If banning alcohol on the underground is the worst legislation passed during Boris Johnson’s reign at City Hall, we should all be relieved. The appointment of Tim ‘Prince of Darkness’ Parker as the new boss of Transport For London does not bode well for the future of the tube network on the more serious issues of staffing and safety. But anyway, there’s a pre-drinking ban party being ‘organised’ (in a very loose sense of the word) for the last evening before the ban comes into force on the Circle Line. The event is reminiscent of the Circle Line parties ‘organised’ by legendary Anarchitect collective Space Hijackers during the early years of this decade and looks like it should be a lot of fun. Bring dinner jacket and Pimms!
{May 23, 2008} Last Orders On The Underground
{April 24, 2008} Sex, Drugs and Socialism
Wanna read something disturbing? Stroppyblog has done a survey on the what lefties do in bed (part 1, part 2, part 3.) Okay, so most of it is just an excuse for a load of in jokes between the various sections of the British left, but there is some interesting information to be gleaned from it.
The clear majority of respondents (72%) were male. Around two-thirds of respondents use porn at least occasionally. A third of respondents think porn degrades women, with a lot of ‘not sure’ answers. A similar number (28%) think that porn should not exist under socialism; 23% think that sex work should not exist under socialism, with a lot of people answering ‘depends what type.’
So what does this tell us? Firstly that lefties, who tend to have a theory on pretty much everything, have no unified approach to sex. In my experience most left-wing bloggers, who are generally male, tend to avoid or fudge the subject. It does however come up quite regularly on Splintered Sunrise and A Very Public Sociologist, and Madam Miaow can be also very funny when she deals with the subject.
The survey also tells us that a lot of people- presumably men, as they are primary users of porn- are hypocrites, in that they use porn even though they think it degrades women. I also suspect that the ‘hmm, not sure’ response may be code for ‘yes, but I don’t want to admit it’. Now, this is interesting because we are running up against the biggest problem with socialist theory, namely that creating a world in which people are not exploited or degraded might not be compatible with human desires, in this case male desires. And human desires are not so easily circumnavigated, nor should they necessarily be. Sometimes ideology doesn’t translate well into real emotional life; lots of liberal minded people are totally in favour of free love, right up until the point when their partner sleeps with someone else.
Again my mind returns to Valerie Solanas and the SCUM manifesto. It almost seems to me that she has the right idea, but unless you seriously want to suggest the creation of a female only society, her conclusion does us no good. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the conservative feminists (who are usually anti-porn and indeed anti-men and anti-sex altogether) are the libertarian feminists, who produce porn for women and organise female centred, sexually uninhibited club nights. Although Female Chauvinist Pigs has it’s flaws, it does effectively tell the story of how these two branches of feminism diverged after the successes of the seventies, and the damaging this effect this had. So we get ultra-feminists working with the religious right to ban porn, and libertarian feminists working with the porn industry to attack sexual inhibition. Both approaches are far from satisfactory.
There’s an analogy to be made between the sex industry and the drugs industry. The progressive attitude towards drugs is much more clear cut- decriminalise, legalise, treat addicts. Here’s my own opinion- recreational drugs (cannabis, ecstasy, mushrooms etc) should be legalised and sold to adults in dedicated shops, which are either run by or heavily regulated by the state. Drugs are extremely cheap to produce, and the current market price reflects how much people are willing to pay rather than the cost of production. Prices could be maintained at current levels through taxation, the revenue from which could then ploughed into addiction treatment centres and other public services. Harder drugs (heroin, crack cocaine etc) should not be sold to the public but prescribed to recovering addicts in accordance with the wishes of their doctor, free of charge.
Why do I and other progressives make these arguments? Because you can’t stop people taking drugs. Drugs are fun. This is the simple, undeniable truth. Hence, you will never eliminate the consumption of drugs for pleasure. This begs another question- why would you want to? Is people taking drugs for pleasure so intolerable to society that it must be prevented at all costs?
I would argue that it’s not. The actual negative effects of drugs on people are usually no worse to that of alcohol, for example. Friends of mine who are much more into hard drugs than myself tell me that in their experience the drug which has the most potential to fuck you up is alcohol. This is probably true in the short term; in the long term, tobacco undoubtedly takes that title. Flipping through the free London Paper today, I read Babyshambles guitarist Drew McConnell arguing that alcohol and heroin are the ‘big two’ to be wary of, and he criticise anti-drugs campaigns for making an unnecessary distinction between legal and illegal drugs. I agree with him.
What is most undesirable about drugs is the industry that goes with it; pushing drugs to kids, gang wars for territory, dealers trying to hook recreational users onto more addictive drugs. Simply put, the worst thing about drugs is making the financial transaction, having to deal with the people you have to buy them off. These problems can be eliminated or at least reduced by legalisation and regulation; denial and criminalisation just works in favour of the gangster capitalists who run the drugs trade.
