Eyes to See, Lips to Tell: Why Facebook Sucks

Genuine criticism of the world’s cultural detritus is often dismissed as deranged hysteria, but it’s becoming clear that Facebook’s hegemony over our hearts and minds is making us crumble and implode, like a poorly baked pie.

Facebook is a place for ranting, raving lunacy in all of its forms, from righteous commie manifestos, to self-righteous reactionary screeds, to incomplete sequences of barely comprehensible complaints written in textspeak. Facebook is a place for us to air out popularity contests, to brag and to bully, and for people to show off pictures of their new-born babies. Or it’s a place for us to sneakily peek at snaps of other peoples’ expensive gap years in formerly far-flung nations. The tracks our friends walk down are, no doubt, well-beaten these days, the internet having stripped them of their real sense of mystery, but those sun-smooched bikini pics are often still worth a lusty gaze, right?

Facebook is the place for us to air our declarations of love, to rigorously document our break-ups and make-ups, or to announce our engagement so that all of our cyberfriends might look and click the Like button. But, then again, if we dare to show off our dirty laundry, announcing that we are single, or suddenly reattached, divorced, or just willing to announce that our arrangements are complicated or unconventional, won’t we, then, come out smelling of mildew?

Facebook is a symptom of the increasing degradation of human communication. Language is here reduced to a medium for expressing everyday mundanity in a purely functional way. But wasn’t this precisely the sort of mundanity that people used to keep to themselves? Didn’t people — you know, ordinary people — used to log their thoughts privately in journals or diaries? They probably did, and just think of how many diaries have been kept throughout human history that were never found or never read, and didn’t belong to famous diarists, regardless of whether that fame was “achieved” posthumously or not (you know, like Samuel Pepys or, er, Anne Frank). It’s almost as if, once upon a time, human beings weren’t constantly in pursuit of instant fame or recognition.

On Facebook, meaning is reduced to an accident. The meaning of things flashes up, as if the paparazzi were invading our cognitive processes, during our exposure to adverts for potato-based smacks in the mouth, or for gut fizz, or for business school.

On Facebook, recognition is reduced to brand identity. The products that companies try to sell to you soothe and relax you. They make your days at work less stressful, and they make your evenings off more relaxing. They replace our mother’s loving smile as the remembered source that makes us smile when we are sad.

On Facebook, social activity is reduced to brand presence, or omnipresence. It’s as if that soft-drink that we’re thinking of buying was spilled somewhere in cyberspace, and now it’s all gooey, stuck to the right-side of our screen.

Facebook turns us into the sum of our photos, our activities, our hobbies, our interests, our musical, cinematic, and literary tastes. It tries to make us forget that all we are doing here is reducing ourselves to an isolated bit of data, projecting and throwing ourselves out there into a nasty, brutish, short, cyberworld as a mere image among millions of other mere images. Our image on Facebook is, yes, just how we would like to see ourselves, so that we might seem funny and fashionable and fulfilled — happy citizens, unworried by a gloomy future, with good jobs, and loads of money, living out a fairytale of blameless bourgeois domesticity.

But, of course, this is not how we really are. It is just a way of branding ourselves in the same way that all those things we think we want are branded. We attach a personality to our branded version of ourselves, and, in the process, we forget who we really are. It’s just like when we think about buying a product in a store. Our purchase is informed by wanting to appear to be in touch with how the rest of the world sees us, so that it might seem to say the right things about us. But, really, it’s as if we’d given these objects mouths so that they might scream out all of our secrets in public.

Facebook works just like this, and the fact that we continue to participate in it (even though we know that this is going on) means that we are happily exposing ourselves to its weird magic. Facebook extends the logic by which we are alienated from ourselves into a grim parody of human society. It’s an endless session of show and tell, where you can never really impress anyone, where all the applause seems too slow and too sarcastic, and where everyone thinks that they have better toys and treasures than you anyway.

Facebook has just been valued at $104 billion.

But if I’m really that concerned by it, I could always stop using it, or delete my profile, couldn’t I?

