February 25, 2009 by Anna Carey
Women, eh? Is there anything we can’t blame them for? And can we do so while being witless, smug, and wildly inaccurate so we can pretend it’s satirical if anyone gets annoyed? Good thing women don’t read this newspaper – what? They do?
Or rather, they did.
Anthea McTeirnan
Croí na Duibhlinn
Aoife Barry
Aoife McLysaght
Arlene Hunt
Attracta McCarthy-McKenna
clairehennessy
Ann Cronin
Amanda Brown
Eleanor Fitzsimons
Edel Coffey
Anna Carey
Lauren Murphy
Jennie Ridyard
Jude Leavy
Hazel Katherine Larkin
Léan Ní Chuilleanáin
Leigh
Lisa McInerney
Laura Slattery
Maman Poulet
Megan McGurk
Clare Kleinedler
Molly
Rosita Boland
Catherine Crichton
Sinéad Gleeson
sarahefranklin
siobhandowling
Susan Daly
theantiroom
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
I’m wondering if Geraldine Kennedy even saw this before it went to print… way, way off the mark.
I can’t read. Can someone translate this into girlspeak for me?
I’m confused.
That’s a joke, right?
Because last I checked, the lifting of the marriage bar and the entry of women in the workforce boosted the economy.
But since it’s obviously a joke, and those are not the thoughts of an actual breathing human, but of a hilarious satirist who could have tried harder, I’m just going to direct you to this:
I think the biggest problem with the article is that it’s not funny. It sort of reads as satire, but without any humour the end result is kind of baffling.
But the last line made me laugh: “This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times”. Uh oh.
Newton Emerson is a satirist for the Portadown News.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4189048.stm
Unfortunately, this all looks like an example of how satire in the wrong context can be a very big mistake. Especially given how closely that piece mirrors the opinions of people who hold them in earnest.
Could have been funny. Isn’t.
I think the biggest problem with the article is that it’s not funny. It sort of reads as satire, but without any humour the end result is kind of baffling.
Exactly, that’s why it’s so stupid. There’s more to satire than just spouting off offensive opinions. I wrote a sodding thesis on satire many years ago, which may be why I get so insanely annoyed when people clearly fail to understand how it works! Chris Morris knows how to do extreme satire. The lovely Newton clearly doesn’t.
Also, the fact that the column is explicitly addressed to a reader who is automatically assumed to be male is the icing on the stinking, unfunny cake.
ETA: Especially given how closely that piece mirrors the opinions of people who hold them in earnest.
Exactly. It’s not actually extreme enough.
Yes, from tomorrow all women should quit their jobs. Clearly a woman’s place is in the home. Tied to the kitchen sink (with a rope that allows a fraction of movement to the fridge, cooker, washing machine and tumble dryer). In fact chop off their legs altogether so they can’t actually leave the house and cause untold damage for example – traffic jams, taking up space in queues at the bank, taking men’s jobs and acting like they have a place in this world.
Chop off their legs and put them straight onto skateboards that way when the man comes home he can wheel them from the kitchen to the bedroom. (Thus eliminating the need to carry her and hurting his little back muscles.)
In fact, if women were at home (and not causing the credit crunch) there would be no more need for child care and there would always be a hot dinner in the oven and an ironed shirt for the working man.
Chop off their legs!
Sinéad, I bet some deluded editor thought it was cutting-edge Swiftian satire. Christ.
The thing is, while good satire doesn’t have to be funny (‘A Modest Proposal’ isn’t funny, nor is some of Brecht’s and Chris Morris’s best satire), it has to have a point – it has to be attacking or criticising something. And if this is meant to be satire as opposed to loud-mouthed “comedy” sexism, I have absolutely no idea who or what is being targeted. As I said before, it’s not extreme enough to be an attack at those who blame women for everything. And as Jane pointed out, it just parrots their views. There’s nothing behind it. It’s just provocative for the sake of it. It’s like Gary fucking Bushell or Kevin Myers. It’s just stupid.
Golly, I hope all those men whose partners earn more than them are happy with this, oh wait, what am I saying THAT could never happen, right?
Satire, ur doin it wrong!
To cheer you up – Harry Enfield’s classic ‘Women Know your Limits’ sketch.
Jane, I completely missed your link first time, sorry – great minds and all that…
‘So put the paper down, stare back and ask yourself a selfless question.