Now, back to porn and prostitution. The act of having sex is certainly not harmful or immoral in itself; if we can make the case that taking drugs for recreation is okay, then we can surely say the same about sex. What is harmful is the act of paying someone to have sex, whether it’s directly with the client or to be filmed in a movie. Simply legalising the sex industry does not work; despite operating legally the porn industry is extremely sexist and exploitative, and legalising prostitution does not necessarily provide an improvement in working conditions. If you’re in any doubt about that, read some reports about the conditions in legalised brothels in Nevada. The Netherlands take a much better approach, with a recognised sex worker’s union leading to much better working conditions, but it’s still hard to escape the conclusion that having sex for money is fundamentally degrading and should ideally be eliminated from society.
So what do we do about this? I’m not in favour of legalising prostitution, but decriminalising those who work as prostitutes, and giving them the help they need to achieve a change in career. This problem is analogous to, and indeed crosses over with, the attempts to tackle drug addiction I expressed support for above. As for the ‘recreational drug’ of the sex industry- pornography- we need to take an approach similar to recreational drugs. Porn is already legal, and rightly so, but the production of porn should be regulated more heavily than it is at the moment to protect the rights of those who appear in porn. It should also be noted that there is an inverse correlation between the availability of porn society and the incident of sexual assault, as frustrated men can relieve their tensions without resorting to physical violence. Another argument against criminalising porn, then.
Finally, here’s a more radical solution to porn. Given that it is the exchange of money for sex and not sex itself which is the problem, why not eliminate the financial transaction from the equation? Place a ban on people paying others to be filmed having sex, and paying for material of people having sex, but not on the creation or dissemination of pornography itself. Thus the porn industry would become something done by amatures out of their own volition. If you don’t think that people would be willing to film themselves having sex and have that distributed on the internet for free, you probably haven’t been keeping track of trends in this area of commerce. Amature porn is fast catching up on professionally produced porn, and there’s more than a few people who get a thrill out of making home movies and having strangers watch the results. What this would result in is a reduction in the amount of porn featuring unrealistic models doing unrealistic things, but then that’s probably a good thing, and would make our perception of sex as a whole somewhat more realistic.
I can see a couple of problems with this approach. Firstly, if you’re not charging money for distributing something, you have no control over copyright. I can sympathise with someone who makes home movies but doesn’t want them ending up all over the internet. However, I’d say that the only way to avoid that is not to put material of yourself on the internet; given the nature of the beast, it’s best to assume that everything you put on the internet will be seen by everyone you know. (I remember a minor scandal a few years back, when it was discovered that ‘Friends Only’ Livejournal posts could be read by searching for them in Google.) Secondly, it’s possible that an underground industry dealing in the more violent and unpleasant aspects of pornography may spring up, out of the reach of state regulation. This could be dangerous; the only solution is vigilance against such activities. The government is already planning on passing a bill against ‘extreme pornography’, which covers the sort of things that people really would have to be paid to do rather than do out of their own free will.
So, that’s my two cents. Anyone wanna start a debate? While you’re chewing that over, here’s a huge phallic symbol to feast your eyes upon.
Insert joke about the thrust of British capital here…
{March 18, 2008} I can has domain name?
Yes! Our new address is culturesluts.com. This is part of an ambitious plan to make this small corner of teh internets look less like a blog and more like a proper website. The next step will involve transferring the WordPress software to our own server, which will require a fair bit of PHP and MySQL knowledge on my part.
Don’t worry if you’ve linked to our old WordPress address or any of our posts at that address, you won’t need to change them. Your visitors should end up at the right place as if by magic.
{February 11, 2008} The Great Fire of Camden
I watched Camden burn on Saturday night. I was smoking shisha with nimuwe in a café on the west side of Camden High Street, when the air suddenly became thicker with smoke which smelled of wood instead of apple or cherry. The market was on fire, and it quickly spread to engulf most of the east side of the high street.
Despite becoming something of a tourist trap, Camden remains a genuinely unique part of London. Many of my favourite shops and market stalls were destroyed by the blaze and hundreds of people have lost their livelihoods as a result. It’s a great shame, and I really hope that when the market is rebuilt the original character is maintained as far as possible, and the fire is not used as an excuse to gentrify the area, as has happened in so many places of cultural importance. There is now a Gap on the corner of the Haight Ashbury intersection; I dread the thought of Camden High Street becoming the preserve of Top Shop and Tommy Hilfiger.
{October 27, 2007} A Unified Theory of Music
The lovable Bolshies at Through The Scary Door have an interesting post about the idea of a unified theory of music. Go take a look.
