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Why Kitchener’s finger gives me the arsehole

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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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The recently released Force Majeure shows shaming men for cowardice is now seen as a feminist act

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For nearly half a century, we have been told that the question of how gender roles are policed and by whom, is essentially a one-way street – something men do to women, and often also to each other. And that’s pretty much the end of it.

But a new film not only exposes another age-old, yet rarely-spoken truth — that women also use shame to control men — it also seems to say that this particular form of gendered expectation is perfectly OK.

In fact, Force Majeure goes even further, because it manages the extraordinary intellectual feat of implying that to shame a man for cowardice, is actually to strike a blow for equality.

In the opening scenes, the genteel skiing holiday of a perfect couple and their children is thrown into disarray as an avalanche threatens to engulf their ski resort. The disaster is avoided, but in the few moments of mayhem, the father instinctively jumps up from their table, leaving behind his wife and children.

Toe-curling laughs

The film explores how that split-second moment of fear strips a man of his wife’s respect, threatens to destroy their family and ultimately leaves him staring into an abyss of doubt and self-loathing.

But what’s most-telling, is that although the film lifts the lid on this uniquely male form of shame, at no point does it invite the audience to condemn the behaviour of his wife and their female friend who are entirely responsible for imposing it on him.

Instead, the film portrays a series of set pieces – all played for toe-curling laughs — in which the husband is effectively put on trial by his wife and their friends, as they unpick the moment to expose his cowardice and knock down what are shown as his pathetic attempts to portray an alternative, less unforgivable interpretation of events.

Both in its treatment of the issue of male shame and in how it has been received, Force Majeure proves this most-ancient of taboos has lost none of its force.

Bloated male ego

But the film and its reviewers also manage a particularly modern hypocrisy — often the very same voices who are happy to shame men for being afraid, are now also those who would never tolerate any attempt to impose traditional gender roles on women.

In fact, humiliating the lead male character for his fear is cast as a quasi-feminist act – a timely expose of the bloated male ego that long-suffering women have had to tolerate while doing the truly heroic work of holding together hearth and home.

In one scene, as a couple who are friends of the two lead characters go back to their room following the group excoriation of the husband’s cowardice, the girlfriend of the couple asks: “I wonder how I would react if you did that to me?”

She then tells her boyfriend, that as he deserted his previous wife and children, why should she expect him to stand by her in a moment of danger?

Worst Man Cry Ever

For reviewers too, the film has been framed as a timely dissection of fragile male egotism and puffed-up immaturity.

Director Ruben Ostlund, told the Times, “It’s men who act egotistically when it comes to a crisis” and said he drew inspiration for one viciously humiliating scene from a YouTube video called “Worst Man Cry Ever”.

Salon, while acknowledging that the wife is far from perfect, maintains that “Tomas is the person who has displayed unforgivable cowardice and solipsism” and Slate describes the film as “a biting critique of modern masculinity”.

But Force Majeure isn’t the only recent piece of pop-cultural entertainment to embrace the idea that shaming men for cowardice is a powerful expression of female emancipation.

A satisfyingly grizzly end

In the latest and last of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit, one of the most repellent characters isn’t an orc or a goblin, he’s a man.

At the heart of the film’s opening sequence, is the comical greed and cowardice of a despotic chief and henchmen as they try to escape with coffers of the town’s gold.

The chief soon meets a satisfyingly grizzly end, but one of his henchmen, Alfrid, is washed up alive and goes on to become a source of derision throughout the film. The reason? He’s a man who is an unrelenting coward.

In one key scene, we’re suddenly shown a group of townswomen huddled in a corner, before another woman charges in and declares they are as brave as the men and should go and fight alongside them.

‘You’re not a man, you’re a weasel’

One woman however stays bent over and whimpering, refusing to go. The other woman pulls her round, only to reveal it’s the villain Alfrid dressed in women’s clothing. She spits in his face: “You’re a coward. You’re not a man, you’re a weasel.”

In one short moment, the film simultaneously celebrates a woman for emancipating herself from the traditional female role of being weak and in need of protection, while at the same time she shames a man who doesn’t conform to the traditional role of brave protector.

But the most astonishing example of this ugly sentiment, is Sky’s comedy series, Chickens, about how a village of women treat the only three men from their town who have not gone to fight during WW1.

The show is essentially a series of set pieces in which the three men – a conscientious objector, a man who is medically unfit to fight and man who is simply afraid – are shamed, laughed at and humiliated by scores of empowered and emancipated women, including those who are Suffragettes.

Not so revolutionary, after all?

