Breasts, and other low-hanging fruit
A few years ago, I got to know an Online Poet (who has since, alas, died, along with the newsgroup that contained him) who used to murmur, in the manner of a profound philosophical utterance cum poetic manifesto, "It's all about Tits". It always struck me that this was at least as good an answer to the Eternal Question as "you put your left foot in, &c", but it would have been nice if he'd given the idea some extra support. Anyway, it still seems as good a topic as any. The other reason I have decided to grapple with Breasts is that a couple of hours ago I learned in bemusement that in Nottinghamshire, UK, the act of looking at breasts has recently been declared an instance of a special category of Hate Crime by the local police constabulary, the Hate Crime in question being, generically, "misogyny". Now, it so happens that this is precisely what I mean by "low hanging fruit". Which in turn calls for a digression.
The phrase isn't original, and in fact seems to be in vogue at the moment, at least on YouTube, referring to the vice some people like to indulge in of scoring easy polemical victories against unworthy opponents. This, of course, is one consequence of the Internet Age. Never in history has it been so easy for the budding polemicist to find an atrocious poet or writer to pull to bits, a goggle-eyed religious loony to snicker at, an incoherent political pundit or ideologue to wittily expose. The supply of incompetents in various fields of endeavour, primarily logic, queuing up to get fisked by smooth Internet operators, appears to be limitless. What I like about the metaphor is that it acknowledges that, if you are looking for someone to argue with and score dialectical points against, choosing the weakest and most vulnerable opponent in sight is, while tempting, arguably not all that sporting. It may, moreover, be a symptom of lack of confidence, or low self esteem. It may be that back in the nineties, in those heady early days of the Internet, "atheist websites", for example, performed a valuable function in advancing the cause of critical thinking as applied to religious questions; now, all their jostling me-too presence tells you is that the author doesn't have the requisite knowledge and/or confidence to engage in stimulating debate on topics which offer a genuine intellectual challenge, such as politics, climate change or genetic engineering, and has therefore decided to go for the easy option of verbally pummelling people who - often by their own admission - have no rational arguments with which to defend their odd but sincerely held beliefs.
Having said that, I will admit that a lot of the fruit I went for in my old blog (the one in Spanish) was arguably not all that elevated. Much of my polemical fervour was directed at ideologically driven opinion columnists and political propagandists in the government daily rag (a kind of Pravda a lo criollo), which I perused every lunchtime in search of lazy rhetoric and controversial hidden assumptions. I will also admit that one of the reasons I closed that blog was that, while the stats showed a trickle of visitors, I wasn't getting any feedback, and hence had no way of knowing whether what I wrote was being tacitly agreed with, angrily disagreed with (by people too blustery and red-faced to find words for their contempt) or just shrugged over. It would be wrong to suppose that I was only in the market for "positive" feedback. On the rare occasions I did get a gushing response from a satisfied customer, it left me with more of a squiggle than a smile, since while I can identify quite easily with the experience of Agreeing With (Nearly) Every Word someone writes, a residual sense of shame generally prevents me from making such agreement the main topic or purpose of a response. For me, "me too" are sacred words, not to be uttered lightly or wantonly, and rarely outside the bedroom. Show rather than say, might here be a reasonable rule of thumb, as it is in poetry. Most times, I am too tired to even attempt that feat.
Neither positive nor negative, but constructive feedback: when you get that, I suppose, you will know you're doing something right. (I never did, as far as I can remember. OK, maybe once or twice.)
Anyway. The point towards which I'm groping (sorry) is that there may in fact be legitimate justifications for sniping at easy targets. After all, there's nothing wrong, per se, with having low self-esteem: for some of us, it's a viable adaptive strategy in all sorts of ways; and if the choice is between engaging a complete plonker (or plonqueuse) or just not engaging anyone or anything at all, for fear of being intellectually or rhetorically outgunned, then the former seems to me to be preferable, since at least you're giving yourself some practice in the elementary arts of logic, and have a hope of progressing on to greater things. Plus, sometimes you have to see what you say in order to know what you think. You have to write out your objection in order to discover it's a weak one, and could do with some more work (or an embarrassed retraction). There's all that. But beyond that, there's also the fact that some of the utter drivel that gets talked gets talked by people in High Places. Hence, it matters far more than it ought to: at least more than the standard "Someone is wrong on the Internet!".
Case in point.
The plonqueuse interviewed by the BBC in the above linked clip wasn't just any old biddy: she was a representative of the Notts police, describing to the BBC how this particular force aims to implement what they interpret as the law of the land (as far as I'm aware, even the British police are not currently allowed to make their own laws. However, I've been out of the country a long time, and may be out of date on this). As I understand it, UK statutory law recognizes a particular category of crime called a Hate Crime, lists a series of possible motives for this "hate", and leaves it to the police and CPS to dot the i's and cross the t's, with the result that in Manchester, but nowhere else, it is now possible to "hate" a goth, punk or emo, while in Nottinghamshire, but nowhere else, you can officially "hate" someone because of their gender, providing (La Plonqueuse helpfully clarifies) that the gender in question is female. So far, so by the book. Which doesn't, of course, mean that an aggravated sentence for an alleged "hate crime" is necessarily a good idea, or in any way productive or helpful, but sorting that one out isn't the police's problem, granted.
