All posts tagged Masculinities

A Hard Man is Good to Find! @ the Photographers Gallery

‘The many men, so beautiful…’
(from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

A Hard Man is Good to Find! charts over 60 years of gay photography in London from the 1930s to the 1990s.

You don’t have to be naked to be butch, you don’t even have to be gay to be an object of gay attraction. Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, Spring/Summer 1957 edition, featuring model Sean Connery, photo by Bill Green. Courtesy the Alistair O’Neill Collection

Homosexuality illegal and legal

For the first half of the period homosexuality was a criminal activity which was severely punished, with the threat of exposure hanging over hundreds of thousands of gay men, and making them susceptible to blackmail and intimidation. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised gay sexual activity but left in place many forms of legal and social discrimination and so gave rise to the gay liberation movement which campaigned for full social equality.

Personal note: In 1978 I joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, enjoyed going on marches, signing petitions and spending time at Windsor’s only gay pub. Through all this I discovered that I am not gay but discovered a susceptibility to gorgeous men, hunky men, specially young working class men, the kind that you used to see doing labouring jobs with a wonderfully carefree physical exuberance, the kind of young bloke photographed in the 1960s by Anthony C. Burls (see below).

The Obscene Publication Act remained in force

Anyway, back at the exhibition: it brings together more than 100 photos of men’s bodies, taken with a distinctly gay or queer sensibility. The thing to really understand is that throughout the period, from the 1930s till well into the 1980s, despite the 1967 law about homosexual acts, risqué images of male nudity – taking them, owning them, distributing them, publishing them – remained a criminal offence under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.

A lovely boy. John Hamill by John S Barrington (about 1966) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

A secret history

All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.

Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.

Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.

The male nude as fine art. David Dulak by Angus McBean (1946) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

London locations

The exhibition takes an interesting approach which is to divide the photos, and the gay magazines and bookshops which distributed them, by area of London. Thus it’s divided into sections which deal with Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Marylebone, Portobello, the Serpentine and Euston.

Highgate

Apparently Hampstead Heath is London’s most renowned cruising spot for gay men. Young artist Keith Vaughan bought a Leica camera and set up a dark room in his bedroom. Aged just 21 he then made a n album of photos of gorgeous young men at Highgate Men’s Pond in the summer of 1933.

Highgate Men’s Pond Album by Keith Vaughan (1933) Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries

John S. Barrington trained as an artist at St Martin’s School of Art. In 1938 he persuaded two men he’d met on the Charing Cross Road, dancer David Dulak and his friend Vik, to accompany him to Highgate Men’s Pond so he could photograph them nude – and thus began a long career as a ‘physique photographer’. Dulak was later photographed by Angus McBean, see two photographs above.

John Mckay made studies of ballet dancers and performers.

Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks

I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.

Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.

In the 1950s Basil Clavering ran a cinema on the Charing Cross Road but he also built a photographic studio in the basement of his house on Denbigh Street, Pimlico. Here they recruited military men to pose in genuine uniforms and also act out various scenarios, some kinky, some humorous. He and his partner John Charles Pankhurst, invented the ‘storyette’, a series of stills, as from a movie, which told a story, often saucy, sometimes featuring corporal punishment.

Just doing the housework. Storyette EX FJSS print, 1950s by Basil Clavering (aka Royale). Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

The Serpentine

In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.

Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.

Spencer Churchill, 1951 by Paul Hawker. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

Marylebone

‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.

In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.

Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.

Photo of Gervase Griffiths, titled ‘Narcissus of 1967’ by Cecil Beaton

Earl’s Court

This was the location of BDM publications, set up by Alexander McKenna and partners, which published a range of styles, from the lifestyle magazine ‘Jeffrey’ to more explicit titles such as ‘Hung Heavy’, ‘Taste of Beefcake’ and ‘Leather Studs’.

Notting Hill

Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.

One of the Portobello Boys, hopefully only fiddling with his zip. The Portobello Boys, early 1960s. Courtesy The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives

Euston Road

Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America. David Gwinnutt started taking photos of the post-punk gay scene as an art student. Patrick Prockter introduced him to his generation of artists.

Thomas Mervyn Horder (Baron Horder) was the chairman of Duckworths, the literary publisher in in the 1950s and 60s. He also had a sideline as a physique photographer under the pseudonym Larry Knight, publishing in specialist magazines with titles like ‘Grecian Guild Pictorial’ and ‘Der Kreis’.