Passion Multiplied By Facts = Profit

If you go into any branch of Pret A Manger, you’ll see what I saw last night. I was sitting in a branch of Pret A Manger, drinking a coffee. More specifically, I was sitting in the branch of Pret A Manger on Bishopsgate, drinking a coffee. I was sitting in the glare of the artificially-lit back area behind the counter. It’s decked out with uniformly comfortable brown leather chairs, and tables that are, counterproductively, just a little bit too low to be truly comfortable. The walls are adorned with three panels. They aren’t quite examples of advertising, because the only people who are going to see them are the staff or Pret customers who have already been convinced to eat or to drink in Pret. But they aren’t really anything other than advertising, either. It’s confusing because they certainly aren’t posters, or amateurish artworks; paintings of sun-kissed Mediterranean verandas, as you might find somewhere that (shock! horror!) wasn’t a chain faster-food-bar-café-food-vendor-coffee-shop. They are something else entirely.

The panels bear vague, contextless statements. They’re poorly written, but this only serves to intensify the gleaming zeal of their spiritual motivational schtick. At the bottom of each panel reads the legend ‘Passion. Fact’ (but the full stop is the Pret star, which says something in itself). The one on the left reads ‘Old Fashioned’. It describes the relationship between the French word compote and Pret’s own brand of fruit Pots. It is accompanied by a close-up, heavily Photoshopped, graphic of blueberries artfully teetering on the edge of a walnut. The one in the middle reads ‘Never Ending Journey’. It describes Pret brownies. It is accompanied by heavily Photoshopped graphic of a single sugar cube (or it could, in fact, be a brownie itself) artfully teetering on the tippity-top of mounds of powdered chocolate, and what could be flour or sugar, that have been made to look like mountains. The one on the right reads ‘An Upward Spiral’. It advertises the Pret Foundation Trust. It is accompanied by a heavily Photoshopped graphic of a pear cut into a spiral shape.

The manner in which the agents of consumer capitalism, running their hands through their hair, swinging on their chairs, guffawing like adolescents, not even wearing ties, have hijacked real art and real aesthetics for their own nefarious commodity aesthetics is a well-documented phenomenon. But perhaps we should ask questions about the extent to which this sort of thing is really just a corporate-sponsored backtrack to an earlier way of representing the world — that old Renaissance idea that art’s role in the world is to offer us a window onto the world outside of the individual artwork. But this isn’t art. It’s slick, professional graphic design that, yes, does offer us a window onto the world. But this world is nothing but the confusing object-world of late capitalism. Here, we don’t even stop to look, think, stroke our chins, contemplate; we only gaze longingly at shelves or at shop window displays. Here, we don’t really live, we just buy things. Here, we don’t even swallow, we just consume. And everything teeters artfully on top of everything else.

A Clarification of ‘The London Riots and the Crypto-Fascist Aftermath’

I’ve frankly been overwhelmed by the response to the post I wrote yesterday, ‘The London Riots and the Crypto-Fascist Aftermath’. Far more people read it, and far more people commented on it, than I had ever expected, so I’d like to start off by thanking everyone who did read and who did comment, even if you disagreed with me. Perhaps even especially so.

However, I don’t think my post got the situation quite right: there are some theoretical problems with it, where I haven’t clarified the crux of my argument (which is more philosophical than about politics in any direct way), and where I indulge in the postmodern identity politics that I’m meant to be criticising. Thus, I think that everybody who commented on the post made a valid point and that they deserve a response. I’m not necessarily going to respond to individual commenters. Instead, I’m going to first clarify my theoretical position (explaining why “liberals” think in the way that they do). Then I’m going to reply to particular lines of argument levelled against me (about “the rioters themselves” and “the response of the public”) and I’ll occasionally directly quote bits of individual comments that made sense.

• My theoretical position:

The argument I was making was not specifically about race, class, the race or class of the rioters, or the people filmed criticising the rioters, themselves. Instead, the crux of my argument rested on how the people criticising the rioters have been using particular linguistic tropes, with particular implications and connotations that are often used to degrade people of certain race and class-backgrounds, which they would not otherwise use and which would usually not be allowed in polite society. The causes of the riots, and the response of the public, are quite complex and I wouldn’t want to be reductive in my argument by claiming that “this caused this” or “they said this because of this”. Instead, I’d like to suggest that there is a double antagonism at work here:

1. Since the collapse of Communism, party politics no longer includes a strong antagonistic ideological divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives, Labour and Tory. One of the consequences of this for liberal ideology was the victory of a postmodern liberal democracy that celebrates diverse, ‘post-conventional’ ethnic, national, race and gender-based identities. Perhaps this celebration takes place at the expense of “uncultured” often white-working class people whose behaviour is (wrongly) blamed for the continuation of the stagnant, traditional racism directed towards the influx of immigrants from the West Indies in the late-1940s and 1950s and from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s and 1970s. The liberal universalisation of the command to celebrate the value of these identities directly contradicts the inherent pluralism of those identities, and the resulting antagonism between them, and it replicates the original universalisation of that binary divide between ‘left’ and ‘right’, between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.
2. The collapse of Communism as the external ‘enemy’ to western Liberal values, and the founding of a new ‘enemy’ in the confusing and diffuse (and very postmodern) nature of the specific brand of Islamist terrorism we have seen since 9/11 has led to the blurring of the distinction between whom we deem to be ‘friend’ and whom we deem to be ‘enemy’. Now that the ‘enemy’ by-and-large belongs to one of the minority groups that permissive social liberals so love to defend, it means that there is now an ideological battle between those permissive, tolerant social liberals who declare their celebration of diversity, and social conservatives who maintain many of the values of classical Liberalism but who are generally less permissive. The ‘enemy’ is no longer externalised. Instead, the ‘enemy’ is to be found within liberal society. It is found between different liberal groups who blame each other for that society’s internal problems, and between liberal middle classes (of both a permissive and a conservative bent) and the excess of the disenfranchised “underclasses” who have been left behind who are assumed to not share the same ideological battleground as either group.

Broken Britain, and the ‘Big Society’ David Cameron has established to tackle it, seeks to fix the “brokenness within us”, the agonistic fragmentation that leads to social divides. A good example of this is in mass immigration, which the right normally see as a force that undermines the traditional British values they seek to universalise, and which the liberals see as giving them more and more cultures to fuel their own unfocussed relativism (and more cutesy culture to consume). These traditional British values are best expressed in Britain’s Finest Hour (the Blitz, Keep[ing] Calm and Carry[ing] On), which is what #riotcleanup seeks to replicate. But, these values go hand in hand with the historical reality of that situation: not just the context of the war, but of Britain’s dying Empire, and of the subsequent wave of immigration.

With the ’90s, we saw the rise of Political Correctness, which limited what could be said in public about the plural identities with which we are confronted on a daily basis. This was gobbled up by liberals who are caught in a paradox, an ideological prism, in which they are simultaneously threatened by this new plurality because it challenges a traditionalism that they repress because it belongs to a conservativsm they reject, and found to be self-consciously celebrating those cultures and identities as ‘exotic’, belonging to the otherness that conservatism usually rejects. Ultimately, the fact that many people who self-identify as middle-class liberals come from a working class background a few generations back, scares them so much that they have to hide this fact behind a sophisticated social neurosis (rendered brilliantly by Patricia Routledge’s portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket in sitcom Keeping Up Apperances).

However, the moment things go wrong, such as the riots, the cracks in the liberal wallpapered soul begin to appear and they seek to cleanse themselves of this inner fragmentation, turning to use linguistic devices once the preserve of the racists, bigots, and snobs that they’re so desperate to deplore as being imperialist and old-fashioned. More often than not, the metaphors used by bigots to castigate their ‘enemy’ involve metaphors of and references to “cleanliness”, “sweeping”, and of that enemy’s “ignorance”. Compare this to the sort of things you hear being said about the rioters: that they are “scum”, “feral rats”, “disgusting” etc .

My emphasis is, thus, not on the class or race of the rioters, or the reasons for their rioting, but on the assumptions about the character of the rioters made by the people demonising them and the connotations of the way they express that demonisation.

I realise how tedious the above must seem, but I had to make it clear, y’know?

Also, I’d like to point out that, contrary to the suggestions of one person who commented, I’m not really into deconstruction. My philosophical position (if you really must know) is found on my About page.

• Public VS the rioters themselves:

“These people were rioters acting according to a mob mentality. They are scum.”

I probably need to make it clear that I don’t “condone” (and we’ll save an analysis of the very specific use of that word for a later date) the looting and violence seen on Britain’s streets in the last week. There is a big difference between “condoning” peoples’ actions, which they make of their own free will, and understanding the context in which these events take place. I’m certainly unimpressed by the fact that these events have lead to the deaths of several people and the injury and that many other people have lost their livelhoods. However, it also needs to be made clear that, yes, while these people were carried along by a mob mentality, they were ultimately looking out for their own interests, indulging in the consumer society so feverishly promoted by conservative capitalist ideology. These people acted very selfishly, but that doesn’t make them any different from the rest of us, though sacrificing other peoples’ lives for the sake of a new pair of trainers is disturbing.