What is disturbing is, first of all, the glib conflation of "incident" and "crime", apparently applicable, in Notts, solely in the case of "misogyny". From the horse's mouth:
We've started recording misogyny as a separate category of hate crime. It's where either a crime or an incident occurs and the victim feels that it's occurred because of their gender, i.e. the fact that they're a woman.
Notice that it's a "hate crime" when "either a crime or an incident occurs". To give some background to this, it should be noted that in police parlance, an "incident" is anything that is reported to police and that may warrant action or further investigation: it is assumed that what is initially reported as an "incident" may prove, upon investigation, to have been a crime, but will not always be so. Here, however, we are led to understand that whilst anything that is reported as an "incident" will not, pending further investigation, have the label "crime" prematurely attached to it (which would be contrary to standard police procedure and centuries of jurisprudence), an exception will be made in the case of "misogyny", which will be treated, and recorded, as a "hate crime" even where the "incident" reported turns out not to have broken any existing law. (How the Notts Police deal with "crimes" that cannot actually be prosecuted is something I am not qualified to do more than speculate on. My guess is a series of closely spaced lightning arrests for Walking on the Cracks in the Pavement.)
This, along with with the extreme subjectivity of the claim of hateful motivation ("the victim feels"), can scarcely be interpreted as other than an invitation to extreme cynicism with regard to police reporting and official statistics. So what's new?
I won't, for now, address the glaringly obvious point that if victimizing someone because of their gender is to be held a Hate Crime, it ought to be so regardless of whether the victim is a woman or a man, for the sake of (ahem) gender equality. I would probably have more to say on this, but there's better to come. Ici la Plonqueuse:
Staring at [someone's] breasts isn't a crime per se, but it's an offence - and it's one that we can, in the right circumstances, deal with [inaud. - with?] the offender, and report them for summons, and take them to court.
As a UK-born teacher living in South America, I get quite a lot of mileage in my classes out of the eccentricities of my lower-middle-class Catholic English upbringing, including the eternally reinforced exhortation "It's rude to stare". If you're from the UK, or anywhere on the American continent north of the Bible Belt, your mother will probably have repeated this to you several hundred times from the age of 3 up to 9; if you're from anywhere else on the planet, chances are you will never have heard these words, or anything like them, and will regard them as the sheerest lunacy, since gawping at whatever interests us is a natural human instinct, and does no one any harm (unless they belong to the category of Special Snowflakes, and there ain't many of those in the latitudes referred to). One consequence of this sort of upbringing (speaking from experience) is that the British male is far less likely than most other nationalities to stare, or even glance, at a woman's breasts, even when he is in bed with her (Nottinghamshire may, of course, be the exception: again, I am Not Qualified. Women, of course, are traditionally exempt from any restrictions on direction of gaze, so Don't Count). At all events, it strikes me that this is scarcely a pressing (sorry) social problem, or ought not to be, since if anyone, irrespective of gender, has an overwhelming urge to look at breasts, there's always the Internet, which was, after all, invented specifically for that purpose: beside which magnificent cornucopia of riches, anything likely to be within one's own limited field of vision is almost inevitably going to prove a poor substitute and not worth the bother and potential embarrassment.
In Nottamun Town, not a soul would look up.
Not a soul would look up, and not a soul would look down...
If you thought this was a prophetic description of the world of Pokémon Go, well, you were wrong. But at least he got the county right, and you got the year.
No, what gets me is this idea that "staring at breasts" is, or could ever be, reasonably construed as an expression of "hate". This is so wrong that it's hard to know where to start. Well, all right, let's try a quick definition of what "hate" means (I wrote several articles on this on the old blog, so here is the condensed version). You hate someone if you
My contention is that all three criteria need to be met for "hate" to be the right word. If it's just (a), it's indignation. If it's (b), it's contempt. If it's (c), it's malice (or sadism). Hatred is more than any of these in isolation. You might argue a case for two out of three, but since hate is a strong word (and carries strong penalties in some cases) I think the stronger test is justified (in my other blog I also made a psychological case for two out of three bringing the third into existence as a kind of automatic mental reflex, but let's not go there right now). Hate is indignation plus contempt plus malice. At least, that's what I've always gone with, and even this exacting definition comfortably covers all of what it's consensually supposed to cover, e.g. Nazism, so it's practically applicable.