History of the posing pouch

In line with the unwritten law that absolutely all exhibitions these days must either be about America or feature Americans, there’s a little annex off to the side of the main gallery which gives an amusing history of the posing pouch. In this version of the story this skimpy little piece of fabric, barely enough to cover a man’s meat and two veg with the thinnest of fabrics going round the waist, was invented in America.

It developed from the aim of American gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as legally possible. In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality.

Original 1955 posing pouch as sewn by Bob Mizener’s mum (or mom)

We are told that the shape and tan colour of the pouch was often lightly drawn on photos over the willy of nude models in order to avoid prosecution if the parcel they were distributed in was stopped and searched by the authorities; but that the happy recipient could then easily, in the safety of their own home, rub the little patch off and glory in the sight of total male nudity!

Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow.

Mixed media

It’s not just photos. Within each part of London the curators identify gay photographers who lived and worked in that area, but also includes catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications to show how the photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. In the 1970s publishers of gay photos send out catalogue sheets like this one to customers, who then ordered full-sized body shorts and prints of the guys they fancied.

Which one would you send off for? 1970s catalogue sheet by John S Barrington. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

White Brixton

Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre.

Back to John S. Barrington. In the later 70s he set up the 252 Gallery on Brixton Hill, which included photographs but also drawings and sculptures. He sent out catalogues listing his many gay models and categorising them by race as well as arranging them by head and masked torso. They’re included here as an interesting example of the taxonomy of desire.

Black Brixton

Rotimi Fani-Kayode lived in Brixton from 1983 to 1989. His work explores the paradoxes of the Black queer experience. He’s represented by a work called the Golden Phallus.

The Golden Phallus by Rotimi Fani-Kayode ( 1989) © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Autograph ABP

Guy Burch was director of the Brixton Art Gallery from 1985 to 1988. Artist, writer and curator, he’s represented by photo study drawings and collages.

Frank B came to prominence for his performances which involved blood letting, performed in the late 1980s in gay fetish clubs and is represented by photographic invitation cards to a private screening of a 6-minute art movie.

Ajamu X is an artist, curator, archivist and activist whose work explores ‘the nuances of intersectional experience as a Black British queer man’. He is represented by contact sheets which show him playfully wearing a white cotton bra and panties.

Thoughts

To be quite honest this exhibition wasn’t quite as sexsationally fabulous as I was expecting it to be. A lot of the images are quite small, many are only on contact sheets of 20 or 30 tiny, tiny images which I had to lean right up to in order to see properly. Take the contact sheet of 40 or so images of Black artist Ajanu X who is, unexpectedly, wearing a white bra and panties in various states of disarray. Funny and sexy but tiny, each image only an inch square or less.

I enjoyed the staggering physiques of some of the Greek athlete-style photos from the 1930s and 40s. I liked the couple of photos by Cecil Beaton of Gervase Griffiths lazing by a fountain or posing among cow parsley in some field, because they were so redolent of a kind of Pink Floyd 1960s.

I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at  funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair.

There were several sequences of young men, obviously soldiers, in full uniform and then various stages of undress, hanging out together. There was a whole set of young blokes around the house, sitting, reading, smoking, half dressed or with their cocks hanging out their trousers, the Portobello Boys. Mildly interesting, but I went to an all-boys school and shared houses with blokes at university; admittedly we didn’t spend social time with our willies hanging out of our trousers – at least not when sober.

Overall, I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.

And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.

Two learnings

I don’t think I’d ever noticed the phrase ‘physique photography’ before, but here it kept recurring and being explained as a style of photography which goes beyond the passive idea of the ‘nude’ to celebrate a kind of effortful, muscular, athletic masculinity. Think body-building.

Stunning example of ‘physique photography’. Indian bodybuilder Monotosh Roy shot by Bill Green (Vince) in the 1950s

Related to it was a comment in a wall label right at the end making a simple but devastating point that, as LGBTQ+ culture gained confidence in the 1990s, photographers, publishers and consumers felt more confident in producing and consuming gay pornography.

The point being that the delicate balancing act, the hints and subtleties of the preceding decades, the self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s – all this tended to be swept away as gay art gained confidence in the 1990s. Now artists could depict explicit photos of erect penises and men doing all kinds of things with them to other men. Obviously delicacy and subtlety continue in a thousand flavours, but the era of constrained delicacy and obligatory subtlety came to an end with the arrival of explicit gay pornography.

