Why Kitchener’s finger gives me the arsehole

July 1, 2016 by Inside MAN 16 Comments

Image: BBC Radio Times

If there is one image from the First World War that’s more iconic than any other, it is the Big-Brother stare and jabbing index finger of Lord Kitchener.

A century after the propaganda campaign ended, it’s an image that is still all around us — the original now re-versioned and re-deployed on everything from coffee mugs and duvet covers, to jaunty student union flyers, tourist T-shirts and even for David Cameron’s Big Society.

It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, as to have morphed into kitsch; the lazy go-to stock image for anyone who wants to knock-up a quick call to action.

But that accusatory forefinger isn’t just an old bit of Keep-Calm-And-Carry-On retro irony. It stands for a unique and brutal form of discrimination. What’s more, no-one either seems to notice or even care if they do.

The shame of fear

The explicit purpose of the Kitchener recruitment poster was to shame every man of enlistment age who saw it into signing up. It was a demand by the state that men and boys risk death and trauma or face becoming a social pariah if they refused.

In short, it is an expression of ultimate, state-sanctioned, socially-reinforced gendered discrimination – total control of the state over the bodies of one half of the population.

I’d like to suggest that you put yourself in the position of a young man walking past those posters back in 1914.

As he walked down the high street, or waited for a bus, or went into a post office or a library, that finger was pointing at him.

Jab in the chest

But more than that, no matter how crowded those streets and buildings were with women, each of them remained entirely untouched by its accusation. Every man, however, would have felt that finger jabbing into his chest, those eyes boring into the back of his head.

And the young man would have felt the force of that shame from the women who stood beside him too.

Kitchener’s two-dimensional jab in the chest was made flesh by women’s unique power to shame men for cowardice, a power that was ruthlessly exploited by the state and often enthusiastically adopted by women themselves.

Take a moment to think about it. An image that makes no explicit gendered statement at all – the simple words “Your Country Needs You” makes no reference to men or women – yet it was nonetheless totally understood only to apply to men.

What else must we be blind to?

That silent image was a manifestation of society’s deep and iron-clad demands on men and the stigma that stalked them should they refuse to conform.

The shame of male cowardice must have been like the weight of the atmosphere, so close to your skin that you couldn’t feel where your body stopped and it began.

The fact that now — fully 100 years later – we glibly fail to notice that this is the core meaning of that poster says a lot about how we view male suffering and disadvantage today.

Take a look at the Radio Times’ interpretation of the Kitchener poster on its front page. Then notice the headline for Kate Adie’s two-page spread on women entering the work force as a result of WW1.

Which one of these is most sensitive to the gendered sacrifices of the First World War?

If we can’t, even today, see conscription and pervasive social stigma as a gendered injustice for men, what else must we be blind to?

By Dan Bell

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Also on insideMAN:

http://thepowerofrelationship.com Mark Davenport

My take-away:
“Take a look at the Radio Times’ interpretation of the Kitchener poster on its front page. Then notice the headline for Kate Adie’s two-page spread on women entering the work force as a result of WW1. Which one of these is most sensitive to the gendered sacrifices of the First World War?”
- Inside MAN
  
  Thanks Mark.
  
  For me, that front page is such stark evidence of both the double standards we have in considering men’s and women’s issues, and our total blindness to that double standard.
  
  It genuinely bemuses me as to why so few people see it.
  
  Dan
  - http://thepowerofrelationship.com Mark Davenport
    
    Dan, I think it’s great that we have become so sensitive to the inequalities that old role models for women thoughtlessly imposed on us. Unfortunately we have bought only half the bag, leaving out that men did not simply one day a few thousand years ago decide to subjugate women for their pleasure and convenience.
    It was an unconscious deal, an agreement that evolved as culture changed.
    We now see how women were oppressed, but not yet how men were also oppressed by these roles.
    May we move on now to work for true equality (not sameness) in conscious collaboration with women.
    - Inside MAN
      
      I agree with pretty much all of that Mark, but I’m not sure I totally buy the idea that gender relations were primarily a question of dominance and subjugation in the first place. I have a hunch that this way of seeing gender relations is a binary, hierarchical model, imposed on a much more fluid and complex situation by modes of 20th Century political and philosophical thought.
      
      It seems to me, that the proverbial pre-modern “thousands of years” that people refer to in these discussions, would have been much more about mutual dependence for mutual survival — with costs and benefits to both genders.
      
