The Bluestocking, vol 112: The Back Clap Contest

Happy Friday!

While I was preparing for my interview with Jordan Peterson, I tried to read/consume as much Peterphenalia as possible. On the plane to the US, I listened to the podcast version of the Munk debate he did alongside Stephen Fry, Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson on the subject of political correctness. One of the things which stuck out was their different definitions of "identity politics". Peterson sees identity politics as essentially dehumanising, flattening individuals down to a single aspect of themselves: black, woman, Jew.

Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson made two counter arguments. First, that political action requires coherent group identities in order to make demands. Want to fight legislation which will disproportionately prevent black voters from casting a ballot? It helps to have organisations like the NAACP or the Congressional black caucus to help you. Expecting that the majority will be interested, let alone supportive, is la-la-land. Also, sometimes it's a zero-sum game: help for one group means taking something away from another. University admissions quotas for minorities are bad news for mediocre members of the majority, for example.

Second - and this is now oddly controversial in some areas - we need identity politics because we aren't always control of defining our identities. Michael Eric Dyson, I think, makes the point that if he runs away from a police officer who is shouting "stop!", then his own manifold individual splendour as a human being might count for a lot less than the fact that he is a black man. We can't pursue a "she who smelt it, dealt it" approach to identity. Racism won't go away if we all claim "not to see race". Twentysomething women have closed the pay gap (and girls are more likely to go to university) because it turns out they were not stupider or less able than their male peers. But they can't keep working like men in their 30s, when four out of five of them have kids, which they need to grow inside them, birth and feed from their bodies. Equality doesn't mean treating everyone the same, or we wouldn't have wheelchair ramps or hearing aid loops. You have to see, and acknowledge, difference to give everyone the same opportunities.

At the same time, I have sympathy with the idea that talking about difference - which is politically necessary - inevitably emphasises it, at the cost of making an appeal to our common humanity and shared values. The early part of Barack Obama's presidency was concerned with the latter idea - not a red America or a blue America, a black America or a white America, but a United States of America. You can say, look at the Oval Office now and see how that worked out. Or, you can say that overall, he moved the dial forward, and backlash is inevitable.

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I've been thinking about identity because this week I went to see The Doctor, at the Almeida. It's an updated version of Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, a 1912 play about a Jewish doctor who refuses a Catholic priest entry to the bedside of a girl dying of sepsis after a botched abortion. (Spoilers ahead, so if by any chance you plan to see it, stop reading now!) The doctor is accused of anti-Catholicism, is the subject of anti-semitism, and is drummed out of the profession.

In this new version, the doctor is a woman: Ruth Wolff, played by Juliet Stevenson. She's Jewish, culturally, but also an atheist, and the kind of atheist who finds religious faith irrational and outdated. We see her home life, too: her partner Charlie, fading from Alzheimer's disease, and her teenage protegee Sami, whose identity is beginning to blossom.

The supporting characters are often cast against their identity type, so about 45 minutes into the drama, we learn that the priest, played by a white actor, was black. Two prominent male characters are played by women. Several white characters are played by black actors. In one scene, a white actor tells Ruth that he thinks she speaks differently to him because he's black.

I enjoyed the inevitable, deliberate confusion for two reasons. First, if you read the original play, the descriptions of all the doctors are almost comically detailed:

Ebenwald. Vice-president, tall, slender spectacles; with exaggerated Austrian accent.

Professor Tugendvetter. About fifty years old, grey, "side-chops ", jovial, humorous manner. Of uncertain demeanor, tries to win applause.  Adler: small, dark, lively, about thirty years old.

Eventually, you realise: oh right, this is because there are approximately 19,324 doctors in this very talky play, and they are ALL WHITE MEN. No wonder the dramatist is reduced to giving them glasses and exotic facial hair so you can tell them apart. It's like some demented game of Guess Who.

Second, this is one of those plays that you need to replay in your mind as each piece of new information comes to light. Does Ruth really talk differently to people of a different race? Do you reappraise the relationship between Ruth and Sami when you learn Sami is transgender? Is Ruth's partner Charlie male or female, and does it matter? When has Ruth been talking to Charlie, and when has she been talking to herself? It's a play that makes the audience work hard to acknowledge and interrogate their own unconscious assumptions.

In the second half, there's a hideous TV version of Moral Maze, where the same actors from before play into their identities, rather than against them. Another set of questions. Do you roll your eyes at a black female actor invoking post-colonial theory, where a white man might have sounded authoritative because he is "objective"? I've long noticed that talking about sexism as a woman carries an in-built problem: you have a "vested interest". You might even get emotional. How much easier it would be to consider it as an intellectual exercise, and then judiciously and rationally come to a conclusion! (There's only one answer to that.)