Bodybuilder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990)

A note on nomenclature

The introduction explains that ‘queer’ is now the accepted academic term for non-normative sexualities but the curators acknowledge that it used to be a term of abuse (as it was when I was growing up) and so older visitors might be offended by its use. At the same time, they acknowledge that the more factual, legalistic term ‘homosexual’, which older visitors might be comfortable with, is ‘problematic’ for the younger generation.

The need for this note prompts the reflects the ongoing (and, I imagine, eternal) struggle human beings have to make sense of the disruptions, embarrassments and irrational instincts of sex which we find ourselves saddled with.

Willies

Having been to hundreds and hundreds of exhibitions curated by feminist curators and read thousands of wall labels written by feminist curators, I have had the notions of toxic masculinity, of the poisonous affect of the male gaze, of the evils of male sexual attention, of male sexual harassment, and the unspeakable terror of seeing a penis from which some women, apparently, never recover, drummed into me again and again and again. Even the shamefully biased mega-exhibition about so-called ‘Masculinities’ at the Barbican didn’t include one single image of a penis for fear of offending sensitive visitors.

It was, therefore, rather disorientating, gave me a sense of vertigo, to walk into a pair of rooms absolutely flooded with this object of terror and fear – showing a proliferation of penises, peckers and plonkers, willies and winkles and weenies, cocks and tools and todgers.

Like all the other ‘banned’ part of the human anatomy, like women’s breasts and, more so, vulvas, if images of penises are strictly rationed and you only occasionally see one, it can all too easily be overloaded with lust and desire. Whereas if you freely see scores, then hundreds of them, in all their variety and humanity and mundaneness, quite quickly you get used to the sight, and then a bit bored.

From a visual point of view penises obviously come in two states, flaccid and bored or aroused and erect. Presumably this is, or was, in the period under study, the threshold between images which could be justified as art or at least decorative (flaccid) and pornography (erect).

Anyway, it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think there’s a single erect penis in the show. Maybe this is because the exhibition itself had to tread a fine line and the inclusion of erect penises would have crossed that line (? I don’t know the law on the matter). Maybe because pretty much all the photographers on show here used the flaccid/erect distinction as a simple rule of thumb (were there legal precedents under the Obscene Publications Act regarding the exact angle of arousal of the member? Again, not being a lawyer, I don’t know.)

For whatever reason, no erections at all are on display here and probably over half the images didn’t show penises at all (e.g. all the athletic, posing pouch-style photos; or a lot of the fully dressed soldiers or fairground workers; or just the many portraits which focused on faces) and all the ones that did include a penis showed it only as a slack, slumping, limp willy.

These kinds of images captured what I imagine is most men’s attitude to their penises; on rare and special occasions it may be roused and primed for action, but most of the time it’s just another part of the body which you barely think about unless you have to pee, or you inadvertently squash it while riding a bike or some such activity. Ouch!

In this respect a lot of the photos seemed (to me) to be surprisingly stripped of the urgency of sexual desire (lust) and instead conveyed quite a homely, almost domestic vibe of what it is to be a young man, to be naked and to lark around with other men. I’ve been to scores and scores of exhibitions making polemical points about women’s bodies, depicting them from every angle and analysing in immense detail the way women’s bodies are depicted in all sorts of media and the never-ending iniquity of the male gaze, as a matter of burning social and political importance.

This exhibition is a rare opportunity to look at scantily clad bodies without feeling a soupcon of guilt; and and space where the visitor can just accept and enjoy the sight of the male body, in all its variety, for what it is.

Catalogue sheet 3, 1949, by Bill Green (Vince). Stephen Cartwright collection

Last thought

This exhibition triggers nostalgia for an age before the internet: talk of photography as an activity restricted to a talented few, of hard copy magazines and subscriptions, of mail order catalogues, of the extraordinary lengths you had to go to to get sight of a photo of a naked man – all this consigns the entire exhibition to a past which is rapidly retreating.

For now we have 1) smartphones and 2) the internet. 1) More or less everyone has access not just to cameras, but to extremely high-quality cameras and amazingly sophisticated image manipulation softwares. Everyone’s a photographer these days. 2) And any image of anything, alive or dead or ever conceived, can now be accessed at the touch of a screen, including as many naked bodies, male, female or whatever, as your hard drive can cope with.

