I graduated with a BA in Sociology and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College (University of London) in 2009. I was pretty pleased with my 2:1, and was under the misguided impression that the world of work would only be a few application forms away. I managed, after about 4 months of unemployment (in which I did voluntary work), to get a job in a clothes shop. We were paid below minimum wage, and were often sent home early if the day was slow. Although I was contractually working full time, the pittance I was making meant I had to move in to my boyfriends room to divide a rent cost. To supplement our tiny wages, me and the other girls would often bring in clothes of our own to sell on the permanent ‘sale rail’ that required cash only, which we pocketed. This is how I afforded anything beyond the very basic. Sharing a tiny room with a boy I was not ready to live with inevitably took its toll, and we broke up.

I left the shop for a mixture of reasons. I hated the crushing boredom of retail, the rude customers and lousy pay, but more pressingly, my boss was a sexist piece of shit. He regularly harassed the largely female staff, and sexually assaulted a friend of mine. I couldn’t take it any more, and I quit.

Back to the ‘Job’ centre it was. I then began what must be to many a familiar cycle. Furious job applications, phone calls, emails, the rare and glistening interview, followed  in turn by a debilitating dawning of my own worthlessness.. No amount of rationalization about the economy or the similar status of your friends eases the underlying and constant knowledge that your life is shameful. Something I call to myself ‘The Dole House’. The Dole House is not just the institution of the Job Centre, nor is it merely the physical building you visit every other week. It is the carpet and walls of your own private existence. It’s the limitations and designs made upon your life. It is something intangible and  terrible, that bleeds into all things. To be a resident is to find yourself following a cycle of emotion and action that is particular to those who are unemployed.

A quote I read recently from Walter Greenwoods ‘Love on the Dole’ I felt typified my own emotions perfectly. As the protagonist comes back from the dole office for the first time “He trudged homewards staring, a strangulating sensation in his throat, a feeling in his heart as though he had committed some awful crime in which he was sure to be found out”. To be unemployed in this country is to be of a criminal class, imprisoned by a gnawing lack of money, opportunities, and the descending shabbiness upon your life.

When the spurts of active engagement came, I applied for all I could. Bar work – no experience. Agency work – not enough experience. Retail – No jobs. A ‘real’ job? even entry level positions required at least three years experience. I couldn’t even get a voluntary position at this point, my degree not leaning itself well to anything other than further academia. Something I would still love to pursue, but just cannot afford. Hours spent on applications, the painstaking revision of my C.V. lead to only the occasional one line replies. Then back to sign on.

I’m not sure many people are truly aware what happens when you go to sign on. The Job Centre Plus I attend is in Catford, London. A large plastic cat adorns a shabby shopping centre. Boarded up pubs sit next to brightly lit ‘money shops’, pawnbrokers and overflowing bookies. The job centre itself is a nondescript brick building sunken next to one of the ubiquitous chicken shops, and new Tesco Express. Here’s a photo in fact. Inside you are met immediately by security staff, who inspect your paperwork as if crossing a border. To the left of the door are a row of telephones and chairs, with a twitching line of people waiting for their turn to use the landlines. The phones can only be used to call the job centre, or the benefits head office. You can not, as logic might lead you to believe, call out to respond to a job advert, or follow up on an interview. I asked someone about this once, apparently ‘too many people were using the phones to call up their baby mama’ and the service was cut.

Once your existence has been verified and you have passed through the leers and comments of the security staff, you enter the main room. A collection of sofas sit in the centre, with those all waiting to be seen. You sit, avoiding eye contact with others. Around you are the ‘offices’ of the job centre staff, desks and chairs next to each without a partition between them. All of the embarrassment of your claim is laid out for the rest of the room to see. I have witnessed a Spanish man unable to speak to his advisor, who walked up and down the job centre asking us all one by one to help him in broken English.  A young woman bullied by a security staff member telling her to move a foot to the left when there were no seats available. “I’m a trained nurse!” she burst out, tears forming. “I’m not even supposed to be here!” I tried to calm her down, the staff around us bustled by as ever, a man cracked jokes with the security officer. Another woman with broken teeth sobbed as we all pretended not to hear “But I always get my claim from Catford, I can’t afford the bus ride to Bethnal Green”. I often bring a book, and find myself unable to read. When your turn comes a disembodied voice will call your name, and you must bring forward the list of jobs you have applied for that fortnight. A cursory glance is made across the newly available jobs for the day. I have been asked before if I would like to apply for a job as a language teacher. “English?” I asked, “No, Kurdish.”