Let's suppose that, as recounted in the linked video, a "man" "says something" about a woman's breasts, then crosses a road, joins her in a tram, and "stares at" them the whole way home. There's no denying that, as described, this is pretty weird, socially dysfunctional behavior. In fact it is so weird that I strongly doubt that it did actually happen "as described". But let's suppose for a moment that it did. Would anyone in their right mind interpret this as an expression of "hatred", either towards the individual or towards her entire gender? Why would they do so? Even in such mildly disturbing behaviour, I see no evidence of indignation, none of malice, and one would need more information to even make a stab at contempt, especially if the man in question did not enjoy the inestimable benefit of an English Upbringing complete with Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, since as already mentioned, almost nowhere else in the world is "staring at breasts" likely to be seen as anything other than a natural expression of middle-range adult male testosterone levels, of no greater account than the habit dogs have of sniffing round lamp-posts (do dogs "hate" lamp-posts? Enquiring minds &c). There are even large swathes of Africa where such behaviour might be regarded as an extravagant compliment (though still weird), since breasts in those cultures are not generally fetishized or regarded as "sexual": often, they aren't even paid the compliment of being covered up.
Now, it so happens that there is a perfectly good word in English to describe the alleged sort of behavior, and that word ain't "misogyny" or "hate". In fact, it's precisely the word our mothers used to use. The word is "rude". Making a complete stranger feel uncomfortable by e.g. staring fixedly at her breasts, or for that matter by blowing smoke in her face, or maintaining eye contact while baring one's teeth in an evil, leery grin accompanied by a sinister nasal snicker - all of these are consensually rude behaviours, or used to be, along with a lot else. For any readers under the age of, say, thirty, who may never have heard the word before, here is a quick summary of what "rude" used to mean:
(1) rude a. (fam, UK) of a sexual nature or content: Instead, Rodney used to look at rude books (fsssh) with rude pictures in them (ffssh).
(2) rude a. discourteous, lacking in proper respect and consideration: It's rude to stare at people.
(3) rude a. primitive, crude, unpolished: For months, he lived in a rude log cabin in the middle of a forest.
As can immediately be seen, the meanings are related, and depend on the assumption that a default characteristic of people who have not had the benefit of a proper upbringing is to act selfishly, even solipsistically, as if there were no other sentient beings in the vicinity, or as if the comfort and welfare of those others was of no account. In other words: humans, in their unpolished, uninterfered-with state, pace Rousseau, tend to be selfish, obnoxious gits. Now, back in the days of Good Queen Victoria, it was felt that a society composed exclusively of selfish gits would most likely be unsuccessful in the great imperial endeavour of Keeping China British, and therefore it became necessary for e.g. mothers to constantly inculcate into their offspring the sort of behaviour, such as Not Staring, which would foster a nascent social awareness in the individual and thus prevent society from becoming ulcerated with debilitating rancour and pettiness, or turning into a Gomorrah of unbridled lust and what one British school pupil famously described as "rough mating". In practice, what I think we see in societies where outward manifestations of courtesy and consideration are highly valued (such as the UK I grew up in back in the sixties and early seventies) is, to some extent, ritualised behaviour, by which I mean that people act courteously not necessarily out of genuine empathy and consideration for others, but simply because they have been taught to act in that way, and are kept on track by tribal conformity. Nevertheless, if certain conditions are met (and this kind of favourable, rule-obeying environment may be one of those conditions) then empathy naturally develops with age and experience and a modicum of self-awareness, and the more empathetic you become, the less courteous behaviour becomes about "following rules" - once you've mastered close harmony, you can allow yourself the odd parallel fifth in a greater cause.
First you learn not to treat people as lamp-posts, without quite understanding why. Then you gradually discover, aided by the kindliness and wisdom of your elders and better halves, that they are not, in fact, lamp-posts, and that this is an excellent reason for not treating them as such. Finally, you get it together with people with a yen for dressing up as lamp-posts at weekends, thus allowing you to indulge your darker, lamp-postifying tendencies in a safe, consensual environment. All's right with the world.
In my opinion, this actually worked. Still works, to the extent that nostalgic and backward-looking people still insist on bringing up their children in this way.
As for the alleged social dangers of not teaching kids "manners", well, I suppose to some extent my (12-year and counting) experience of living in athird world developing South American country may be germane. This is how it usually plays out:
Incomplete Git needs to buy some aspirin, so heads for the nearest pharmacy. There, he finds the pharmacist busy serving one (1) customer. Even though this "serving" seems to consist mostly of pottering around and exchanging inconsequential chit-chat, he waits patiently in silence, vaguely hoping to establish eye contact with pharmacist at some point. ENTER third customer, who strolls briskly up to the counter, ignoring first customer and actually pushing past Incomplete Git, and loudly bellows "Give me some cough mixture" (there is no "please"). Pharmacist interrupts conversation with first customer in order to dispatch order of third customer. Incomplete Git clears throat, but is still unable to establish eye contact, and is incapable of speech, since it is rude to talk to a stranger who hasn't even yet seen you. ENTER fourth customer. "Three ibuprofen and some purple hair dye!" And so it goes on. Eventually, some ten minutes later, first customer remembers she has an appointment, and departs, and customers sixteen, seventeen and nineteen also leave. Pharmacist, faute de mieux, turns to Incomplete Git: "Yes? Did you want something?"