This entire exhibition bespeaks not just a world of repression and restraint, but of rarity and difficulty. Now nothing is rare and everything is available. Soon the subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact described in this exhibition will seem as dated and historical as the pictorial conventions of Georgian England.

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by Simon on May 24, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/24/a-hard-man-is-good-to-find-the-photographers-gallery/

The case against identity politics

Steve Bannon thinks identity politics are great for President Donald Trump. That’s what the president’s adviser told Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect. “The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Anecdote

At the press launch of Masculinities at the Barbican I stood by the bar queuing for a free coffee. In front of me were two very posh art reviewers, laughing and joking about people they know in the art world. One was a man, one was a woman. They drank their coffee and set off into the exhibition where a massive introductory wall label asserts that GENDER is the decisive factor in power relations in Western society.

Is it, though? I was struck by the way both these posh people, man and woman, simply ignored the drone, the servant, the serf who poured them their coffees. When it was my turn, I asked him where he was from – Hungary, as it turned out – and tried out my one and only piece of Hungarian vocabulary on him: köszönöm.

There are well over a million East Europeans in the UK, performing all kinds of menial jobs, handing out coffee, working in warehouses, building, gardening, labouring. Bankers wives lunch together in the lovely restaurant at the Victoria and Albert Museum while foreign lackeys of both sexes serve and clean and wipe up after them.

So as you can tell, for me it’s not about gender; it’s about power and money and class, which can often be mixed up with gender, but just as often supersede and override it.

I’ve watched my friend Sarah, the banker’s wife, give her cleaner her tasks for the day and tell her au pair where to take the children, before going off to meet Gillian for coffee.

Maybe, as the feminists insist, all three of them are women and so share the same struggles and experience the same oppression, but it doesn’t look that way to me.

To me it looks as if one person in this situation has money, lots of money, and therefore lots of power over other people who have hardly any money and so have to obey the rich person. For me, in my opinion, money and power trump gender every time, and I am on the side of the people without money and without power.

Personal experience

I joined the Campaign For Homosexual Equality, although I am not myself gay, when I was 17 or 18 back in the late 1970s. I thought it was scandalous that gays and lesbians didn’t have the exact same rights as straight people, from the same age of consent to the same right to get married, have children etc. I used to like hanging round Windsor’s one gay pub where I was introduced by a gay activist to the colourful clientele and made a number of gay friends, far more fun and interesting than most of the boys and girls of my age.

At the same time, back in the late 70s, I attended Rock Against Racism marches and gigs, although I am not myself black. Again, I thought all kinds of legal and social discrimination against black people were disgusting and needed to be campaigned against, so I signed petitions and went on marches chanting lots of slogans.

Why identity politics is bad

1. Identity politics creates an equal and opposite reaction God knows how many articles I’ve read by ‘angry’ feminists, incensed by this, that or the other latest outrage against women.

And articles by angry Muslims, outraged by discrimination and Islamophobia, like Baroness Warsi.

And by angry black activists, outraged by racism and discrimination against persons of colour, like David Lammy.

And by angry Jews, outraged by anti-semitism, like Margaret Hodge.

But as they stoke a bottomless swamp of anger, none of these people seem to have considered two obvious points:

1. If you promote anger, permanent anger, about every single perceived insult and slight against every single section of society, you are, eventually, in effect, promoting an angry society. When I read puzzled articles in the liberal press wondering why society has suddenly become so angry, I reflect that at least part of the reason might be that you’ve been printing articles encouraging all women, all blacks, all Muslims, all gays and lesbians, and every other definable minority, to be as angry as possible.

2. What makes you think your anger is more righteous and holy than the anger of your opponents? The last decade or so has seen the new rise of ‘white anger’, in the States, in Australasia and across Europe. Why the surprise? If you demonise, mock, insult and abuse white people – and especially white men – as institutionally sexist, misogynist, racist, anti-semitic, Islamophobic, pathetic losers nostalgic for the vanished days of empire, well, why on earth would you be surprised if eventually this long-suffering minority (white men are a minority of the population in all these countries) might themselves develop a sense of grievance and get fed up of being insulted, blamed and abused all the time.

Hence the right-wing, and sometimes very right-wing movements, which have sprung up in the last decade or so all around the developed world, and especially in Eastern Europe.

I’m not in favour of these groups and parties, far from it. I’m just surprised that the hordes of identity politicians railing endlessly against men and white people are surprised that eventually these much-vilified men (all those mansplaining, manspreading, misogynist bastards), and these much-abused white people (the white racist, imperialist, whitesplaining bastards), have kicked back, set up their own political parties, and refuse to take it any more.