Everyone has a list of three job titles on their computer profile that they are supposedly looking for, and which your advisor will use when scanning the system for jobs. I was informed recently that this list in 20 years old. It has barely been updated in this time. For this reason, it is possible to search for the positions ‘char woman’, but not ‘charity fundraiser.’ Apologetically my advisor has told me before “I’m sorry, but to be honest the kind of jobs you are looking for the job centre can’t help you get anyway.” As a graduate, I do not qualify for any sort of training, or apprenticeship. I was recently granted half the funding for a CELTA certified TEFL course by the British Council. I cannot do it, because the full time training will mean an end to my benefits. It is not a Job Centre verified course, and so they cannot allow it. There is no way out.

The longer the period of time you spend signing on, the more apparent it becomes that the Job Centre has neither the staff, resources nor real inclination to get people back into work. It is a place to keep people.

Finally I was accepted as a volunteer for a small charity. Restricted to working there one day a week by the job centre (you can’t do anything that will affect your time spent job seeking) I started to feel like a productive human being again. Working in an office, going out and actively helping vulnerable people, writing letters and organising events… But it didn’t pay the rent. I kept on searching, and kept on failing.

Then a friend of mine contacted me. A woman at her work was off sick for the next two week, could I cover? An office position at a charity, I leapt at the chance. For two weeks I got to play at being a real person again, the tube in the morning, office chatter with new people, tasks that I actually got paid to do. I declared it to the job centre. They fined me all the money I had made out of my JSA, and took away my housing benefits for the time period, just took it out of my account without my prior knowledge. I couldn’t make rent that month, and my parents had to bail me out. God knows what I would do without their support, and It’s hardly like they’re rolling in it either. They’re just so nice about is as well, which make my shame ten folds worse.

I would have been better off if hadn’t taken the work at all. I now work occasionally for them, doing cover shifts. Any money I make is taken out of my JSA, and at any random time. It could be that week, it could be a month along the line. I don’t know when, and I have to try and plan my life in accordance to that. I will also be fined housing benefit, even though the small amount I earn far from covers my rent. There is no monetary benefit for me to work part time or casually, it leaves me out of pocket. Yet I want to get out the Dole House so much that I take it. I have now just recently started working three days a week as an intern at a charity. I get paid travel, and that’s it. I am the only person in the charity doing what I am doing, there is no one to guide me. It is stressful, time consuming, tiring and I was lucky to get it. It’s a job. A job I don’t get paid for.

I cannot declare to the Jobcentre that I am working as an intern because they will take away my benefits. I cannot further my life or career currently without interning. I have to lie to my advisor when I see him, tell him fake jobs I am applying for. I am constantly afraid that I will be found out.

The job centre has, as I’m sure you’re aware, recently implemented a work experience scheme that involves shifts done at local Poundlands, Sainsburys and Tescos, where a claimant must work for below minimum wage. How, in anybodys mind, does a program like that help young people, when at the same time, I am unable to gain experience in a company or charity without having my benefits slashed or my dole money completely taken away? The ONLY way in which a young person can gain experience is for their parents to pay for their living costs for 3 to 6 months while they intern. My parents cannot do that. What am I expected to do?

I imagine you are already aware of the current phenomenon known as Slutwalk, but if not, allow me to give you a little summary.

In January this year, a Toronto police officer advised a group of students that to evade rape, they should “avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” The students in question were so enraged, that they staged a protest, taking to the city’s streets in ‘slutty’ outfits. What then followed was a wave of ‘Slutwalks’ across North America, Australia, and most recently, the UK.  Performed not only in solidarity with the original cause, but also in protest against the usage of the term ‘slut’, and the pervading mentality that shames and blames rape victims.