The real problem is that public opinion seems to have inverted this “mob mentality” and acting according to one of its own. By calling for violent retribution to be enacted on the perpetrators, the public seem to have regressed several centuries. The policy of naming and shaming people charged with offences related to the rioting in the news means that the news channels have begun to act less like an information service and more like the stocks.

It has to be noted that these people are not “scum”. They are exactly the same as those who accuse them of being “scum”. Might I cite the example of Alexis Bailey, who works as a teaching assistant in a primary school. People wouldn’t have thought he was “scum” prior to his being arrested. On the contrary, he would have been seen as a pillar of his “community” (and we’ll save the analysis of the very specific use of that word for a later date). In one evening, he has fallen from public grace and is now seen as exactly the opposite of how he was seen just a few days ago without any middleground. Lest we forget, however, that during the economic turbulence a few years ago, the banks struggled to keep cash machines working. Would this have not led to rioting and looting by “ordinary people”, of exactly the sort when the same thing happened in Argentina in 2001?

• Public fear:

‘The public is rightfully horrified at the rioting and it is utterly shameful for you to attack a collective for being afraid. You layering on this a cynical undertow is pretty shitty’.

Yes, the public is rightfully horrifed, and it is rightly scared for its safety and the continuation of that safety as obvious problems like the deepening of the spending cuts progress. I’m no less horrified and no less scared than anybody else at what I’ve seen coming from the TV, and from my own bedroom window. But I’m more inclined to find peoples frankly avaricious, turncoat, attitudes to people caught looting horrifying than I am the sight of teenage kids trashing shops and stealing trainers.

The London Riots and the Liberal Crypto-Fascist Aftermath

You don’t need me to go ond on describing the events of the last few nights, because we all know what has happened. We’ve all been glued to our TVs, giving ourselves square eyes while being spoonfed reactionary bile from news reporters intent on crushing reasonable (read: Leftist) opinion in favour of their own gleeful coverage of the rioting. These events are being treated as if they were a form of entertainment rather than the presentation of serious facts with a really existing social context.

The army of Big Society ideologues look to clean up London

Public opinion has seen a massive shift to the right. This has been demonstrated by the thousands of tweets and Facebook messages calling for violent retribution to be enforced on those caught rioting instead of a sensible call for us all to understand the social conditons that have led people to riot (be that consumer ideology, thuggery or general disaffection). This deeply conservative shift has been surprising, but perhaps it shouldn’t be.

What this really shows is the inherant contradiction in postmodern liberal ideology. Indeed, there seems to be a nasty undercurrent of middle class resentment towards disenfranchised, perhaps working class, youths expressed in the aftermath of the riots. The ideological manipulation at the heart of the clean up operation doesn’t help. As my compadre and Birkbeck classmate Jacob Bard-Rosenberg of The Third Estate puts it:

Sifting through the tweets tagged with #riotcleanup there is swift equivocation: at once the physical act of clearing rubble from the streets merges with the act of cleansing the street of black youths. The cleaning of streets amounts to the wiping away of traces of social unrest. Cracks in society are smoothed over and at once an oppressed underclass is rendered invisible again.

While I agree with Jacob’s sentiment about #riotcleanup being about “cleansing”, “cleaning”, and “wiping away the traces of social unrest”, I think this is more obviously about people expunging their own class resentment by using traditionally racist tropes to conceal a really-existing underlying classism and racism, rather than blatant racism in itself. The news channels have called on ordinary people (often white, almost always middle-class) to stand in as social commentators. This isn’t unusual in an age where everybody has access to global communication networks, where everybody has a voice, where everybody seems intent on using that voice to shout as loudly as possible.

What is unusual, however, is language used by those interviewed. Here, rioters have been described variously as “animals” and “feral rats”. The point concealed here is that the people doing the rioting are unclean, diseased, or subhuman not simply because they are black, not simply because they are working class, but because they refuse to do what white middle class people, who own the clean, shiny, shops being looted, expect people to do. Our repressed desires for stability in the face of rapid social change seem to be embodied by the great unwashed left behind by middle class expectations to come out of the recession and the spending cuts unscathed. This is nothing more than an illusory idea of “progress” made by taking tough economic decisions that will direct the fortunes of those who need public services, and yes, jobs, the most. In the wake of the riots, however, this “progress” proves itself to be even more of an illusion than we already thought it was: it is middle-class self-hatred seeking to erase its own working-class past. The connection between folksy wartime cheeriness expressed in the Keep Calm and Carry On sentiment, which conceals a brutality, fear and hardship experienced predominantly by white working-class people, and #riotcleanup is no coincidence.