      But without a doubt, hear-hear to your: “May we move on now to work for true equality (not sameness) in conscious collaboration with women.”
      - http://thepowerofrelationship.com Mark Davenport
        
        I was being facetious with the “…one day a few thousand years ago…” remark, Dan. It didn’t happen that way, but in time it did indeed become formalized within Blue traditional structures.
        The binary models have been ruling now for a very long time so thinking in terms of hierarchies as natural has become a habit. I thank Green post’-modernism for questioning these old structures but while getting confused about the “equality” issue. Differences in biology will still tend to distribute men and women differently on many bell curves, giving conservatives more fodder for their more rigid role divisions. Fortunately they will not rule the discourse indefinitely!
        Thank you for your close reading of my post, Dan.
      - Inside MAN
        
        Thanks for your thoughtful and even-handed response to the article.
      - Nigel
        
        Indeed. Apart from anything else there have been wide variations over time and in places with regard to human relations. So whereas in Ancient Greece (and its much vaunted “democracies” ) Citizens were men and their women were usually closeted the majority of people in any City state were rural serfs(of whom we know much less because they were so uninteresting) and slaves. As far as we can tell in many urban areas the majority of the population were slaves. Needless to say their experiences were rather different than the few aristocrats and citizens . Just as there are considerable differences between cultures, social classes even within these on what actually happens. India is a fascinating case as even today there are matrilineal, matrilocal, patrilocal, polygamous(in wives and husbands) hypergamous (across castes) and so on and on. Interestingly the power of caste/class means that there are quite different gender relations in the same geographic area.
        My point being that the current “binary” appears to me very much out of an understanding of a particular time and place. And actually a specific class in a specific economic structure. In that it grew out of a combination of bourjouis leisure and the specialisation of labour. In effect the growth in specialisation and exponential rise in wealth ,in England for instance, allowed the spread of the female leisure enjoyed by a few aristocrats up till the 19th Century to spread to a much larger bourjeouse class. Who found themselves with no significant role (apart from supervising servants and very useful charitable work). Even at the time in Lancashire Mill towns the vast majority of men and women worked, there actually being no alternative if they were to eat and pay the rent. In a sense the Fawcett society, mainly concerned with directorships and access to pleasant professional careers , is symptomatic of this very specific view formed in a specific set of circumstances. One that also fought for legislation to exclude women from dangerous work or the rigors of debtors prison(the legislation repealed in the late sixties or seventies). And now assumes women shouldn’t be subject to the rigors of the criminal justice system.
        This is then projected backwards and outwards as if the rather simplistic analysis of “gender” has much to say about the rainbow of human experience.
      - http://thepowerofrelationship.com Mark Davenport
        
        Nice overview, Dan. No disagreements, though, as an American, some specifics like the Fawcett Society, i was ignorant of. We of course have both inherited many of the distinctions that you have noted as well as adapted some to our particular circumstances. None the less the broad common outlines remain and I am hopeful that our progress in gender “equity” will proceed along very similar paths.
        
        I put “equity” within “” as I’m not sure how you understand that term. be generous!
      - Inside MAN
        
        Thanks Mark. As an aside, it’s quite interesting to me that the Kitchener poster got its own US version, only with the pointing being done by Uncle Sam…
      - Inside MAN
        
        I think your point about our binary understanding of gender relations having sprung from a “a combination of bourgeois leisure and the specialization of labour” is particularly interesting, as some argue that feminism — which is the prevailing paradigm through which western society discusses gender — as at its root a reinterpretation of Marxism, with the categories of aristocracy and proletariat, replaced with men and women.
        
        One of the main critiques of Marx, is that society simply isn’t divided neatly along lines of binary economic power and disadvantage — with a concomitant critique that trying to fit the complex reality of society into that ideological framework inevitably leads to inaccuracy and injustice.
Nigel

Thanks you rather more eloquently summed up my point. Of course the Marxist conundrum of the last Century was that the societies where Marxists took control were not the advanced industrialised economies as the theory expected but largely agrarian economies. The solutions: forced collectivisation, “the great leap forward”, cultural revolution , ” year zero” were the most catastrophic expressions of the theory’s inadequacy. I do place feminism as a heresy of Marxism with the same inherent limitations as a means to understand the world and to guide action.
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Nick Langford

Ironically, our understanding of this poster may be a complete myth. It started life as a magazine cover, inspired in turn by a US advertisement for cigars. There is little evidence it was widely used as a recruitment poster, and another poster featuring Kitchener – the “30 word poster” – was used much more. The poster seems to have become popular after the war when the Imperial War Museum started selling it. There is doubt about its impact and the efficacy of recruitment posters generally; the fact that it has so often been parodied is taken as a sign that it didn’t have the required effect, and it was necessary to introduce conscription soon afterwards. It is true that women were used to shame men and boys into signing up, and they handed out white feathers to boys as young as 15. Even at the time, John Bruce Glasier, chairman of the Independent Labour Party, accused these women of “miserable individualist sexism”.

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