This story caught my attention from the outset for a variety of reasons: the excitement of seeing women self-organise out of anger and frustration, the seemingly organic manner in which Slutwalk caught the imagination of women across different nationalities, and, of course, the implicit possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, feminism hadn’t become a totally irrelevant political stance – that women could still pool their creative energies and react with palpable ferocity against oppression. Perhaps for me, my own yearning for second wave sisterhood danced before my eyes. But as I read more blog posts and articles, saw more photos, watched more videos, I started to wonder, what is Slutwalk actually challenging?

Chicago Sluts

This thought crystallised in my mind while reading an article by The Daily Mail, which initially supported Slut Walk. To the right of the articles headline, which read “Yes means yes and no means no! Scantily-clad protestors join in ‘Slut Walk’ to end rape victim blaming”, are the Daily Mail’s other ‘Femail’ articles, and the one that caught my eye detailed how a particular exotic fruit had the same shape and level of ripeness as Pippa Middleton’s bum (including, of course, a photo of said bum, as Pippa leant over). The juxtaposition of the two, seemingly incompatible, articles astonished me at first, before I realised how, ultimately, they reflected each other. The reason Slutwalk has received so much wide spread coverage is that it enables the media to apparently support women’s struggle against rape in a manner that belies any other wider cultural context or sense of responsibility. Much like the commonsensical notion that rapists are abominations to society, aberrations as opposed to fathers, brothers, workers and leaders, Slutwalk manages to keep its rebellion well within the confines of capitalist ideology.

To my mind, Slutwalk seems to adhere to a major philosophical point, one that also informed Third Wave Feminism, namely that feminism is primarily about choice: the choice to wear heels and lipstick, the choice to be the primary bread winner, the choice to stay home and raise children. Under this approach, all female choices become by their nature feminist, with the only necessary premise being that they are chosen by a woman. And so, Slutwalk cries out, ‘We CHOOSE to dress as sluts! The choice is ours and we are empowered by it!’

UK Sluts

Of course, the major flaw of this perspective is that you are choosing between options that have been preordained for you, choices between limited and limiting social identities. The manner in which ‘sluttiness’ is performed within these walks is a sad echo of how we are taught to exhibit our sexuality. Confined between virgin or whore, we seize upon ‘whore’ because it is a marginally broader role to occupy than Madonna. But that doesn’t prevent it from being an expression of our own constraints. Of course we should be able to dress how we want without the fear of sexual abuse, but why should we settle for the binary position of slut when it is fundamentally just another female archetype; moreover, one that is used within a patriarchal society? I understand that reclaiming words can be an empowering experience within marginalised communities. However, Slutwalk goes beyond the reclaiming of a word, becoming, as it does, the embracement of an age-old masculine projection of what it is to be a sexual woman.

Titillating, playful, a bit ‘girl power’-esque, Slutwalk is a true product of feminism’s desire to go mainstream.

Not that there is essentially anything wrong with trying to extract feminism from its own ghettoization. Feminism should – no, must – be aware of its own subcultural nature, its tendency towards ‘more feminist than thou’ attitudes, and its history of a white, middle class focus. The problems come when, in reaction to our failings, we climb into bed with the powers that directly contribute to our own oppression.

The media can be used and manipulated successfully to express ideas and actions that run contrary to its own interests. But it’s a dangerous game. By simplifying its message to one of ‘slutty and proud’, to gain media attention, Slut Walk has ultimately done itself a disservice. The original, impressive act of women reacting against a powerful sexist attitude has become lost. At the best, articles supported the idea that women should not be blamed for their own rape, regardless of their attire. At the worst, it became an excuse to show angry girls in hot pants using a provocative word: the act of ogling female flesh done under the guise of documentation, and in some cases, reason enough to wheel out ‘political correctness gone mad!’ or ‘Those pesky feminists!’.  Press reaction has been huge, criticism and support coming from a variety of sources. But the unifying message behind all responses being of course rape is bad ladies. Irregardless of whether the press piece sees Slutwalk as demonstrative of the demise of womanhood, or a reassertion of feminist politics, it has been a spring board for media outlets to present themselves to women as representing their interests. Stimultaneously, the isolated nature of Slutwalks political scope, has allowed them to continue to perpetuate images and attitudes that contribute to a culture that fosters horrifying levels of sexual abuse against women. It doesn’t offer any sort of critique of a society that teaches men to be aggressors, penetrators, conquerors, nor does it combat the images of dead-eyed, sticky-mouthed women that are supposed to represent the female experiences of desire. We are left with empty readings of rape, and ultimately irrelevant ponderings surrounding the semantics of ‘slut’.