Ultimately, these riots, and the public opinion garnered by their constant coverage, have allowed people who normally self-identify as “liberals” to show their true colours. Calls for use of water cannon, rubber bullets, or, worse still, bringing in the army and instating martial law, come largely from people who usually claim to be society’s most permissive and the most tolerant. Instead, these people are proving themselves to be postmodern crypto-fascists, churning out folksy, yet bilious, petty bourgeois bigotry. Just check out your own twitter feed and Facebook page if you don’t believe me. The problem here is the massive contraction between this supposed liberal permissiveness and the need for security which is expressed in the emerging authoritarian streak without being synthesised by a formal liberal doctrine.

It’s a culture of excessive tolerance that sees “liberals” being the first to overtly celebrate other peoples’ cultures and the supposed plight of minority groups. But, in reality, conceals their unnerving fetishisation of their own liberal indulgence, of their own act of tolerance. Here, people use a form of relativising liberal historicism to cleanse themselves of their own guilt for seeing themselves as belonging to a culture whose past is rooted in racist, imperialist exploitation. As such, they renounce their own culture in any way that can, and they are the first to scream about how disgusted they are by the obvious racism of the BNP and the EDL. These people reject the “imperialist” universalisation of cultural norms (homosexuality, women’s rights, their own free-speaking liberal agenda) but wilfully ignore that agenda when confronted by bigotry espoused by people who belong to the supposedly downtrodden minorities they so fetishise: homophobic currents in, for example, Pentecostal Christianity, of which many followers are black West Indian people or misogyny in, for example, certain prominent strains of Islamism.

But when it comes to the riots, it seems that the liberals are the first to denounce the rioters as being dirty, ugly, demonic, feral, disgusting. All this despite the fact that the people using this language know that many of the rioters are often young black males. All this despite the fact that they know about the history of prejudice in British society, and in the police, directed towards young black males. All this despite the fact that they know about the ways in which racists describe young black males. As such, these people don’t seem to understand the political position they claim to hold, and they are the first to sell out to reactionary authoritarianism when things get rough. It is ideology at its most obvious: people see through these commands and yet choose to follow the script anyway.

Perhaps the worst element of this concealed prejudice is that thse liberal-fascists are blind to the class divides in which they themselves participate. This finds particular expression in the gentrification of areas like Hackney, which saw rioting on Monday night, where ordinary working-class and lower-middle class people are being driven out by ever-rising rents and property prices. Why? Because namby-pamby permissive liberals want to live in artfully dishevelled low-rent ex-council pads because they like the “brutalist bohemian aesthetic”. What they forget is that these places, like the Pembury Housing Estate which was overrun on Monday night, are social housing projects designed for poor people by rich people who didn’t have to live in them.

Jacob continues, writing that

The reward offered for such action [helping out with the clean up operation] is “true community”, or “community spirit”. In the face of such rampant dehumanization, these new communities, the battalions of #riotcleanup, reassert their supposed true humanity. And such a new humanity is a badge to be worn with pride. It is forgotten by many that it is premised on exclusion, on the sweeping away of neighbours. Raise your broom to the sky and create the world anew, a world without unrest in the face of poverty and oppression. A world in which black youths, and the real antagonisms of society, are consigned to oblivion.

It’s not just about young black males. It’s about class. But those things still kinda go hand in hand, huh?

Goodbye Geist Bites

"And it's goodbye from me"/"and it's goodbye from him."

Three words: “fickleness”, “laziness”, “incoherance”.

And, anyway, somebody told me a few days ago that Geist Bites was a shit name.

Leah Capaldi, Chanel Allure, and, “Like, art or something”

So, did anybody catch that article in The Independent on Friday about young artist Leah Capaldi? Basically, she did some sort of performance piece for the Catlin Art Prize, which is meant to be an annual look-in at 40 promising art graduates. Her piece involved two actors at a time (one female, one male), who were each sprayed with a whole bottle of Chanel Allure or Allure Pour Homme. They then proceeded to trot about the visitors at the gallery to see how punters reacted when they were confronted by somebody wearing too much perfume. That happens sometimes, y’know?