{October 25, 2007} Interview with Simon Price
Last April, I went to London to meet and interview Simon Price for my dissertation about androgyny in rock music that I was writing at the time. I was pretty nervous about meeting him, because I’m rather in awe of anyone who is a big, grown-up, published author, and a friend of the Manic Street Preachers, but I thought the interview went pretty well, despite my questions being a bit schizophrenic. Anyways, here’s a transcription of the interview with the man himself:
Alexis: So tell me about your nightclub here, like who plays there?
Price: We have live gigs there and DJs, it’s a very glamorous, androgynous place, glitter rock place. So we have people like Peaches and Nicky Wire, who have played there live.
Alexis: Have you ever encountered any negative attitudes towards your club here?
Price: Well, London’s pretty open, but lots of places aren’t- that’s why I left South Wales to come here- I just didn’t fit in. It’s very macho, they’re into sports and rugby and drinking; it’s very manly. And lots of people come from great distances every month to come to our club night. We’ve had people from as far as Norway, Denmark, and Ireland, who feel they don’t fit in where they live come and visit us.
Alexis: Wow, that’s impressive!
Price: Yes, it is.
Alexis: Do you think the Manics made androgyny acceptable in South Wales, has it changed at all?
Price: I don’t think it’s changed that much. They made being from Wales cool, and a bunch of bands came from Wales right after them. But they are sort of seen as something novel in Wales and are only just tolerated. I mean, Nicky Wire can walk around in his fur coats and dresses, but no one else can.
Alexis: Ah. Well, what about metal? Isn’t it really big in South Wales? And Metal can be quite androgynous- you know bands like Poison. How do they reckon with that?
Price: Metal is an interesting one, metal borrows a lot from gay culture, but they wouldn’t admit it. Like Axl Rose wearing assless chaps, that’s a very homosexual look, but they would deny it. They take gay culture and try as hard as they can to make it macho and hetero. And another example, do you know all those guys with holes in their jeans?
Alexis: (Nods)
Price: Well, in Prison when a guy has ripped trousers like that, you know he’s one of the guys who gives oral sex. So that’s where they get that ripped look from.
Alexis: I didn’t know that…
Price: Yeah…
Alexis: So, you’ve been writing for a while, 15 years?
Price: Oh, more than 20! I started writing for the local paper when I was in secondary school. And then when I came here to London for university, I was studying French and philosophy, and I was going to France for my course, and Melody Maker asked me to write about what was going on over there. So I did and then I wrote for Melody Maker for 9 years. Now I have a weekly Sunday column in The Independent.
Alexis: So you’ve been around for a while! I was gonna ask if you noticed any trends in androgyny and sexuality in rock during that time. I guess I also mean trends in public reactions and stuff…
Price: Well, I got started at the end of the 80s when metal was giving way to other things- grunge in the US, which was a very blokey thing, with the lumberjack look, people were growing beards again. In the UK, it was the same- the early 90s were quite macho, with the exception of the Manics and Suede who were feminine in a way that no one had been since the Smiths, (and they were 10 years earlier.) Then you had riot grrrl in the US, which we had too in the UK. And various alternative indie scenes, and dance club scenes, so even though people think of the 90s as quite macho with Nirvana and Oasis on the one side and the Spice Girls on the other, there was still a lot of sexual deviance going on. Well, and Kurt Cobain exemplifies this- he wasn’t always manly either, he wore eyeliner.
Alexis: He dressed in drag sometimes too, didn’t he?
Price: Yeah, he did. Though he was an exception, most of grunge was very stripped down- a pulling off of the makeup of metal and the whole 80s scene, whereas bands like the manics were still putting it on. And the late 90s were very open, you had the whole emo scene, which allowed men to be sensitive, which really shouldn’t be a feminine thing, but it is. Now, I think we’ve kind of come full circle and we’re very macho again. Lots of bands are just skinny white boys that make lots of noise, and they’re very macho about it, very hetero.
Alexis: You mentioned riot grrrl in the UK, what was it like here? I’ve read more about it in the US…
Price: Well, Huggy Bear was the main band here, they followed Bikini Kill in the US, and never really had a hit. There were lots of riot grrrl bands, but they weren’t very good.
Alexis: Maybe they weren’t really aiming for that?
Price: Yeah, they weren’t. You only have to be as good as what you want to get across. It was an equalizing movement, because they didn’t have to be virtuosic, they took the blokey guitar solos and power chords and made them their own, which is very feminist.
Alexis: Just curious, do you think an androgynous sound exists?
Price: What do you mean?
Alexis: Well, with non-vocal music, say classical, people talk about male and female elements of the music, so it makes sense that there is something in between those. I dunno, some writers that I’ve been reading have argued for an androgynous sound, but they don’t really say what that sound might be.