Sao Paulo Sluts.

Yet the Slutwalk train speeds on, with new protests springing up all the time, the latest across South America and India. For all its faults, Slutwalk has caught the imagination of women on a global scale, and it has shown that we will fight for our voices to be heard.  These calls for freedom from violence are real, and they are here. Whether Slutwalk indicates the shaky firsts steps of an emerging movement built from these voices, or a one-off parade of sensationalism, is yet to be seen.

`

Let’s just try zipping it up here…

OH POW!

All television sets in range have now mysteriously been turned off. What a super power!

Especially pertinent after all the bollocks TV I witnessed over the Christmas period. (Mad Men, Doctor Who and Misfits are all excluded from said judgement.) As seen on Flickr

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 8,200 times in 2010. That’s about 20 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 36 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 22mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was August 2nd with 3,008 views. The most popular post that day was What Happens If We Leave?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were wordpress.com, facebook.com, 1x.com, twitter.com, and WordPress Dashboard.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for what happens if we leave afghanistan, anna clover, time what happens if we leave, what happens if we leave, and disfigured afghan girl.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

What Happens If We Leave? August 2010
170 comments and 34 Likes on WordPress.com

Graffiti Project May 2010

Graffiti-me May 2010
4 comments and 3 Likes on WordPress.com

Whovian Hall July 2010
1 comment

In defence of the hipster – cos being a dickheads hard. November 2010
3 comments

Why is the hipster culture so troubling to people? What is it exactly that marks it out as being so different from any other fleeting youth movement of an era? Essentially, hipsters are young, white, privileged, and disenchanted youth. They occupy urban spaces, ride bicycles and are meshed in a constant hunting pattern for the obscure and the authentic. To be a hipster is to take the Foucaldian idea of self regulation to a whole new level. The hipster must be intune not only to their bodies, but to the never ceasing wash of information that characterises our age. It is this awareness that crystalises to form a knowing look based on an odd form of bricolage. Old and new merge and transmography to create a walking set of symbols that communicate an understanding about semiotics of past style. What makes hipsters approach to bricolage different to say, punks however, is that the objects and styles chosen are done so in a manner that essentially only communicates an intellectual elitism about knowing their original symbology. For the punks,  the wearing of the safety pin was an intended homage made to the everyday nature of its intended use, and its association with the British working class.  Something seemingly mundane and innocuous we taken up, and re-established with a new meaning through its relationship with other objects. When a hipster places an original 1940s fedora hat on top of their newly cut hitler-youth hairstyle, what is being communicated is not political. It is about knowing the right vintage clothes shop, the right kind of pieces to wear at that particular moment in time, and the right way in which to mark themselves out to other hipsters as being of a selective group.

All youth movements have had an elitist element to them, a desire for the underground and the not yet discovered. Something which can be seized upon as ‘theirs’, that is rejected by the mainstream mother culture. Hipster culture is also carried by this desire, but has found itself faced with the free exchange of information that typifies modern western culture. The internet has meant that everyone and anyone has easy access to all forms of creative expression, the most obscure bands can be found in a matter of minutes on google, self published zines can be read online by anybody. To know about a particular band from the depths of musical history, or from the outer reaches of the globe, is just not t hard anymore. Bob Dylan built a career from discovering a rare collection of Woody Guthrie records, barely heard of by most people of his generation. It is inconceivable that such a thing could happen now. That sense of a few people all tuning into something at the same time, the essential blood to counter culture, is no longer possible.