The debate scene makes a good case that where modern progressive movements become jumpy and bad-faith (cough on Twitter cough), it's often because their proponents are used to being patronised and dismissed because of their identities. They don't get treated like individuals, but as blinkered emissaries of their group.
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I could yak on all day about the richness of the script, which is packed full of Easter eggs. I mean, come on! It's a play about a witch-hunt, and the first word is "which?". All the way through, other characters tell Ruth to do what she's going to do all the end ("literally die", says an angry Sami; "swallow some pills", says Jemima, the politician who uses identity as a weapon: "as a senior woman in medicine, I think it's important to support a senior woman in medicine", she says at one point. In the first scene, some of Ruth's first words are "it's not over until there's a body").

The production is also full of these little details, which seem natural on first viewing and only unfurl themselves on further reflection. My favourite one is the behaviour of one of the institute's doctors, Brian Cyprian (played by Pamela Nomvete, whose twitter bio describes her as an "African actress"). Cyprian is - there's no other word for it - hale. The kind of middle-aged man who would have a "snifter" at the "19th hole". When he welcomes Jemima the politician to the Institute, he is all over her in that indefinable non-sexual, proprietary way that some men of a certain age are with younger women. He claps her on the back. He clasps her hands. He touches her like he owns her body, like he owns everything.

For an idea of what I'm talking about, watch that clip of Boris Johnson trying to jovially usher Nicola Sturgeon into HER OWN RESIDENCE. (In fact, watch it with Janey Godley's commentary, because Sturgeon has said it accurately represents her thoughts).

Jemima doesn't react, but later, when Cyprian tries the same thing - a comforting/patronising pat on the back - with Ruth, she flinches. Ugh. Get your hands off me. It's a perfect metaphor for Ruth and Jemima's different attitudes to life: Jemima will shrug off the insult because she wants power (or, as she tells herself, wants to do good). Ruth is unable to disguise her instinctive reaction, even though it would be expedient to do so: Cyprian is supporting her in a board meeting. It's the heart of her character. She can't fake it, even to survive.

I also loved that detail because it's a choice men don't have to make: acquiescence or rudeness. It reminds me of the perennial row about whether Foreign Office female staff should wear hijabs when they go to Saudi Arabia. I resent that they have to make the choice, flush themselves out, decide whether or not to do something that some will see as respectful and others as kowtowing... when their male peers don't. I've always felt that the answer is for all foreign office staff, male and female, to wear a headscarf. Simples! There's nothing in the Quran to say that men can't cover their hair, after all.

(And yet, it will never happen. Women will act like men because it's an upgrade. Men have a long way to go to unpick their association of femininity with humiliation. Notably in this production, all the debatably male/female characters are in "gender neutral" clothes. Those gender neutral clothes are . . . trousers.)

I would love to coin a cute phrase to describe the phenomenon, in the vein of "manspreading". But of course we already have one. Manhandling. Hashtag notallmenhandling, but it's definitely a gendered behaviour. It's also one of those gendered behaviours that is really hard to fight, because it's dominance disguised as chivalry, or kindness, or warmth. What kind of stony bitch has a go at a man who is just being friendly?

But of course men who do this know, deep down, what they're doing. For proof, look at the mildly hilarious Contest of The Back Claps between Nick Clegg and David Cameron as they entered Downing Street together in 2010.

Right, that's enough for now. I have a feeling I will come back to this subject. Goodbye for now. Consider yourself given a respectful, gender-neutral firm handshake.

Helen

Was Simone De Beauvoir As Feminist As We Thought?

It was surprising to discover, when researching the reception of The Second Sex in France in 1949, to find it – and feminism in general – vociferously dismissed as passé. Gradually surprise gave way to suspicion, as a pattern emerged in reviews: again and again, Beauvoir was criticised for thinking “feminism was still relevant”, for writing female protagonists in her novels, and spending too many pages on women’s points of view. “What about men?” reviewers asked. What they liked best was the Beauvoir who told them what it was like to be with Sartre, the woman who fuelled imaginary fires with fictions of free love.

Ignore the tedious framing - you ain't shit, Simone, you hear me? - this is an interesting piece.

Quick Links:
- Leslie Jamison's moving essay about her pregnancy, and her former anorexia.
- Fascinating piece on how a niche pro-Falun Gong site has become a massive hub for Trump support on Facebook.

Have a good Bank Holiday weekend . . . If you liked this newsletter, please tell a friend. If you hate it, tell an enemy!