Sexism is alive and well

Living Dolls: the return of sexism

By Natasha Walter

For as long as I can remember, I have been alive to the fact that, in Western society’s eyes, people are not created equal. I wasn’t around during even the second-wave of feminism, but I knew that people were still discriminated against due to their sex or gender. So I came to Walter not for affirmation, but examples, analysis and explanation.

At first I felt that she was providing only examples. A great deal of this book – especially in the first half – is exposition. For instance, Walter describing a typical night in an Essex nightclub in which the girls are invited on stage to pose for Nuts magazine; Walter interviewing former strippers; Walter describing the girls’ pink and glittery section of the toy shop. Walter described all these encounters – many of which shocked me – in neat and concise prose. Her writing is cast by Walter’s scepticism: naturally, she cannot describe a girl’s wanting to be a pink princess without a dose of cynicism in her language. While some of these accounts were gripping, they were not what I came for. I wanted insight. I craved objective analysis – especially after Walter had opened my eyes further.

Eventually it came, and it was worth the wait. I still can’t help but imagine what this polemic would have been like if Walter analysed every encounter she had while describing it to us or, in any case, if her analysis came closer to a description of something problematic. But her decision to keep the exposition and analysis mostly separate is nevertheless an intriguing one. I suppose in the very least it left me really hungry for the analysis when it did come.

And I have to say that I found her arguments compelling, persuasive and well made. I had found the ‘pink princess’ approach to girls’ toys rather tasteless, but I always thought that that had been down to the fact that I’m a boy or a grown-up or a bigger fan of other colours – or a republican. But now I feel I have some substantive reasons for not liking it. Walter puts the ‘pink princess’ phenomenon in context, plots its development relative to other narrow representations of women and shows what it does for the developing psychology of a young girl. The realisation that, in the extreme, a modern girl is essentially building her identity through medieval values (entitlement, privilege, dependence, and the wait for a prince to take over the role of provision from her father) is shocking. My second surprise is Walter’s explanation of how the media’s sexualisation of women affects us all. She breaks down the notion that now women who choose to strip or pose in a lads’ mag are empowered.

I think she could have developed this argument more, but nevertheless her examples speak for themselves. The women she meets, who chose to strip, describe how it is not empowering at all. And the girls she interviews, perhaps most crushing of all, explain how they want to be glamour models. Walter craftily weaves example and analysis together here when she positions these girls against her argument that sexualised representations of women in the media present very narrow choices for young girls. Girls who see glamour models all the time think that the models’ bodies are the ‘ideal’ body types: they work towards achieving this or become depressed that they don’t have it. And Walter drives home her point with statements from her interviewees (one very compelling 17-year-old included) who feel that that is exactly what these representations do: present very persuasive but narrow choices.

The great thing about Walter and this book, by the way, is that she doesn’t suggest for one moment that internet porn turns all men into dangerous sex obsessives or all women into subservient performers; her arguments are much more nuanced. To that extent, I could have done with a broader analysis. That is, the affect of sexism’s return on men. Walter mentions men superficially, but more insight would have been welcome. Perhaps that is another book, though; Living Dolls remains concise, tight and expertly argued.

Everything and everyone, explained

Guns, Germs and Steel

By Jared Diamond

Most people have wondered at one time or another why history unfolded so differently in different parts of the world. Why did the Europeans conquer the Native Americans, and not the other way around? Why did some people develop paler skin than our forebears, and others darker? Why do some people live in skyscrapers, and others still in mud huts? For most of us, these questions remain in the pub or around a dinner table. We develop them no further; they are simply too big.

Diamond is the kind of insatiable scientist who devotes his time and energy to these sorts of questions. He’s also smart enough to know that most of us are interested in them, but are short on time and expertise. And so he has written what has to be described as one of the most comprehensive and compelling books on human history ever. I haven’t read many others, but the sheer number of surprises I found when reading Diamond’s is enough for me to believe that no other book like this exists. In tracing how the environment, geology, climate and biology caused the development of human life to unfold the way it has, Guns, Germs and Steel is an astonishing piece of work. To top it off, Diamond is a thrilling writer.

The book could not have been written by anyone else. Others could have tackled its central questions, but their responses would have been different. That’s because Diamond is canny: he knows that his readers need a personal guide through this long and arduous journey. So he brings together his experiences as an ecologist in New Guinea with his travels in Australia and Africa, and his upbringing as an American. Fascinatingly implicit in his approach to the question of how history unfolded differently on different continents is that he is an American with a top-class education and the resources necessary to write such a wonderful book – resources that include computers, literacy, food supplied by others, security, etc. It is to this depth that Diamond traces human history. The reader is surprised to hear that Africa’s poverty relative to Europe’s propensity of food is down to the fact that Africa started with fewer domesticable plant species than Europe thousands of years ago. It sounds obvious (indeed, it is!) but it’s the kind of problem that was compounded by other factors: eg, Eurasia’s west-east axis with no geological or environmental barriers in the middle promoted better migration and sharing than we see in Africa, whose north-south axis hinders cross-continent migration thanks to the different climates it spans and the existence across one great swathe of a huge desert.

These are but tiny, and no doubt ill-expressed, insights into Diamond’s view of history. Although he has condensed eons into a mere 425 pages, it is a comprehensive and lucid piece of work. Astonishing.