Does the woman in your life really need a job?’
I didn’t even have to bother reading the rest of the article, because in my house the answer to that question would be a resounding ‘Yes’!
As Penny says, it’s incredibly irritating that it’s implicitly addressing men only, and it’s even more irritating in its presumption that men are the major wage earners in every household and that they could comfortably support a partner and family on their own.
And it definitely mirrors the attitudes that some people still have — exactly the same presumption was made by my bank when I applied to them for a mortgage a few years ago.
I was emailed the piece this morning and I honestly read it as satire of much the same type as the video Sinéad linked to. I’d like to think the Irish Times wouldn’t have published it if it was anything more sinister. Having said that, Annie has hit the nail on the head by pointing out that it simply isn’t very funny. And badly-written satire tends to end up looking quite offensive.
I wouldn’t crucify the bloke for it too much, though. I doubt he holds an opinion even close to that one. And satirists tend to think they’ve been successful when they think people have taken them seriously.
Penny, couldn’t agree more. If it’s satire, it’s not done well or effectively, though I should hope women will still read the Irish Times or I’ll be out of a job, and Sir Emerson will have gotten what he wanetd.
It was a great article, most reading it would laugh along and agree, despite it being ‘satire’. Most of it was true.
Men create all the wealth in this country and women spend it or steal it. They spend it on useless status anxiety fueled frills and steal it by demanding that the productive sectors of the economy – the male private sector, which does everything of value in this country – pay for them to sit around doing nothing in the useless public sector.
Or worse, they get pregnant by some useless alpha pump and dumper then demand that the male productive sector pays for their stupid decisions by stealing their money (taxes) and giving it to them (lone parent allowance). Women expect the government – funded by the male productive sector revenue – to pay for whatever lifestyle they want.
I know what you mean, Andrew. But what’s the target of the satire? Seriously, that’s my big problem with it. As I said before, being offensive but not actually meaning it doesn’t equal satire. What is he being satirical about? To actually count as satire rather than the print equivalent of a stupid “look how shocking we’re being” conversation in a pub, it has to have some sort of point.
Golly, I hope all those men whose partners earn more than them are happy with this, oh wait, what am I saying THAT could never happen, right?
That is some sort of crazy talk! Which doesn’t fit Mr Emmerson’s sophisticated satirical world view.
Well, humour is in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t have any difficulty in accepting this piece as satire in the same way I would accept pieces in The Onion as satire. There needn’t be a ‘victim’ of the satire as such (though here it is probably the wild ideas regularly mooted by newspaper ‘experts’ to get the economy ‘back on track’), just an extrapolation of a ridiculous viewpoint to the extreme, which it seems to me this piece achieves well.
This column, Newton’s Optic, is a regular satirical item in the Irish Times (and as Jane mentioned above, Emerson is known for his previous satirical work on the Portadown News), though even if coming to it for the first time, I would say that it is pretty clear that the piece is satirical.
I do think it presents a problem if people object to viewpoints they disagree with being expressed satirically with the specific aim of ridiculing those viewpoints.
Ladies and gents, our little chum Sebastian has given us all a good laugh over the last couple of days. He has given my husband and me some entertaining running jokes (when spoken to while online, we could cry “I am on the internet! READING! I simply know more than you about everything now!”) that have been amusing us greatly. And let’s not forget, this is the most attention he’s ever received from any women who aren’t related to him by blood. So as far as charity goes, we’ve been doing him a favour.
But mildly amusing as his comment above was (and I must admit, it wasn’t bad), I fear he has jumped the shark. The novelty of his total ridiculousness has faded. My husband and I will find some other ridiculous running jokes. He’s now just a troll like any other. So from now on, let’s just ignore him, shall we? He probably thinks we’re all, like, engaged to him or something by now anyway. We don’t want to encourage him. It’s not kind.
The alternative is that I start editing his comments to reveal his true thoughts (“PAY ATTENTION TO ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!”). But that’s even meaner.
Marry me, Sebastian! And then run off with a German bloke with a gangrenous foot and I’ll take the house and have hot sex with your sister.
I do think it presents a problem if people object to viewpoints they disagree with being expressed satirically with the specific aim of ridiculing those viewpoints.