What I think this and similar anecdotes reveal is that as long as everyone is rude, rudeness also works socially, after a fashion, for everyone except for the poor bugger who was brought up with, well, other expectations. Granted that where no one has even heard of queues, there is an increased risk of sprained ankles and other minor contusions, esp. when boarding and alighting from buses (it would help if they actually stopped rather than just slowing down). Sometimes I wonder whether even the admirable stoicism of your average Greater Colombian is proof against being run off the road onto a grassy verge by someone whose hurry not to miss the match self-evidently trumps the safety and convenience of other drivers. I guess the crime statistics and mortality rates might help elucidate this, if you wanted to do a doctoral thesis on the matter. Personally, my experience here has led to the discovery that I object rather strongly to being burgled, but can otherwise adapt reasonably well to most kinds of unthinking rudeness (it's their culture, innit), especially since I am at an age when one would normally expect to be universally ignored anyway, on account of being self-evidently neither a threat, a challenge nor a catch. (Ho-hum.)
There are dangers, though. Some of these dangers properly belong in another post, where I may attempt to address the economic angle. Let's just say, for now, that I remain unconvinced that genuine empathy is likely to flourish (save among the precious 33% minority that Milgram allows) in a society where routine expression of elementary consideration for others is not valued as an attribute of free, responsible individuals, but is instead either regarded as an anachronistic affectation, or imposed as a legal constraint, aided and abetted by heavy-handed policing.
Let's put this another way. Why would La Plonqueuse, and others like her, be tempted to place "staring at breasts" in the manifestly inappropriate category of "misogyny" and/or "hate crime"? Why would she flinch from describing it with the vastly more appropriate term "rudeness"? What's going on here? In my opinion, two things:
(1) As a society (and whether this has anything to do with the Internet is anybody's guess) we have fallen prey to hyperbole. The British in particular, once famed for understatement, now prefer to ramp up the rhetorical rheostat any chance they get. The problem with this is that words get devalued rather easily and quickly. In a discourse where "fascist" generally means no more than "having political ideas I disagree with", it is, perhaps, natural that "misogynist" should come to mean "inadvertently causing minor annoyance to at least one woman, whether by word or deed". The day I actually hear a self-described feminist say something like "well, I think misogynist might be too strong a word in this instance", I may change my mind on this. Not until.
Strikes me, this is just Godwin's Law writ large. "Oh dear, no one is taking me seriously. Well, I'd better use more extreme language and more shocking comparisons. That will get their attention!"
No, but really, I get it. Deep down, we all want to be loved. I can relate. (The problem, as I say, and it may only be a small one, is that when you are faced with people who genuinely are both fascist and misogynist, there are literally No Words Left: you've spent all your ammunition.)
(2) The police can't arrest anyone for just being "rude". This is written into the (teasingly non-existent) British Constitution. The only people properly qualified to deal with persistent rudeness are terrifying aunts, a species whose continued existence post Brexit must be a matter for concern. Hence, the nut must be approached with an appropriate legal sledgehammer. This lazy and defeatist legalistic codification of acceptable behaviour, based on the assumption that the Thin Blue Line is all that separates us from anarchy and Zombie Apocalypse, is at least arguably a symptom of long-term social decline: corruptissima re publica plurimae leges. More importantly (but still arguably: feel free to disagree) it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean by this, and at the risk of repeating myself: if you tell people that staring at breasts is "wrong" not because it makes the owner feel uncomfortable (i.e. is rude) but because it will be treated by one of the obtuser arms of the State as a manifestation of "hate", which it is plainly not a manifestation of, but you try arguing the toss with a six-foot-six bloke with a taser from the floor of a police cell, then you are telling people that empathy and genuine consideration for others are little more than occasional private eccentricities, irrelevant to the smooth running of society, which is instead dependent purely on compliance with a bewilderingly pedantic code of conduct instituted at the behest of various hectoring, obscurely cognitively challenged pressure groups. In short, there are no prizes for growing up. Beyond tribal conformity? A very lonely place indeed.
Well (to bring this back on course), this lonely place is where I think I am now living.
And this is not because I am the (so far only hinted at) other fly in the political ointment, i.e. that unfortunate person whose upbringing was designed for a quite different kind of society from that he now finds himself in. There is that, of course. Duplicated across an entire population, it gives you predictable conflicts - generation gaps, xenophobia, Donald Trump, etc - but I won't make my own problems out to be political, because they aren't: they're just me. I have some very strange and wondrous baggage, which makes it impossible for me even to imagine how I might have ended up had I been born normal: result, I can't use myself as an example for anything. All I can do, and try to do, is leverage my own, presumably bog-standard, basic emotional wiring to try to get an insight into how other, more important, people really think and feel, especially when they themselves are too busy to notice. So that's what I plan to do in this blog. And it so happens that, along the way, I'll be brushing through some very low-hanging fruit indeed. If you like, put it down to the fact my brain is still running Sapiens 98: I never upgraded, and given my limited life expectancy, doubt I ever shall. There are limits to what I can realistically grok. I do my best. (No, actually I don't. But I do, sometimes, try to do my best at doing my best.)