In one scene, after a woman demands that Cecil – who incidentally is the one discharged as medically unfit – justifies why he hasn’t enlisted, he says: “I really believe in this war and I’m really keen to help.” She replies: “Rubbish, if you were really keen to help you would have killed yourself to raise morale.”

The writers describe Chickens as “a quasi-feminist sit-com” and according to one of the lead actresses: “What’s great is to see a village full of women who are just really getting on with it, just couldn’t give a toss that the men have gone, really, except for basic plumbing issues and the occasional need for someone to shag them.”

There’s a line of argument that states feminism doesn’t really overturn traditional gender roles at all — that in both pre and post-feminist worldviews, women are seen as deserving of protection and it’s men who must step up and prove their worth.

If these recent dramatic offerings are anything to go by, that analysis seems pretty close to the truth. The question is, why are men still prepared to tolerate it?

By Dan Bell

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‘Your country needs you’: why did so many volunteer in 1914?

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By Toby Thacker, Cardiff University.

On the first day of the war in 1914, British newspapers published appeals for young men to join the colours, and to fight against Germany. Following the advice of the new Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener, the government decided to raise a huge volunteer army, hoping in two or three years, when the other armies were exhausted, this would tip the scales in Britain’s favour.

Over the next few weeks, thousands of young men came forward. When the first grim news of casualties and of the retreat from Mons arrived in late August, more volunteered, and after the fall of Antwerp in early October, there was a renewed surge. On some days, more than 10,000 men enlisted.

By Christmas 1914, hundreds of thousands had come forward, and this continued well into 1915. Men from all social classes and all areas of Britain volunteered. Others who were overseas in August 1914 travelled thousands of miles to get back and enlist. Whole groups from individual companies, offices, and universities joined up together. There were far more volunteers than the government could arm or equip, and most had to spend months training in civilian clothes, without proper weapons.

Why did so many volunteer? There was a huge recruiting campaign, led by newspaper advertisements, and supported by posters, including Reginald Leete’s famous image of a mustachioed Kitchener with pointing finger. Meetings were held in every town and village where politicians, priests, and local worthies exhorted men to do their patriotic duty.

Who could say no?

There was a broad national consensus that Britain was fighting a righteous war, and that volunteering was, put simply, the right moral choice. We should not underestimate the climate produced by years of pre-war public discourse, which had anticipated a war against Germany in which young men would be needed to reinforce Britain’s small professional army. Since the Boer War there had been calls for conscription. These had been supported by invasion scares, and by novels such as Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands. Reprints of this book were prefaced by the author’s call for every British man to do national service, “with the rifle”, or at sea. Officer Training Corps had prepared middle and upper class schoolboys for leadership, and given them some rudimentary training.

So strong was this mood that some volunteered even before the actual declaration of war. Siegfried Sassoon was one who enlisted, together with his horse, on reading in The Times that volunteers would be needed in the event of war. Rupert Brooke, who became the most widely read war poet, similarly recognised before the actual outbreak of hostilities, that he would affected: “It will be Hell to be in it, and Hell to be out of it,” he wrote.

Undoubtedly the narrative of young men volunteering in a shared mood of patriotic enthusiasm has some strength. But others faced painful choices. For many men of military age the call to arms initiated a period of soul searching, often lasting for months. It was not a decision they made alone.

Some, like war chronicler Vera Brittain’s brother Edward, were pulled in different directions by friends and relatives. In his case, his sister urged him to volunteer, but his father refused to countenance the idea. Rupert Brooke did volunteer, after some weeks’ hesitation, but he faced bitter criticism from former Cambridge friends, many of them pacifists.

Peer pressure

How many young men, now unknown to history, were pushed one way by friends and workmates, and pulled in another by anxious parents? Those who did not volunteer faced insults from the press, and were publicly ridiculed for their lack of “manliness”. Many were presented with white feathers by women, something which often left a lasting sense of shame. In the family, amongst friends in the pub, and in the workplace, they faced derision, contempt, and intimidation.

For some it took more courage not to volunteer than to yield to the pressure. Strikingly the only areas where volunteering fell below the high national average rate were in the countryside, where young men were exposed to less social pressure, and in places like rural Wales, where there was a tradition of pacifism.

It was indeed this growing social pressure which helped maintain the flow of volunteers well into 1915. The painter Stanley Spencer and the poet Edward Thomas, who both volunteered in July 1915 after months of indecision, are good examples. When, reluctantly, the government introduced conscription in March 1916, it found no great reservoir of manpower to tap. A high percentage of those conscripted appealed for exemption, and had to be coerced into service.

