wide eyed wonderings of the undecided

THE TRUTH ABOUT BLACKS!

The other race explained by a black who knows!

“My mates tell me the reason I don’t have a black friend is because my bedroom is a bit on the messy side. Do blacks really make an issue out of that kind of thing?”

To be honest, I don’t know any black who’d be happy to be invited back to a filthy flat. Admittedly some blacks can be obsessive about cleanliness but if you really want to get lucky you’ll just have to live with that.

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The above passage, adjusted from last Friday’s Nuts Magazine shows how quickly ‘harmless fun’ disintegrates into something more sinister when placed in a different context. From the original copy the references made to ‘women’ were changed to ‘blacks’ and ‘men’ to ‘whites’. Whilst the analogy may not be perfect the prejudices it displays remain. Nuts may be a flaccid target for critics but with almost 6000 copies a week sold in the UK it demands attention.

‘Lad’s Mags’ often attract criticism for their objectification of people. Whether objectification need be dehumanising is an important debate. However, in this example I simply question whether the attitudes on display would be deemed unacceptable in a different context.

Like racism, you will never rid society of sexism. Thankfully in the last century much progress has been made on both fronts. The common defence of such publications and the attitudes portrayed is that they are simply what the market demands. Yet, in today’s age it would be unthinkable for companies to sell their goods through a racist card. Why should it be different when dealing with an equally ignorant prejudice?

Racism entails assigning behavioural and cultural traits to the different biological ethnicities. On the basis of these imaginary characteristics a racist concludes that one ethnic group is superior to another. The above article carried a similar process of behavioural assumptions about men and women.

The shocking statistics released last month by the British Crime Survey estimated 200,000 incidents of rape and sexual abuse, of which the police recorded only 12,000 and disgracefully only 5% ended in conviction. This means that of the 200,000 cases of rape committed only 600 men end up in prison.

Too often the pervasive notions of gender prescribed the media are divorced from the visible crimes they reveal themselves in. In no way does reading Nuts amount to raping women but the complacent attitude that brushes aside offensive writing as ‘harmless fun’ does seem to exhibit itself in these far uglier forms.

Last year Anna was savagely beaten up in Notting Hill late one evening. She called the police the morning after, only to be questioned about whether she’d been drinking and what she’d done to provoke this assault. The officer rounded off the call with the news that they were unlikely to catch the man who did this to her so there was little point in proceeding. Yet, in the same area, there is no shortage of yellow Metropolitan police incident boards seeking information when men are the victims of unprovoked violence. Rather than being an isolated incident the statistics suggest cases like this are indicative of the entire system.

Returning to race, if there were numerous magazines reducing and homogenising ethnic groups to imbeciles, accompanied by evidence of intrinsic racism in the police force, there would, quite rightly be public outrage. The two things would be discussed together and wider questions about our attitudes towards race would be raised.

The dominant ideas of both women and men that pervade are ignorant and offensive. The contest to the millennia of misogyny has only just begun. If progress is to be made we must challenge ourselves to make a stand and demand debate about these issues.