Price: Yeah, I guess so. In the 90s there was a movement called shoe-rock, that bands like “My Bloody Valentine” were a part of. They took the power chords and macho things out of rock, and can be described as being sort of womb-like. But I would be uncomfortable labelling a sound as masculine, feminine, or androgynous.
Alexis: What was that? Shoe-rock?
Price: Yeah. Shoe-rock… but on the other hand, I’d like to see people in the music press expressing strong opinions like that… I’m actually talking about this at a panel discussion later, but Id like to hear a band being labelled as sounding androgynous even if I disagreed, because it would be refreshing to read a strong opinion.
Alexis: It hard for me to hear lots of sounds as androgynous, I dunno, I guess so many sounds have been reclaimed by everyone that it’s hard for me to hear them as gendered, except for electronica, it sounds very androgynous to me… what do you think about electronica?
Price: It’s often very machine, very un-human, very robotic, un-sexual, I quite like that though.
Alexis: What do you think about Peaches, as a woman in electronica, who manages to be very sexual?
Price: I have so much respect for Peaches, I just love her. She has the nerve to be in your face about sex, in a way that’s sometimes quite scary, really. And then she goes and does things like poses for an album cover with a fake beard. She’s great, she’s played at our club before. But she’s never going to be mainstream or get radio play, she’s a bit too blunt.
Alexis: Sort of to switch topics a little, what do you think about homosexuality and rap or hip hop? I know of a small scene in San Francisco, but no one mainstream. It’s just odd that a genre which has spawned so many sub-scenes doesn’t have a place of a gay sub-scene.
Price: Well, there’re reasons for that. Minority groups or people who are economically down tend to have very conservative views. I’m not excusing it though. I think maybe Outkast would be one exception, but beyond them, it needs to develop more in the underground, before it will ever become mainstream and that will take a while.
Alexis: Is there much of a gay underground hip hop scene here in London?
Price: Yes, a small one. But like I said, it needs to develop even more, beyond what it already is, if it wants to become mainstream.
Alexis: ah, I see. Oh, and I have to ask… what do you think of the new Manics album? And what’s their direction for the future?
Price: It’s hard for me to rank their albums because I like them all, and I like this one too. “Underdogs” is a good track, I like their single, and also the title track. “Imperial bodybags”- I was glad to hear that one, because they are really going to be lyrically relevant and say something. It’s nice to hear, many bands aren’t as literate today, and are afraid of saying bold things like that, but they never were.
Alexis: Why do you think they never broke America?
Price: Well, there’s no shame in it really; they tried, but America wasn’t ready, America was into grunge at the time. And the Americans that were into Brit-pop wanted a very specific style- a very literate, university style. Well, the Manics are very literate too, but their sound is very American, maybe too American for those who were into Brit Pop; they just wanted Blur. And the Manics were pushed very heavily by record companies in LA, but maybe the people who would have liked them weren’t in LA, their potential fans could have been elsewhere. But I think it’s okay, and they’re fine with it. Lots of bands burn out trying to conquer America- they go on 18 month tours and then they come home and break up. It’s okay for the Manics to be an only British phenomenon. I mean, there’s a lot of musicians like the Manics, such as Bowie, or T. Rex, the Cure, or Suede who haven’t really cracked America. They might have one or two hits over there but it’s not like it is over here, they don’t have the fanatical audiences over there.
Alexis: Heh, that’s funny, because I knew about the Manics before coming to Britain, but I had no idea they were as big as they are, the fan culture kind of took me by surprise. It’s a pity it’s not in America, because I would have probably really enjoyed it as a teenager.
Price: How did you hear about them over there?
Alexis: They were recommended by a friend who was really into Brit pop, and I sort of liked their name, silly reason I guess, but I went to every record store in my area and only came up with their best of, but I liked that a lot…
Alexis: Well, I guess we’re mostly out of time. Thank you so much for this, you’re a big help, and it was great meeting you, I guess I’m sort of a fan of yours too.
Price: I’m really flattered by that. And it’s no problem, I like talking about this stuff anyways.
Stay Beautiful Club (a night club run by Simon Price)… Hey can we go there in January?
{October 17, 2007} Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!
Gluklich zu sehen, je suis enchante, happy to see you! Welcome to Culture Sluts, a joyous exploration of all that is great about music, art, film, and anything else which comes under the broad umbrella of culture. We geht’s? Comment ca va? How are you?
This blog currently has two regular contributes. Nimuwe spends her time hanging around in a lake and enchanting bearded magicians. The Culture Vulture circles the landscape, eyes peeled for juicy pieces of human interaction to feast upon. Hopefully more contributors will join in the future and expand this beachhead.
Meanwhile- bliebe, reste, stay! And enjoy.