No one is saying that, John. That’s a straw man argument and a ludicrous suggestion. As I’ve said repeatedly, one of the big problems with this column is that it’s not extreme enough. It’s not really ridiculing those viewpoints. It’s just repeating them. You can find plenty of mainstream commentators saying that families having two incomes pushed up the property market, for example. And yes, I know that column is meant to be satirical but to be honest, it’s always so bad the point of the satire is dubious at best.
The only Sebastian Flyte who has anything of interest to say is – as has already been pointed out in the Gail Trimble comments – the “gay, alcoholic” from Brideshead Revisited. And I don’t care if you look like Anthony Andrews in the original. I won’t change my mind for all the foppishness in the world.
Men are hurting far more in the recession than women. Most of the major job losses have been in the male dominated construction sector. No doubt a lot of those men will go home jobless to wives or girlfriends who still work in the cushy private sector, and their wives/girlfriends will leave them because that is how women operate, their love is usually conditional on hypergamy and the man bringing home the bacon. They will be divorced by the women, who quickly go on to marry the taxpayer instead.
As a piece of satire and, allegedly, humour, this works on the same level as “blacking up”.
Penny, couldn’t agree more. If it’s satire, it’s not done well or effectively, though I should hope women will still read the Irish Times or I’ll be out of a job, and Sir Emerson will have gotten what he wanetd.
Sorry, Fiona! At least there are women like you in there to balance things out and keep us reading.
It wasn’t long ago that the same paper employed Kevin Myers, whose non-satirical view was that rape of any type other than violent stranger rape was invented by feminists as a weapon to take away men’s rightful power, and that most ‘alleged victims’ were not only liars, they’d been forced by feminists to lie.
And I can’t remember — was his ‘bastards’ column before or after he went to the Indo?
Then you’ve got John Waters, whose views on women are well-known.
You can’t *really* have a paper that prints a ridiculous, unfounded and indefensible viewpoint and then prints an identical one as ‘satire’.
It is obviously intended to be funny. It isn’t. Satire either works on its intended level or it doesn’t. This doesn’t. And as Penny keeps pointing out, there’s no thrust to it, no focus, no truthful pillar around which an edgy, thought-provoking commentary revolves. It should demonstrate some kind of deeper awareness about what the issue is, without explicitly stating it, which it doesn’t.
It’s just lame and looks like a John Waters column subbed by Kevin Myers and run through a ‘seduction community’ focus group.
Well, we’ll have to shake and disagree on that one. I’d say the viewpoints are being ridiculed on the grounds they are self-evidently ridiculous. Of course a few people may read the column and think, “Right on!” but then back in the 1960s, there were people who thought Alf Garnett was a decent bloke rather than a satirical bigot, but that’s a risk satire always takes.
I suppose my main thought is that there are plenty more worthy targets for your ire than this column. People coming to this blog for the first time today and seeing this are likely to think, to quote another Martin Amis character, that some of your beefs are pretty smallprint.
To have a highly sensitive inbuilt detector for misogynist crap is a valuable quality, but it can be devalued if used with a scattergun approach on silly (even if unsuccessful) jokes like this column.
Penny: Phew! Was worried there – in case it was misinterpreted, I should point out that I don’t really think Sir Emerson wishes me out of a job.
I’m going to wade in on the side of Andrew here: I thought Newton’s piece was a mildy amusing dig at the rightward lurch that commentators often take during recessions – frantically scrabbling around for ridiculous moral panic rather than pointing the finger where the blame clearly belongs. I can only too easily imagine Kevin Myers or John Waters spouting this kind of reactionary nonsense, and being taken very seriously indeed by Tubridy et al on the chat shows.
Newton’s parody (I’d call it that rather than satire) wasn’t as funny as it could have been, but god love Newton, he rarely is. What’s not funny, of course, is the number of neanderthals* out there who are likely to have thought that he meant it.
*yes, I do know that current research has suggested that neanderthals were possibly more cultured and sensitive than homo sapiens sapiens. sssh.
(Ah, I do love it when a man comes on a feminist blog and tells them what they should be blogging about, and what should be beneath their notice. Heaven forbid you should write something that puts the mens off, or leads them to think that your viewpoints are trivial.)