The second chance

The Fourth Hand

By John Irving

Irving’s awful A Son of the Circus burnt me. Although I loved several of his previous books, I steered clear for years. A one-dollar price tag on a copy of The Fourth Hand was enough to lure me back – and thank heavens it did. The novel is a triumphant study of redemption that features a cast of endearing and despicable  characters. The plot hangs together much better than those of some of Irving’s earlier works and the characters feel much more real. While critics of Irving could slate him for creating inauthentic, comical characters just to have someone to mock, he has silenced them with this book.

The story follows Patrick Wallingford, a television journalist and playboy whose hand is bitten off by a lion, an event that changes the course of his life and sets the seeds for his ultimate return to humility. Along the way we meet his hand transplant doctor, whose idiosyncrasies are well conceived and often hilarious, Wallingford’s various lovers, and the wife of his hand donor. Irving’s trademark is the creation of hyper-real situations and, while he will not disappoint fans of that here, the set-pieces in this novel are perfectly grounded and genuine. Everything is slightly ridiculous, but never once over the top – not even the sentimentality.

Joining the dots

Pirate Latitudes

By Michael Crichton

Death is never fair. And so, the sickle-wielding spectre grabbed Michael Crichton early, leaving him time to drop only Pirate Latitudes on to his editor’s desk. My hopes of a return to a thinking man’s science thriller for Crichton were dashed. He tried it with Next, but that book is not really worthy of categorisation as a ‘novel’. It is a hole in literature.

Just before Crichton died, he turned his attention to pirates. And he’s written what can be described as a competent pirate adventure book. There’s wenches, swashbuckling, treasure, sea monsters, cannon – everything a book in this genre needs. Crichton must have written a big list of all these things and ticked them off as he happily worked his way through this manuscript. In so doing, he’s forgotten about character. I don’t mean to be so naïve as to hope that Crichton would craft a literary novel. But spending some more time developing characters that one cares about is important in any book, no matter what genre. And I don’t just mean characters that I would be happy to know in real life – I can care about the baddies too. The important thing is to make them human, so that when the giant squid attacks their sloop, I feel their anguish.

Pirate Latitudes is, unlike its author, instantly forgettable. It merges with every other genre-based pirate story with nothing to set it apart. It is pirates-by-numbers. A pirate dot-to-dot. Where Pirates of the Caribbean brought us the entertaining Jack Sparrow, Latitudes offers us nothing. Not even a decent title. Quite what those latitudes are remains a mystery. As will Crichton’s thoughts on why he decided to write such a middle-of-the-road adventure book.

Feels like Hollywood

A Family Matter

By Will Eisner

A rather simplistic and predictable tale of siblings fighting over the estate of their father, who is not yet dead. Eisner’s images in this graphic novella are able to get very quickly to the heart of each character, but not without relying on cliché in storytelling. So the pretty daughter is the one who grants sexual favours, for example. No surprises there. It feels like Hollywood. But then, Eisner is a part of the American dream factory, such is the influence of his graphic novels. There’s no doubting the man’s artistic talent. But, in A Family Matter at least, his storytelling could be more refined.

The beauty, the beauty

Heart of Darkness (graphic novel)

By Joseph Conrad, Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz

Like many literature students, I had to read Conrad’s groundbreaking novella twice before I understood its importance. Not only did I need to get my head around what was actually going on, I also had to spend time understanding that Conrad’s obfuscation was deliberate. For the first time here was a writer marrying content to form: the impenetrable nature of the Congo’s forests and people (to a European) were reflected in the language used to tell the story. Ingenius!

Of course, since Conrad published his tale in 190X, the graphic novel has become the dominant form of literature. (What do you mean it hasn’t?) Or at least, a significant player in storytelling. Indeed, where prose writers almost find it impossible to break boundaries of form in 2011, graphic novelists and cartoonists are still able to push their form further and further. Such is the achievement of Catherine Anyango in her arresting and disturbing visual retelling of Conrad’s famous story. David Zane Mairowitz has adapted the text itself, using Conrad’s memorable descriptions and dialogue, but it is Anyango’s images that win the day here.

In what appears to be charcoal or pastel, Anyango has managed to capture the shapes of this story. The action is not always clear in every frame – in fact, hardly ever – but that is an achievement, not a drawback. Anyango’s challenge was to translate Conrad’s confusing language into images. And she has done so expertly. Even taken out of context, these images are stunning, unnerving and even frightening.

An intellectual adventure

African Exodus

By Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie

Readers willing to look beyond the rather academic paperback style of publication will find in this book a great deal to contemplate that is not beyond their layperson’s understanding. The publisher’s choice of book size, cover illustration and paper type may deter some general readers, but the content of Stringer’s argument is comprehensible to anyone familiar with anthropology as a non-specialist.

As one of the main proponents of the Out of Africa theory of human origins, Stringer is well placed to make this argument. Indeed, one of the book’s chapters is a diary-like account of Stringer’s own journey around Europe as a young man to examine fossilised skulls held by museums. He’s hardly Indiana Jones, but African Exodus reads in part like an adventure – albeit intellectual – at times. Stringer repositions the opposing multiregional theory of our origins (the rise of Homo sapiens simultaneously in different parts of the world) and gradually unfolds the Out of Africa theory with such superior logic that the former idea is left in the wilderness.

The layperson may find it difficult to keep up with the various species and genera discussed in this book, and a general ‘best current thinking’ diagram at the beginning would not have gone amiss, but for the most part, McKie’s clear and concise prose keeps the interest up. Perhaps what I shall remember most of the book are the amazing facts it contains: for example, that there is greater genetic diversity between different people in Africa than there are between an African and, say, a European. Astonishing knowledge – this book’s full of it.