Why does it come as a surprise that they will begin writing and talking about their identities and their traditions and their communities and how they feel increasingly under threat from a globalised, neo-liberal economic order and its handmaiden, the globalised rhetoric of identity politics. In fact many of these post-industrial communities have had the stuffing kicked out of them over the past 30 years and are right be angry.

The great irony of our times is that woke identity politicians have created their nemesis, their mirror image. Western societies are drenched in feminist and politically correct rhetoric to an unprecedented degree. Which newspaper today doesn’t have an article about the terrible misogyny that all women have to face and the racism that all blacks have to face and the Islamophobia that all Muslims have to face and the homophobia that all gay people have to face.

In fact, more women, blacks and Asians, gays and lesbians are in positions of power and influence than ever before in world history, and has the result been the birth of a new, peaceful, calm and content society?

No. The exact opposite. It has resulted in the flowering of the Far Right: Trump, Brexit, the AfD, Five Star, Vox, Viktor Orban, and so on. In the European Parliament, nine far-right parties have formed a new bloc, and its name is: Identity and Democracy.

It turns out that the Left, the woke, and the politically correct do not have a monopoly on the rhetoric and discourse of identity. Other people can be angry about their identities and their communities and their beliefs being mocked and vilified, too.

So now all those angry black people and feminists and Muslims and LGBT+ activists I’ve been reading about for decades haven been joined by loads of angry white nationalists and racists and xenophobes and far-right conservatives.

As I’ve said, I have no truck with angry white nationalists and racists and xenophobes and far-right conservatives. I’m just stepping back, surveying the scene and marvelling at what a wonderful world we have created.

2. Identity politics divides and polarises society For a preview of how this will pan out, look at America, home of the most advanced feminist and BAME civil rights movements in the world. Is it, as a result, the most peaceful, calm and relaxed society in the West? No. It is the most poisonously divided Western society, where political opponents can’t even speak to each other, where all sides devote their time to sniffing out each other’s politically incorrect texts or tweets or speeches or jokes, and where the complete inability top laugh or joke about any of these issues is contributing to a toxic cultural atmosphere in which identity-motivated violence is growing. America is without doubt the most violent and socially divided country in the OECD.

3. Identity politics consumes conventional politics Back in the United Kingdom, look at the trouble caused in the Labour Party by the accusations about its supposedly institutional anti-semitism and, right now, the trouble leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey has got herself into on the tricky issue of transgender rights.

It’s difficult to take a view on transgender rights which someone else can’t criticise as bigoted and transphobic, or bigoted and misogynist. If you support the right of transwomen to call themselves women you upset quite a few feminists who insist they aren’t and they certainly shouldn’t be allowed into women-only spaces like changing rooms. But if you back this point of view, you are instantly accused of transphobia.

Trans rights are, in a sense, a quintessence of politically correct, identity politics because a really pure, ‘correct’ view which pleases all sides, is actually impossible. It calls for a degree of ‘correctness’ which isn’t actually achievable by mere mortals. Thus it will continue to bedevil the Left for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, is the net effect of all these squabbles over race and gender the creation of a happier society more at peace with itself?

No. The most obvious result is to wound anyone who gets caught up in these kinds of arguments because they are so poisonous and, once you’re embroiled in these sorts of controversies, they are extremely difficult to wriggle out of.

Will the Labour Party ever, ever again, be free of the taint of anti-Semitism which has it has been so comprehensively accused of?

And this is how you end up with people like Steven Bannon quoted as saying how great it is for people like him (former White House Chief Strategist to President Trump) when the Left go on about race and identity and gender – because it means they’ve handed over the entire debate about how to run the economy, how to tax and spend, about business and transport, about resources and the environment, about social and foreign policy, in fact most of the business of actual government, over to their opponents.

Identity politics means the Left becomes evermore focused on a handful of extremely contentious issues, and loses sight of all the larger problems which affect most people most of the time and which they look (often pretty reluctantly) to politicians to fix.

Modern, urban, university-educated identity politics has helped to make the Left seem totally irrelevant to the lives of huge numbers of people.

4. Identity politics condemns you to political impotence Thus the Left loses at a high, political and governmental level, but it also loses demographically, in terms of simple arithmetic.