It isn’t successful satire to me either. There’s no particular context which makes it make sense: just saying, “What would a real misogynist think about the credit crunch? I’ll write that!” If it was responding to a particular Kevin Myers controversy or something it might be apposite, but just general “i’m going to satirise nobody in particular’s misogyny today, without relating to any particular wider feminist context” seems a bit … flaily. Flaily isn’t really a good look for satire.
I think I have been rather dim here. I was just watching the news tonight and the stuff about Sir ‘Fred the Shred’ Goodwin, formerly of RBS, and his enormous pension, and I gradually and then suddenly realised what the intended structure of Emerson’s column must have been.
A great deal of ink has been spilled in the last six months in newspaper op-ed pieces about the ‘macho’ culture of the City and the banking industry, and how the ‘testosterone-fuelled’ nature of the reckless investments has led to our current situation. What Emerson is doing, it seems to me, is turning that presumption upside down for comic effect.
(mary, you do not have to agree with my views, but I have come on here out of a desire to engage with the subject and have done my best to express myself respectfully, which is more than others have done. I don’t think the discussion should devolve to sarcasm.)
It’s not sarcasm to point out the common trend of dudes telling women what they should right about or take issue with on their own blog. The Martin Amis reference doesn’t authorize your censure, either, John. Why would feminists care what a douchebag sexist such as Amis thinks?
Hi Medbh, good to see you again, I do read your blog even though I haven’t commented in a while. By sarcasm I meant mary’s “I do love it when…”, which I take it she didn’t mean literally.
Now the Amis-as-sexist one is an interesting subject but probably too long and boring to go into here. I don’t know Amis personally but I don’t believe him to be sexist (I have no knowledge of his douchebag tendencies). He certainly has created sexist characters, such as my namesake in (probably his best novel) Money, and it’s said that Maggie Gee, who was a judge of the Booker Prize in 1989, vetoed the inclusion of his novel London Fields because of the character of Nicola Six, who was certainly no feminist.
However it’s vital in interpreting the work of any artist not to conflate the (opinions of the) character with the author. In Money, John Self is a boor and a pig, and a figure of ridicule. The strong characters, such as Martina Twain, are female.
In his 1997 novella Night Train (one of my favourite of his books, but generally underrated, and the book my quote earlier came from), he presents two female characters – lots of his books contain the ‘twin’ theme – and explores the issues of the expectations and limitations of women in society. It’s a wonderful, brutal but poetic, short read and I particularly recommend the commentary by Janis Bellow (wife of the late Saul) ‘Second Thoughts on Night Train’ if you can find it online.
Essentially though, Amis is a comic novelist, and tends to present larger-than-life caricatures rather than characters, which can cause offence to some. He once said that he had been accused of “delivering banalities with tremendous force” – and added, “That’s fine by me.”
John – I apologise for resorting to sarcasm, but as Medhb says, it IS a common trend for men to go on feminist blogs and say, respectfully and politely and civilly, “Come on, this is too trivial for you, there are more important issues” “You know, you’ll put people off if you talk about this kind of thing,”
And I have SO MANY TIMES seen this quickly segue into: “I think if you want to get more men reading this blog, you need to do it more like this…” “Look, I’m entitled to my opinion, I’m just trying to offer you some friendly advice!” “I support what you’re doing, here I am trying to engage with you, and all you can do is …” It drives me round the bend. It presumes several things that aren’t necessarily true:
1. That feminist blogs are written with the goal or engaging and educating men.
2. That they have a responsibility to engage or educate men.
3. That they should therefore cater to men’s ideas of what’s “important”.
4. That they should show at least a little gratitude to men who do read it and try to “engage”.
The usual threat is that they will withdraw their support/interest/engagement with feminist issues if the women don’t “play nicer”.
So ,I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and taking the time to type out and explain why it riled me. The classic next step, that would be saying something about your right to free speech, and how this proves that feminists don’t like men, and that men Aren’t Allowed To Contribute To Anything On A Feminist Blog and making good on your threat and withdrawing your engagement with feminist issues.
The point is that the second a man makes his support/engagement for women’s or feminist issues conditional on anything, or suggest in any way that he’s doing women a favour by bestowing your attention on their blog, he is reminding us that he has the option of forgetting it all because spending any time thinking about sexism is optional to him. I hope you can see why suggesting in any way that someone owes as if reading someone’s blog is doing them a favour comes across as kind of patronising. Honestly, you can pick almost any feminist blog and somewhere in the comments, you’ll find a male-identified commenter doing this. Hence the very quick leap to hostility. I apologise if it turns out that it was premature.