So yeah, I'll be talking more about breasts, and about various species of plonqueuse, and all of that. Feel free to interrupt if you've heard it all before.
The tribal campfire is down there, and the stars are up there, and I can only manage a few miles either way. Damn. Where do I go now?
The phrase isn't original, and in fact seems to be in vogue at the moment, at least on YouTube, referring to the vice some people like to indulge in of scoring easy polemical victories against unworthy opponents. This, of course, is one consequence of the Internet Age. Never in history has it been so easy for the budding polemicist to find an atrocious poet or writer to pull to bits, a goggle-eyed religious loony to snicker at, an incoherent political pundit or ideologue to wittily expose. The supply of incompetents in various fields of endeavour, primarily logic, queuing up to get fisked by smooth Internet operators, appears to be limitless. What I like about the metaphor is that it acknowledges that, if you are looking for someone to argue with and score dialectical points against, choosing the weakest and most vulnerable opponent in sight is, while tempting, arguably not all that sporting. It may, moreover, be a symptom of lack of confidence, or low self esteem. It may be that back in the nineties, in those heady early days of the Internet, "atheist websites", for example, performed a valuable function in advancing the cause of critical thinking as applied to religious questions; now, all their jostling me-too presence tells you is that the author doesn't have the requisite knowledge and/or confidence to engage in stimulating debate on topics which offer a genuine intellectual challenge, such as politics, climate change or genetic engineering, and has therefore decided to go for the easy option of verbally pummelling people who - often by their own admission - have no rational arguments with which to defend their odd but sincerely held beliefs.
Having said that, I will admit that a lot of the fruit I went for in my old blog (the one in Spanish) was arguably not all that elevated. Much of my polemical fervour was directed at ideologically driven opinion columnists and political propagandists in the government daily rag (a kind of Pravda a lo criollo), which I perused every lunchtime in search of lazy rhetoric and controversial hidden assumptions. I will also admit that one of the reasons I closed that blog was that, while the stats showed a trickle of visitors, I wasn't getting any feedback, and hence had no way of knowing whether what I wrote was being tacitly agreed with, angrily disagreed with (by people too blustery and red-faced to find words for their contempt) or just shrugged over. It would be wrong to suppose that I was only in the market for "positive" feedback. On the rare occasions I did get a gushing response from a satisfied customer, it left me with more of a squiggle than a smile, since while I can identify quite easily with the experience of Agreeing With (Nearly) Every Word someone writes, a residual sense of shame generally prevents me from making such agreement the main topic or purpose of a response. For me, "me too" are sacred words, not to be uttered lightly or wantonly, and rarely outside the bedroom. Show rather than say, might here be a reasonable rule of thumb, as it is in poetry. Most times, I am too tired to even attempt that feat.
Neither positive nor negative, but constructive feedback: when you get that, I suppose, you will know you're doing something right. (I never did, as far as I can remember. OK, maybe once or twice.)
Anyway. The point towards which I'm groping (sorry) is that there may in fact be legitimate justifications for sniping at easy targets. After all, there's nothing wrong, per se, with having low self-esteem: for some of us, it's a viable adaptive strategy in all sorts of ways; and if the choice is between engaging a complete plonker (or plonqueuse) or just not engaging anyone or anything at all, for fear of being intellectually or rhetorically outgunned, then the former seems to me to be preferable, since at least you're giving yourself some practice in the elementary arts of logic, and have a hope of progressing on to greater things. Plus, sometimes you have to see what you say in order to know what you think. You have to write out your objection in order to discover it's a weak one, and could do with some more work (or an embarrassed retraction). There's all that. But beyond that, there's also the fact that some of the utter drivel that gets talked gets talked by people in High Places. Hence, it matters far more than it ought to: at least more than the standard "Someone is wrong on the Internet!".
Case in point.
The plonqueuse interviewed by the BBC in the above linked clip wasn't just any old biddy: she was a representative of the Notts police, describing to the BBC how this particular force aims to implement what they interpret as the law of the land (as far as I'm aware, even the British police are not currently allowed to make their own laws. However, I've been out of the country a long time, and may be out of date on this). As I understand it, UK statutory law recognizes a particular category of crime called a Hate Crime, lists a series of possible motives for this "hate", and leaves it to the police and CPS to dot the i's and cross the t's, with the result that in Manchester, but nowhere else, it is now possible to "hate" a goth, punk or emo, while in Nottinghamshire, but nowhere else, you can officially "hate" someone because of their gender, providing (La Plonqueuse helpfully clarifies) that the gender in question is female. So far, so by the book. Which doesn't, of course, mean that an aggravated sentence for an alleged "hate crime" is necessarily a good idea, or in any way productive or helpful, but sorting that one out isn't the police's problem, granted.
What is disturbing is, first of all, the glib conflation of "incident" and "crime", apparently applicable, in Notts, solely in the case of "misogyny". From the horse's mouth:
We've started recording misogyny as a separate category of hate crime. It's where either a crime or an incident occurs and the victim feels that it's occurred because of their gender, i.e. the fact that they're a woman.