Capaldi seems to think that she’s subverting that great old gender divide. She thinks she’s making a comment on the social neuroses surrounding women who wear too much perfume, compared to the universally accepted virility exuded by a man wearing too much perfume. But she isn’t. What she’s actually doing is providing a glorified real-life perfume advert and presenting it as if it were a sculpture. Shall we not forget that a 100ml bottle of Chanel Allure costs about £80?

There are three important distinctions between sculpture and perfume adverts:

1. Sculpture tries really hard to capture some mythic little fragment of human experience. Perfume adverts replace our nervous interior monologue with corporate rallying cries, mere slogans about sexuality that play at being poetic. Clearly, what Capaldi is doing is expressing her ability to apply pressure on a spraying mechanism in lots of little repetitions. She’s totally, like, an altermodern Archimedes, or something.
2. Sculpture encourages some sort of highly personalised physical reaction to whatever the piece discloses. Perfume adverts launch their crazed detached retinas towards us, staring us squarely in the most vulnerable bits of our souls. Clearly, what Capaldi is doing is expressing how corporate bullying is really useful and how tape measures should have pound-signs put on them so children can learn to measure profit from an early age. She’s totally, like, a neoliberal Emil Nolde, or something.
3. Sculpture replaces the frailty of human being with something sturdier. Perfume adverts whisper petty little promises that they will exfoliate our souls, replacing them with shiny gold spacesuits and filling up our tummies with super-duper self-confidence. Clearly, what Capaldi is doing is expressing how we can only make ourselves worthy people by spending our working lives playing existential Snakes & Ladders, using the shredded scraps of our dignity as counters. She’s totally, like, a constructivist Camus, or something.

Is Capaldi playing into late capitalism’s compulsive lying? Is she thus guilty of jamming these empty status symbols of wealth, power, and virility into our daydreams, allowing corporate ideology to reproduce itself in our own image like an ungodly brood of rabbits that eat up our reflections like they were yummy carrots?

Is Capaldi sadistically encouraging us to furnish our collarbones with the sweet, seductive, scent of expensive perfume so that she might show us the way, enlightening us with how we are tragically confronted by the evaporation of our dreams as soon as we squeeze our index finger on the perfume bottle?

The answer to both of these questions is “yes, definitely.”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or The Swirling Moral Void of LAD Capitalism

What do Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Ken Clarke, and Tyler, The Creator all have in common?

The first may well be a rapist. The second spent most of the week bumbling through his own inability apologise for his rape-related gaffe. The third makes gleefully distasteful rape jokes as a provocative look at hip-hop’s juvenile future.

All three figures stir up a particular sort of stern-faced third-wave feminist debate. We know it well. We know the ins and outs of the argument because we’re all seen that South Park episode, ‘Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset‘.

But what are the implications of this debate  for guys who totally aren’t rapists? What happens when a guy is sympathetic to the contemporary application of second-wave feminist debate: all that stuff about the construction and exploitation of gender in the media, and of all the wired technicalities of différance? What about guys who totally respect the rights of the vagina (and women), while remaining really keen on their aesthetics (and insides)?

These sorts of discussions are interesting because they polarise the male population.

One pole belongs to the penguin huddle of wimpy literary romantics. This social formation feel a deep shame when they feel that they don’t question patriarchical society as much as they really should. They feel a squealing guilt for not having read enough Wollstonecraft, while having totally recommended that their female friends read Je, Tu, Nous. Basically, these chaps spend their every waking second riddled with dread about being labeled imperialist pig-dog-hegemonisers belonging to the deep history of sexism that leaves us with a culture of apologies for rape-misunderstandings, rape jokes and, er, rape.

The second pole belongs to the growling polar bear paw of modern lad culture. This social formation speaks with the giddy eloquence of an article in Zoo or Nuts, priding themselves on being up to date with the mechanics of contemporary “banter”. They hunt in packs, relying on alcopops like a hunter would a trap. Their mating rituals include sipping up recently-spilled Stella from their wife beaters, and boorish, monosyllabic jeering. But they have just enough of a grasp of irony to be aware that they don’t really want women to “get back to the kitchen” forever. After all, if that happened, then there’d be no way for them to “get [their] end/s away”, would there? Indeed, the most important trait of the lad is to feverishly pursue the vaginal goal like a superinjunctive footballer for STI United.

But, ladies, just don’t ask them if you might use their toothbrush in the morning.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn? LAD.
Ken Clarke? LAD.
Tyler, The Creator? Poofter.