I’m not a moderator or a writer here, and I’m just speaking for myself and not Penny, Leigh, Sinéad or Honoria. But if you read a lot of feminist blogs, and you find that you often get a negative reaction from women who post there, please give this some thought.
Thanks for explaining where you’re coming from, Mary. I don’t want to get into endless circular arguments, but at the same time I don’t want you to think I’m taking my ball and going home (plus, I am at work now and have loads on), so if I may respond fairly briefly…
First, I didn’t think of The Anti-Room as a ‘feminist blog’ – as the About page says, it’s “about everything from fashion to feminism, pop culture to politics”. (In passing I note with trepidation that Leigh is anti metrosexuals. I moisturise and have a man-bag. Does that mean me?) I don’t think it should be an exclusively feminist issue to be concerned about, to take two recent topics, media portrayal of intelligent women (Gail Trimble) or of ‘celebrity’ women (Jade Goody). It’s not just feminist, it’s humanist.
I don’t think I would have gone on to do any of the things you predict above. I do say in relation to your list of what you say men presume about feminist blogs, that to predict my views primarily on the basis that I am a man is as reductive as the sort of misogyny that was talked about in the Gail Trimble post. Feminist blogs, like all blogs, don’t have a responsibility to engage men; they have a responsibility (if they want to be read widely, as most blogs do) to engage everyone.
I didn’t make my original comments on this post because I am a man (at least I don’t think I did); I made them because I looked at the thing being complained about and considered it and expressed my conclusions. To attack a piece of satire (or parody if that’s a better word) which clearly intends to ridicule the views it ostensibly espouses is, I think, counterproductive. (Here is a perhaps more subtle and better executed piece along similar lines.) I would say the same if a gay rights blog complained about, say, this as being homophobic.
In any event, nobody likes to be trampled on as soon as they come onto a blog and enter into a discussion. Anyway, I said I would make this brief, so had better stop there.
Feminist blogs, like all blogs, don’t have a responsibility to engage men; they have a responsibility (if they want to be read widely, as most blogs do) to engage everyone.
Why? Seriously, I don’t have a “responsibility” to engage everyone. I don’t have any responsibilities on this blog apart from to myself and my fellow bloggers. This isn’t my job, it’s something all four of us do for fun and because we like writing about stuff we’re interested in, which includes feminism. I hope we’re keeping people engaged and entertained, but I really don’t give a shit whether every post I do is inclusive of the world at large. I physically couldn’t care less if some men (or women, for that matter) find my concerns about that crappy column trivial. As these comments show, plenty of women (and some men, I assume) also found that column misguided and just plain stupid.
Also, it doesn’t really matter whether you think this is a feminist blog or not. That’s not the real point. It’s by women, and as the others have said, men going on women’s (usually feminist) blogs and telling them what they think they should be writing about is a huge internet phenomenon. I’m not saying that you’re doing this to try and put the uppity wimmins in their place (I’m pretty sure you’re not!) but at the same time it’s not a bad idea to be aware of the context of one’s comments.
@ John Self
An interesting point, and maybe somewhat relevant to the thing about the satirical piece. I also don’t like Martin Amis, and I have an ambivalent relationship with the work of his father. Obviously, writing a sexist character doesn’t make an author sexist, but there’s something about his tone — maybe it’s bravado or some hard-to-identify literary airs that make me annoyed, I don’t know — that turns me off, too, and turns me off in a way where I feel like my feminist-spidey-senses are activated.
This is in contrast with, say, The Sopranos (the TV show, not the Alan Warner book), where every male is a blatant misogynist, and yet to me, the show is a satire on that sort of behaviour, and not just because I know already that David Chase doesn’t approve of that sort of Italo-American machismo, nor of any of the cultural stereotypes that are very real (because, as a fellow Italian-American, it was like watching a family reunion). I mean, not only could I not get enough of it, it was one of the more anti-misogynist examples of popular culture ever aired. Yes, people certainly took it up the wrong way, as is often the case with satire (I’m sure my caricature of an uncle thought his resemblance to Paulie Walnuts could help him get some tail), but it was so strong that no unintentional celebration of the culture would have undermined it.