Everyone in the woke bubble agrees with everyone else in the bubble, as I realised when I watched the very woke curator of the Masculinities exhibition at the Barbican explaining the very woke attitude of all the artists represented to the very woke audience of art journalists and critics who went off and wrote their very woke reviews to be read by the very woke readers of The Guardian etc.

But it is a minority bubble. Utterly pure social justice warriors – those who have such impeccably correct views that they cannot be criticised for islamophobia, racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, sexism or transphobia – are in a small minority.

They may – like on-message art gallery curators – share their immaculately progressive views with all the other artists and gallery curators and lime-minded progressives in America and Canada, and across Latin America and Australasia and Europe and Africa. How wonderful that all these like-minded people share the same values and support the same important causes!

But hardly anyone else does.

Jo Swinson wouldn’t stop telling everyone how proud she was to be the first woman leader of the Liberal Party, and I listened to a radio 4 interview just three days before the 2019 General Election, in which she spoke for nearly ten minutes about the burning importance of trans rights.

The result? The Liberal Party was slaughtered in the last general election and Swinson lost her own seat. So much for holding immaculately progressive views. For sure that makes you an immaculately progressive person, and it’s always lovely to be an angel and on the side of the good and the pure and the true. But in a democratic system, insisting on views held by only a tiny minority, means you lose and lose badly.

Look at the contenders to be the Democratic Presidential candidate against Donald Trump and how they’re using race and gender to tear each other to pieces. Elizabeth Warren is going to lose but not before she accuses all the men around her of being sexist pigs, abusers, harassers and misogynists, and a lot of that mud will stick.

Or look at the contenders for the Labour Party leadership struggling to address the issues of anti-semitism, racism and sexism. Any policies about the economy or industry or healthcare or the NHS or crime or immigration are difficult to make out through the blizzard of accusations of sexism and racism and transphobia which they’re throwing at each other.

And meanwhile, watch the bankers and heads of multinational corporations carry on wrecking the environment, paying their immigrant staff a pittance, and awarding themselves multi-million pound pay rises, happy in the knowledge that the Left is tearing itself to pieces with needless and bitter recriminations about which of them is more sexist or more racist than the other.

Watch Donald Trump and Boris Johnson sit back, rubbing their hands and laughing their heads off.

Conclusion

So my position is not that I’m against equality for women, LGBTG+ people, blacks, Muslims and so on. I am in favour of all these causes, and continue to vote for left-of-centre parties. But I think the never-ending rise of identity politics will:

  • in the name of ‘progressive’ values, permanently weaken the Left as a viable political force
  • lead to the permanent entrenchment of the Right in power
  • continue to create a more fractious, fragmented, angry and violent society
  • leaving huge corporations and the banks completely free to carry on business as usual

So this is the context for my reaction to an art exhibition like Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography at the Barbican, which I reviewed yesterday.

My reaction isn’t a knee-jerk negativity prompted because, as a white man, I feel somehow threatened by all these black artists or gay artists or feminist artists. I’m not threatened by them at all. I campaigned for black and gay causes when I was a teenager, and I really liked a lot of the black and gay and feminist art on display.

But taken as a political gesture, if the curators really take the word ‘politics’ in its simplest core sense, as ‘the activities associated with the governance of a country’, then I fear that exhibitions like this which are drenched in a rhetoric which attacks all men and all white people and all straight people, and blames them for all the injustices of the past – is in practice going to alienate the majority of the population, exacerbate social divisions, merely entrench the blinkered groupthink of a small minority of the hyper-woke metropolitan middle classes, and is part of the general cultural movement which is rendering progressive politics more and more irrelevant to most people’s day-to-day concerns.

The Barbican exhibition is drenched in the kind of righteous rhetoric which at best leaves most people cold, at worst actively insults some of the people we need on our side, and which paints the Left into an increasingly irrelevant corner and condemns it to perpetual powerlessness.

So it this analysis of the politics of the real, wider world, which lies behind my refusal simply to endorse all the anti-white, anti-male discourse enshrined in an exhibition like Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography.

I broadly support the political aims of all the groups represented (women, blacks, LGBT+). But I fear that the self-congratulatory elitism and the aggressively anti-mainstream rhetoric of the commentary and discourse which saturate exhibitions like this is not part of the solution, but are contributing to a really serious, long-term social and political crisis.

Articles against identity politics

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by Simon on February 25, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Politics
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Posted by Simon on February 25, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/against-identity-politics/

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