Not only do we have the free and mighty internet, we have a consumer culture that has finally caught on to the fact that kids will buy cool. Scenes barely have enough time to emerge,  before ‘cool scouts’ are taking photos of what they’re wearing, and selling them to fashion conglomerates. The organic and natural progression of a youth culture has been stunted by a constant media fascination with what kids are wearing and listening to, and how exactly it can be re-packaged and sold back to us.

A hipster girl in Hackney gets 'cool scouted'

In the face of this, hipsters have created a scrabbling culture, that moves more quickly, and rejects more swiftly past trends than any other youth movement that has come before it. It centres around the need to know ‘obscure’ music, that ‘you probably wont have heard of’ because it recognises that this is something that has been taken away from us, something that was at the cornerstone of all other counter cultures, but is now unreachable. In the past, young people would rally together with those few others that had heard they’re much loved but sidelined bands. Jonny Ramone couldn’t help but be friends with DeeDee because he was one of the few other people to like The Stooges. There is an awareness that this how it used to be, and hipsters try to recapture this sense of belonging through music, drawn by the need to find things that haven’t yet been seized upon, sanitized, de-politicised, and made appopriate for mass consumption. Hipsters are left trying to keep one step ahead of a constant barrage of products that have been distilled from counter culture and then re-sold. The mother culture can no longer be resisted in the same way. It has come to realise the lucrative potential for absorbing dissonance and re-selling it. Reification baby. Hipsters are criticised for being consumerist, for being smug and apathetic. But this seems to me only a natural reaction to the suffocating situation young people have found themselves in. We have no real movement, because as soon as anything springs up, it will be plastered across magazines and news articles, picked up by fashion houses, and any political resistance it could potentially have is neutralised. Young people know that any political ideology would quickly be gobbled up and regurgitated out by mainstream culture as merely a trend, and so hipsters have embraced the mentality of style over substance. We simply do not have any space in which to express a political movement, we are too scrutinised, too self aware. When young people have as of late reacted in a political manner, they are treated as though they are bad parodies of a bygone era, as if they are only poor imitations of the ‘real’ young people of the 60′s and 70′s. Is it any wonder that hipsters fetishize objects of the past? The hipster movement is, as all youth cultures are, a direct reflection back upon the nature of our culture as a whole. The 60′s beats were a product of a changing understanding of the world,  a desire for change and belief in the new. The 70′s punks reflected back across middle england the dissastisfaction of a country being squeezed by Neo-Liberalism. The 90′s grunge scene saw young people reclaiming music from the bloated corporate music industry in a renaissance of the punk spirit. And hipsters.. Hipsters show us the ultimate result of a world saturated with information. Of a world that hinges around globalised knowledge, and high speed consumption. Hipsters give insight into the core experiences that inform our modern age, of consumerist culture and deadening of resistant politics. Ultimately, it seems to be that most people find it far easier to mock and belittle the actions of young people trying to forge a collective sense identity, than it is to look with a critical eye upon the culture they are reacting too. The Hipster movement does not exist in a vacuum, and if it is to be problematised, so too should be the consumerist nature of our capitalist society.

Awesome.

If you are not familiar with it however, Okcupid is one of the most popular and free dating websites currently available. You take tests, build a profile, and peruse others people pages. The site links you up with people who have answered lifestyle questions in the same way as you, and who have mentioned similar interests. You are granted awards based on your personality in relation to other people, for example, a politics award for being more political than the average user, or a literary award for being more literary. There are various personality based tests that tempt the procrastinator in us all, and flatter the ego. There are lots, and lots, of myspacey photos taken in bedrooms. And there are lots, and lots, of users.

Until a recent encounter, I myself have been floating around on that site for a while now, occasionally chatting to someone, or taking a test when bored. But never really giving it any substantial amount of time or energy. A very good friend of mine however, has been a pathological Okcupid user. In the last few months, he has been in a relationship with more than 3 women, all met online. They start with an unusual intensity. The initial emails quickly become instant messaging, then phone conversations at all hours of the day, and then long Skype calls. The women are generally not close enough geographically to visit without a deal of planning, and so the relationship is mostly played out over the internet. He gets to know their personality through his computer modem, and no face is connected to the voice held close to his ear. Each time he gushes incessantly about how lovely they are, how clever, how pretty, how perfect. Each time, the presence of reality has shredded the seeming perfection that was created online. Yet he has returned again and again to the internet, and to Okcupid, as a means in which to meet people. It seemed baffling to me.