My point is that the satire from Emerson is not offensive because it parrots sexist views, it’s because it’s bad. To me it’s more of a quality control issue than anything else.
I also think your point about the ‘macho’ culture of the City is interesting, and I hadn’t thought of it. But that presumption about the culture is also worth satirising, as is any overly simplistic explanation for the current crisis. Yes, there are studies that show testosterone levels are related to risk-taking, and yes, that macho culture is a huge part of the whole thing, but it’s not enough, and we shouldn’t be satisfied with any explanation that allows us to pretend that a hormonal response system can control human will.
Maybe Emerson, if he were wittier, could have written a satirical piece about a man apologising for his hormones causing the economic collapse? It would be funnier because it’s ridiculous, and also be simultaneously lampooning the really sexist myth that women in the workplace are a risk because we have periods.
Something like this:
Diary of a City Trader
16 September
OMG, I can’t believe about Leman Brothers. If I worked there I would be all WTF WTF and OMG so glad I never got that job there even though at the time I thought they all just totally hated me. Today I feel so fat and I’m mad at myself for eating all those hot nuts in the pub so I did a bunch of CDS and put some sub-prime mortgages into the shredder just to keep myself from crying and balling my fists with rage. WTF is wrong with Sloane? Yesterday he was being all nice and slapping me on the back and today he is wearing the same clothes and gave me a look. I wonder if he’s talking about me. Better FB Franklin and see if I can get the 411.
Oh, sorry for now hijacking your blog twice in one week.
Regarding the issue of what feminists should/shouldn’t take issue with, it should just be taken for granted that just because something irritates us doesn’t mean we’ve taken up fighting it as our cause. A discussion on a blog doesn’t mean we think it’s as serious as, say, FGM. It should be assumed that we do have that stuff in perspective already, and require no gentle correction.
On a blog, everything looks like it’s at the same volume, and it’s easy to think that means everything is the same priority.
And just as the Times doesn’t have to justify to us why they put that into the paper, feminists don’t have to justify what activates our need to engage in a discussion. Because sexism exists at all levels of discourse, we bring feminist discourse to all the levels.
Ok, sorry. I’ll shut up now. Sort of.
That’s pretty good Jane, you should work that up into something longer!
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think a lot of people have a problem with Martin Amis, not least because of his “bravado or some hard-to-identify literary airs” (well put; someone else described his prose as “swaggering”), and indeed I’m much less a fan of his now than I was when I chose this goddamn online pseudonym that I now seem to be saddled with.
Personally I never got into The Sopranos because I hate violence and if I recall right, the first episode had Tony Soprano kicking some bloke to death or the like, and I felt I couldn’t feel even partial empathy with such a character. (And that from someone who will decry anyone claiming that they didn’t like a book because they didn’t like the characters. Go figure.) I am now banking my hopes on The Wire.
Penny, I am not ignoring your response, but I don’t think there’s anything I can say about it other than
I know; I only addressed that issue because Mary had repeatedly referred to men commenting on ‘feminist blogs’ in the context of my comments here.
Jane, no need to apologise, I agree with everything you said! Just because we’re feminists doesn’t mean we just have to look at the bigger picture all the time and ignore the minor irritations of casual misogyny. They’re part of what goes into producing the bigger picture, after all.
As to whether this is a feminist blog or not, well, it’s a blog about lots of things, not just specifically women’s issues, including personal and just plain silly things, but I think it’s quite clear that we’re coming from a feminist perspective. And I think the point about men telling women what they should be writing about would stand even if we weren’t.
ETA: I know what you mean about getting a bit disillusioned by Martin Amis. I went through a big Amis phase when I was about 18/19, just before The Information came out, but I find him almost unreadable now. I’m less easily impressed by that sort of showy writing, I think.
Hi John, thanks!
It’s funny you should say that about the Sopranos. I hate violence — I can’t even watch cartoon violence. But the violence in the Sopranos (and the same goes for The Wire) is never gratuitous, and always serves the story. Apparently David Chase also hates violence, and Michael Imperioli can’t cope at all with it, which is why I think he pulls it off so well when his character does something violent. He is bringing his own distaste for violence to the character, but very subtly.