Notice that it's a "hate crime" when "either a crime or an incident occurs". To give some background to this, it should be noted that in police parlance, an "incident" is anything that is reported to police and that may warrant action or further investigation: it is assumed that what is initially reported as an "incident" may prove, upon investigation, to have been a crime, but will not always be so. Here, however, we are led to understand that whilst anything that is reported as an "incident" will not, pending further investigation, have the label "crime" prematurely attached to it (which would be contrary to standard police procedure and centuries of jurisprudence), an exception will be made in the case of "misogyny", which will be treated, and recorded, as a "hate crime" even where the "incident" reported turns out not to have broken any existing law. (How the Notts Police deal with "crimes" that cannot actually be prosecuted is something I am not qualified to do more than speculate on. My guess is a series of closely spaced lightning arrests for Walking on the Cracks in the Pavement.)
This, along with with the extreme subjectivity of the claim of hateful motivation ("the victim feels"), can scarcely be interpreted as other than an invitation to extreme cynicism with regard to police reporting and official statistics. So what's new?
I won't, for now, address the glaringly obvious point that if victimizing someone because of their gender is to be held a Hate Crime, it ought to be so regardless of whether the victim is a woman or a man, for the sake of (ahem) gender equality. I would probably have more to say on this, but there's better to come. Ici la Plonqueuse:
Staring at [someone's] breasts isn't a crime per se, but it's an offence - and it's one that we can, in the right circumstances, deal with [inaud. - with?] the offender, and report them for summons, and take them to court.
As a UK-born teacher living in South America, I get quite a lot of mileage in my classes out of the eccentricities of my lower-middle-class Catholic English upbringing, including the eternally reinforced exhortation "It's rude to stare". If you're from the UK, or anywhere on the American continent north of the Bible Belt, your mother will probably have repeated this to you several hundred times from the age of 3 up to 9; if you're from anywhere else on the planet, chances are you will never have heard these words, or anything like them, and will regard them as the sheerest lunacy, since gawping at whatever interests us is a natural human instinct, and does no one any harm (unless they belong to the category of Special Snowflakes, and there ain't many of those in the latitudes referred to). One consequence of this sort of upbringing (speaking from experience) is that the British male is far less likely than most other nationalities to stare, or even glance, at a woman's breasts, even when he is in bed with her (Nottinghamshire may, of course, be the exception: again, I am Not Qualified. Women, of course, are traditionally exempt from any restrictions on direction of gaze, so Don't Count). At all events, it strikes me that this is scarcely a pressing (sorry) social problem, or ought not to be, since if anyone, irrespective of gender, has an overwhelming urge to look at breasts, there's always the Internet, which was, after all, invented specifically for that purpose: beside which magnificent cornucopia of riches, anything likely to be within one's own limited field of vision is almost inevitably going to prove a poor substitute and not worth the bother and potential embarrassment.
In Nottamun Town, not a soul would look up.
Not a soul would look up, and not a soul would look down...
If you thought this was a prophetic description of the world of Pokémon Go, well, you were wrong. But at least he got the county right, and you got the year.
No, what gets me is this idea that "staring at breasts" is, or could ever be, reasonably construed as an expression of "hate". This is so wrong that it's hard to know where to start. Well, all right, let's try a quick definition of what "hate" means (I wrote several articles on this on the old blog, so here is the condensed version). You hate someone if you
- (a) feel that the person or group in question has wronged or offended you in some way
- (b) are disposed to view that person or group in a one-sidedly negative light, magnifying their allegedly contemptible, sub-human nature and failing to see the redeeming human qualities they share with you
- (c) wish that person or group harm, or take pleasure in imagining harm coming to them.
My contention is that all three criteria need to be met for "hate" to be the right word. If it's just (a), it's indignation. If it's (b), it's contempt. If it's (c), it's malice (or sadism). Hatred is more than any of these in isolation. You might argue a case for two out of three, but since hate is a strong word (and carries strong penalties in some cases) I think the stronger test is justified (in my other blog I also made a psychological case for two out of three bringing the third into existence as a kind of automatic mental reflex, but let's not go there right now). Hate is indignation plus contempt plus malice. At least, that's what I've always gone with, and even this exacting definition comfortably covers all of what it's consensually supposed to cover, e.g. Nazism, so it's practically applicable.
Let's suppose that, as recounted in the linked video, a "man" "says something" about a woman's breasts, then crosses a road, joins her in a tram, and "stares at" them the whole way home. There's no denying that, as described, this is pretty weird, socially dysfunctional behavior. In fact it is so weird that I strongly doubt that it did actually happen "as described". But let's suppose for a moment that it did. Would anyone in their right mind interpret this as an expression of "hatred", either towards the individual or towards her entire gender? Why would they do so? Even in such mildly disturbing behaviour, I see no evidence of indignation, none of malice, and one would need more information to even make a stab at contempt, especially if the man in question did not enjoy the inestimable benefit of an English Upbringing complete with Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, since as already mentioned, almost nowhere else in the world is "staring at breasts" likely to be seen as anything other than a natural expression of middle-range adult male testosterone levels, of no greater account than the habit dogs have of sniffing round lamp-posts (do dogs "hate" lamp-posts? Enquiring minds &c). There are even large swathes of Africa where such behaviour might be regarded as an extravagant compliment (though still weird), since breasts in those cultures are not generally fetishized or regarded as "sexual": often, they aren't even paid the compliment of being covered up.