Having recently had my own flutter on the Okcupid gambling machine however, its pull has become somewhat more understandable to me. The website perpetuates a particular form of delusion we all engage in. Namely, that the qualities we list as being desirable in our potential mates are the things we are actually attracted to. I think to an extent, we all have certain things we tell each ourselves we desire. That we are looking for someone with a certain level of education for example, or for someone who has read this book and likes that movie. On a website such as Okcupid, it is possible to pop such qualities into a search engine, and find a plethora of potential mates just waiting to be messaged. It is these verbalisations of desire that Okcupid works with, for of course, it cannot process the raw qualia of human attraction. For this reason I think Okcupid and its contemporaries are fundamentally flawed. As a species, it seems that human beings are actually not very good at knowing what it is they want. The users of Okcupid may fill out its many questionnaires and tests with a particular notion of themselves and the person they are looking for. But the realities of that user can never really be translated, their desires never truly transferred. The intangible and unplaceable qualities that draw us to people are not the ones we are necessarily aware of. The smell of someone for example, is a hugely important element when it comes to attraction, and one that largely works on a subconscious level. So while we may believe we were initially drawn to our partner because they had a good haircut and liked Doctor Who (using myself as a model here) other more covert factors, such as smell, are acutely important. There is also that ‘j’ne se quois’, which can lead you to fancying someone who is not conventionally attractive at all, and could in fact be down right ugly. Online, it is easy to dismiss those who do not fit your usual aesthetic type, because there is no way of gaging the potential for chemistry in a virtual environment.

The other main problem I have found with Okcupid relates largely to my friends experiences, and has something of a Lacanian feel. It pertains to Desire vs Reality. Lacan theorised that in the process of desire, melancholy occurred not when desire is frustrated (such as the frustration of one’s ‘l’objet petit a’ existing behind a computer screen) but when desire is forced to interact with reality, and we are faced with the disappointment of the real. The object continues, but the cause of our desire has withdrawn. Over and over again, my friend was caught up in the creation of an ideal lover. The somewhat painful sweetness of their inaccessibility only heightened the experience, as the object of his adoration was always just quite out of reach. Everything circled around the pulsating interplay of desire and reality, as both parties constructed particular versions of their internet loves. Then when the time came to meet, and the interplay was removed from its creating realm of the internet,  reality destroyed the desire and thus the relationship(s). But the intoxicating intensity of an online love always blotted out the consequential melancholy, and so the cycle continued. The headiness of a frustrated love can be hard to beat.

Lacan poses for his Okcupid profile picture

So I have been left with more than mixed feelings when it comes to the world of internet dating. I understand that it allows people to communicate with others in a way which can be less intimidating, and seemingly more straightforward. You want an earnest brunette who listens to Tunng and works in media? Just type those key words in and find a choice of dream girl/boys with varying match levels and geographical locations. No stumbling over to someone who looks vaguely interested/interesting in a noisy bar, no straining your alcohol addled mind for an opening line, and no awkward experiences of rejection. If someone doesn’t like you, they’ll just not message back, and there’s no face lost because it was only an email to begin with. It’s when we move beyond initial contact that problems seem to crop up. There is the fact that, as I mentioned,  attraction is a slippery character to pin down and can draw you to someone who on paper would seem entirely unsuitable. Vice versa, a person can possess all the physical and mental attributes you think you like, and yet have elicit no desire whatsoever. Yet in the online universe, there is no way in which to know this. Attraction is not an easy thing to identify without the living breathing, creature of your desire in front of you, because essentially, we are animals. We need more than text on a screen and disembodied voices on a phone to successfully work out if we like someone. We need smell, we need body language, we need the presence of facial expressions. It is what we are biologically tuned into, and without it, reality is a ticking time bomb.

It is reassuring to know we are still discovering life on our planet that is removed enough from human beings to be able to happily continue its peculiar deep sea business. For now, at least.