Once you watch a few episodes, you find yourself at turns empathising with and judging Tony Soprano, which is what makes it so real. Carmela is one of the most interesting female characters I’ve ever seen, and she is most certainly not a feminist in the traditional sense. I hope you like the Wire. Talk about a programme that made people think about the structures of power in the world. Yes, it is violent, but it’s violent because it depicts some horrible realities, and doesn’t sugar coat them for the benefit of cushy middle-class white suburban viewers.
I think, to bring it back to the original point about the column, the reason a lot of writers and producers and directors can get away with using misogyny, sexism and violence as satirical condemnations of such acts and behaviours, is because there is a real voice there, there’s a skill that can’t really be measured or taught. I think Emerson wanted it to be like a modern ‘Modest Proposal’, but it’s more….Indecent. Satire is about sense, and you can’t really teach sense. He badly wants to have that sense, but if he has it, he has yet to master the ability to transmit that in writing.
And anyway, of Modest Proposals, I favour Motorhead’s suggestion that we Eat the Rich instead. They’d be doughy and tender and probably if you cut them in half, they’d be all pate and foie gras down the middle. We could serve them with crackers down at the dole offices.
@ Sebastian Flyte – you said “They will be divorced by the women, who quickly go on to marry the taxpayer instead.”
Sadly for all us evil, job-sucking women, you can’t get a quick divorce and remarriage in Ireland. It takes a whopping minimum of 4+ years to leave your poor builder and marry the next taxpaying fool.
Satire? LOL. Disguised as satire, a bitter man’s opportunity to post harmful common opinions on women.
I also don’t like Martin Amis, and I have an ambivalent relationship with the work of his father
I’ve never got into Martin Amis (heard him speak at a conference – “what is the world coming to now that we no longer recognise excellence, as epitomised by the old Oxbridge system” – I don’t need to despise him for misogyny when I can quite happily despise his elitism!) , but oh, let’s talk about Kingsley Amis’s misogyny.
This is because I read Take a Girl Like You at the age of about thirteen, as recommended by my dad who remembered reading it and watching the TV series in the sixties and loving it, and couldn’t put my finger on what bothered me about it. I read it again about ten years later, and realised that what bothered me about it was oh, because, if your girlfriend has refused to have sex with you time and time again because she wants to be a virgin until she gets married, and you wait until she is completely off her face and then have sex with her, THAT WOULD BE RAPE. Not slightly cheeky bad behaviour, not “inevitable” because she’s that kind of girl, not the mark of a stylish bachelor about town … eeesh.
I can’t even think about the fact that the time I mentioned this to my dad he thought I was being a hyper-politically-correct feminist. *shudders*
I don’t need to despise him for misogyny when I can quite happily despise his elitism!
Years ago the New Statesman had a competition to come up with unlikely book titles. The winner was “My Struggle by Martin Amis”, which is brilliant.
Amis bugs me on various levels, but I still count Money as one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, it’s great. He manages to artfully take the piss out of himself in it, and as we’re talking about satire, Money does it very well.
I also can’t really handle watching violence on TV or in films, but The Sopranos was one the best things shown on television in the last 20 years. Up there with, but not quite as good as, The Wire.
I don’t know enough about Kingsley Amis’s books to talk about him much: I’ve tried him twice and failed both times – Lucky Jim was toe-curlingly dated (extraordinary that it was published in the same decade as, say, Lolita) and The Old Devils was just dull: hard to believe it won the Booker Prize (or rather, given that the Booker is at best an unreliable measure of the year’s literature, not that hard to believe). I tend to go along with Wilde that ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book: books are well written or badly written. That is all’. And for my money, Amis Sr’s books are badly written, or at least middlingly written. Amis Jr’s are very well written indeed, though I can easily see that he’s not to everyone’s taste, and at times not to mine either.
Google Megan Basham and see how close to bone this type of piece is. There are plenty of people out there who already believe women are the root of all evil, both morally and financially. Spouting this kind of ‘satire’ only makes those heads bob up and down and go ‘see, he gets it.’
Indeed, FMC. Did you see that interview in today’s Guardian? Bloody hell. She makes my skin crawl.
FYI – there were some responses on the letters page of the Times today.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2009/0227/1224241893890.html
I did, and to steal a lline from Medbh, she’s nowt but a lap cat of the patriarchy.
None of those letters are in the least bit funny. I’m writing one of my own.
Dammit.
After all, the recession shouldn’t be blamed on all women — it’s my fault alone.