Now, it so happens that there is a perfectly good word in English to describe the alleged sort of behavior, and that word ain't "misogyny" or "hate". In fact, it's precisely the word our mothers used to use. The word is "rude". Making a complete stranger feel uncomfortable by e.g. staring fixedly at her breasts, or for that matter by blowing smoke in her face, or maintaining eye contact while baring one's teeth in an evil, leery grin accompanied by a sinister nasal snicker - all of these are consensually rude behaviours, or used to be, along with a lot else. For any readers under the age of, say, thirty, who may never have heard the word before, here is a quick summary of what "rude" used to mean:
(1) rude a. (fam, UK) of a sexual nature or content: Instead, Rodney used to look at rude books (fsssh) with rude pictures in them (ffssh).
(2) rude a. discourteous, lacking in proper respect and consideration: It's rude to stare at people.
(3) rude a. primitive, crude, unpolished: For months, he lived in a rude log cabin in the middle of a forest.
As can immediately be seen, the meanings are related, and depend on the assumption that a default characteristic of people who have not had the benefit of a proper upbringing is to act selfishly, even solipsistically, as if there were no other sentient beings in the vicinity, or as if the comfort and welfare of those others was of no account. In other words: humans, in their unpolished, uninterfered-with state, pace Rousseau, tend to be selfish, obnoxious gits. Now, back in the days of Good Queen Victoria, it was felt that a society composed exclusively of selfish gits would most likely be unsuccessful in the great imperial endeavour of Keeping China British, and therefore it became necessary for e.g. mothers to constantly inculcate into their offspring the sort of behaviour, such as Not Staring, which would foster a nascent social awareness in the individual and thus prevent society from becoming ulcerated with debilitating rancour and pettiness, or turning into a Gomorrah of unbridled lust and what one British school pupil famously described as "rough mating". In practice, what I think we see in societies where outward manifestations of courtesy and consideration are highly valued (such as the UK I grew up in back in the sixties and early seventies) is, to some extent, ritualised behaviour, by which I mean that people act courteously not necessarily out of genuine empathy and consideration for others, but simply because they have been taught to act in that way, and are kept on track by tribal conformity. Nevertheless, if certain conditions are met (and this kind of favourable, rule-obeying environment may be one of those conditions) then empathy naturally develops with age and experience and a modicum of self-awareness, and the more empathetic you become, the less courteous behaviour becomes about "following rules" - once you've mastered close harmony, you can allow yourself the odd parallel fifth in a greater cause.
First you learn not to treat people as lamp-posts, without quite understanding why. Then you gradually discover, aided by the kindliness and wisdom of your elders and better halves, that they are not, in fact, lamp-posts, and that this is an excellent reason for not treating them as such. Finally, you get it together with people with a yen for dressing up as lamp-posts at weekends, thus allowing you to indulge your darker, lamp-postifying tendencies in a safe, consensual environment. All's right with the world.
In my opinion, this actually worked. Still works, to the extent that nostalgic and backward-looking people still insist on bringing up their children in this way.
As for the alleged social dangers of not teaching kids "manners", well, I suppose to some extent my (12-year and counting) experience of living in a
Incomplete Git needs to buy some aspirin, so heads for the nearest pharmacy. There, he finds the pharmacist busy serving one (1) customer. Even though this "serving" seems to consist mostly of pottering around and exchanging inconsequential chit-chat, he waits patiently in silence, vaguely hoping to establish eye contact with pharmacist at some point. ENTER third customer, who strolls briskly up to the counter, ignoring first customer and actually pushing past Incomplete Git, and loudly bellows "Give me some cough mixture" (there is no "please"). Pharmacist interrupts conversation with first customer in order to dispatch order of third customer. Incomplete Git clears throat, but is still unable to establish eye contact, and is incapable of speech, since it is rude to talk to a stranger who hasn't even yet seen you. ENTER fourth customer. "Three ibuprofen and some purple hair dye!" And so it goes on. Eventually, some ten minutes later, first customer remembers she has an appointment, and departs, and customers sixteen, seventeen and nineteen also leave. Pharmacist, faute de mieux, turns to Incomplete Git: "Yes? Did you want something?"
