to make contact through this medium, cutting no corners?

Well, I don’t know.

But I hope I can start to find out.