What I think this and similar anecdotes reveal is that as long as everyone is rude, rudeness also works socially, after a fashion, for everyone except for the poor bugger who was brought up with, well, other expectations. Granted that where no one has even heard of queues, there is an increased risk of sprained ankles and other minor contusions, esp. when boarding and alighting from buses (it would help if they actually stopped rather than just slowing down). Sometimes I wonder whether even the admirable stoicism of your average Greater Colombian is proof against being run off the road onto a grassy verge by someone whose hurry not to miss the match self-evidently trumps the safety and convenience of other drivers. I guess the crime statistics and mortality rates might help elucidate this, if you wanted to do a doctoral thesis on the matter. Personally, my experience here has led to the discovery that I object rather strongly to being burgled, but can otherwise adapt reasonably well to most kinds of unthinking rudeness (it's their culture, innit), especially since I am at an age when one would normally expect to be universally ignored anyway, on account of being self-evidently neither a threat, a challenge nor a catch. (Ho-hum.)
There are dangers, though. Some of these dangers properly belong in another post, where I may attempt to address the economic angle. Let's just say, for now, that I remain unconvinced that genuine empathy is likely to flourish (save among the precious 33% minority that Milgram allows) in a society where routine expression of elementary consideration for others is not valued as an attribute of free, responsible individuals, but is instead either regarded as an anachronistic affectation, or imposed as a legal constraint, aided and abetted by heavy-handed policing.
Let's put this another way. Why would La Plonqueuse, and others like her, be tempted to place "staring at breasts" in the manifestly inappropriate category of "misogyny" and/or "hate crime"? Why would she flinch from describing it with the vastly more appropriate term "rudeness"? What's going on here? In my opinion, two things:
(1) As a society (and whether this has anything to do with the Internet is anybody's guess) we have fallen prey to hyperbole. The British in particular, once famed for understatement, now prefer to ramp up the rhetorical rheostat any chance they get. The problem with this is that words get devalued rather easily and quickly. In a discourse where "fascist" generally means no more than "having political ideas I disagree with", it is, perhaps, natural that "misogynist" should come to mean "inadvertently causing minor annoyance to at least one woman, whether by word or deed". The day I actually hear a self-described feminist say something like "well, I think misogynist might be too strong a word in this instance", I may change my mind on this. Not until.
Strikes me, this is just Godwin's Law writ large. "Oh dear, no one is taking me seriously. Well, I'd better use more extreme language and more shocking comparisons. That will get their attention!"
No, but really, I get it. Deep down, we all want to be loved. I can relate. (The problem, as I say, and it may only be a small one, is that when you are faced with people who genuinely are both fascist and misogynist, there are literally No Words Left: you've spent all your ammunition.)
(2) The police can't arrest anyone for just being "rude". This is written into the (teasingly non-existent) British Constitution. The only people properly qualified to deal with persistent rudeness are terrifying aunts, a species whose continued existence post Brexit must be a matter for concern. Hence, the nut must be approached with an appropriate legal sledgehammer. This lazy and defeatist legalistic codification of acceptable behaviour, based on the assumption that the Thin Blue Line is all that separates us from anarchy and Zombie Apocalypse, is at least arguably a symptom of long-term social decline: corruptissima re publica plurimae leges. More importantly (but still arguably: feel free to disagree) it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean by this, and at the risk of repeating myself: if you tell people that staring at breasts is "wrong" not because it makes the owner feel uncomfortable (i.e. is rude) but because it will be treated by one of the obtuser arms of the State as a manifestation of "hate", which it is plainly not a manifestation of, but you try arguing the toss with a six-foot-six bloke with a taser from the floor of a police cell, then you are telling people that empathy and genuine consideration for others are little more than occasional private eccentricities, irrelevant to the smooth running of society, which is instead dependent purely on compliance with a bewilderingly pedantic code of conduct instituted at the behest of various hectoring, obscurely cognitively challenged pressure groups. In short, there are no prizes for growing up. Beyond tribal conformity? A very lonely place indeed.
Well (to bring this back on course), this lonely place is where I think I am now living.
And this is not because I am the (so far only hinted at) other fly in the political ointment, i.e. that unfortunate person whose upbringing was designed for a quite different kind of society from that he now finds himself in. There is that, of course. Duplicated across an entire population, it gives you predictable conflicts - generation gaps, xenophobia, Donald Trump, etc - but I won't make my own problems out to be political, because they aren't: they're just me. I have some very strange and wondrous baggage, which makes it impossible for me even to imagine how I might have ended up had I been born normal: result, I can't use myself as an example for anything. All I can do, and try to do, is leverage my own, presumably bog-standard, basic emotional wiring to try to get an insight into how other, more important, people really think and feel, especially when they themselves are too busy to notice. So that's what I plan to do in this blog. And it so happens that, along the way, I'll be brushing through some very low-hanging fruit indeed. If you like, put it down to the fact my brain is still running Sapiens 98: I never upgraded, and given my limited life expectancy, doubt I ever shall. There are limits to what I can realistically grok. I do my best. (No, actually I don't. But I do, sometimes, try to do my best at doing my best.)
So yeah, I'll be talking more about breasts, and about various species of plonqueuse, and all of that. Feel free to interrupt if you've heard it all before.
The tribal campfire is down there, and the stars are up there, and I can only manage a few miles either way. Damn. Where do I go now?
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