The narrative of voluntarism has given the British perception of World War I its particular poignancy. The soldiers who went over the top at the Somme were not conscripts, or pressed men. But we need, before succumbing to this mythology, to remember what the poet Charles Sorley pointed out after Rupert Brooke’s death: that it would have been more difficult for him not to have volunteered.

Toby Thacker is affiliated with the Labour Party

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo courtesy: State Library of South Australia

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Why does Sky’s comedy series ‘Chickens’ think it’s funny to humiliate men who didn’t fight in WW1?

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Picture this opening scene from a series currently being shown on Sky.

A furious woman smashes a milk bottle on the doorstep of a small cottage, before storming off in disgust. The camera pauses for a moment to show the front wall of the house. It’s covered with scrawled and abusive graffiti: “Evil parasites.” “House of shame.” “Just die.” “Sad little wankers.” “Cowards.” “We will never forgive you.” “Stinking Judas rats.” “You are cancer.”

This must be the hard-hitting opening shot for a gritty drama, right? Perhaps it’s exploring the treatment of men who crossed the picket lines during the miners’ strike? Or maybe it’s about a community’s reaction to finding out a convicted paedophile has been resettled in their town?

But you’d be wrong. This is a scene from a Sky 1 comedy series about how a village of women treat the only three men from their town who have not gone to fight during WW1. The series is called “Chickens”. I am not making this up. You can watch it online right now.

Image: Sky

The show is essentially a series of set pieces in which the three men — a conscientious objector, a man who is medically unfit to fight and man who is simply afraid – are shamed, laughed at and humiliated by scores of women.

At first I assumed I must have been missing something. Surely, somewhere, there would self-reflection or criticism of the humiliation being milked for laughs? But there wasn’t. The men are the butt of the joke and their weakness and cowardice is the punchline.

In one scene, after a woman demands that Cecil — who incidentally is the one discharged as medically unfit — justifies why he hasn’t enlisted, he says: “I really believe in this war and I’m really keen to help.” She replies: “Rubbish, if you were really keen to help you would have killed yourself to raise morale.”

‘Most-hated man in the village’

In another, the three men encounter a group of women standing around the village green notice board, posted with three sheets of paper with their names at the top.

One of the men asks enthusiastically: “What’s going on here then?” One of the women replies: “We’re voting to decide who should be the Guy we burn on bonfire night.” “Oh, look how well I’m doing!” says one of the men. Another of the three men cuts in: “Don’t get too excited Burt, they’re essentially voting for the most-hated man in the village.”

Just in case you might be thinking the contempt of the female characters is really about reflecting badly on the women of the time, this is what one of the lead actresses has to say in a behind-the-scenes interview for the series, also available online:

“What’s great is to see a village full of women who are just really getting on with it, just couldn’t give a toss that the men have gone, really, except for basic plumbing issues and the occasional need for someone to shag them,” she trills happily.

The men receive daily hate-mail from the village’s women (Image: Sky)

And according to the writers of the series — the same men who are responsible for The Inbetweeners — the series is actually intended to celebrate women’s roles during WW1.

In an interview with the Guardian, one of the writers said: “Our hope, and the thought behind it, is for it to be a quasi-feminist sit-com. When we originally came up with the idea, there was a worry that it could be a bit misogynistic – this idea of us as the only men left and isn’t it horrible living in England now it’s full of women. But you see, actually, that the women cope very well. It’s the men who don’t.”

“They are three pathetic men in a village full of people who hate them,” agrees another one of the writers. “Hopefully, you’ll end up empathising with them, because their social prospects are impossible, really. People throw things at them in the street.”

We have truly gone through the Looking Glass here into some kind of Orwellian understanding of justice and compassion.

A hidden history

Perhaps you think I’m being po-faced and humourless about a series that’s just meant as a bit of fun. But the ugly and rarely acknowledged truth is that women really did shame men and boys into going to their deaths.

According to historian Nicoletta Gullace, in addition to the relatively well-known white feather movement, one female-led campaign enrolled 20,000 women “to persuade their men to enlist and to scorn those who refused”. The women were said to have encouraged hundreds of thousands of men to sign up. According to Gullace, this was “merely one of a multitude” of such campaigns.

You can also hear what those men went through in their own words. Their stories, recorded before the last of the First World War veterans died, are held on tapes in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London.

One man recalls walking across a bridge in London when four girls surrounded him and gave him white feathers – the symbols of cowardice given by women to men who were out of uniform.

‘The look in his eye has haunted me ever since’

A lifetime after the event, you can still hear the pain in his voice as he says: “I explained to them that I had been in the Army and been discharged and I was only sixteen. Several people had collected around the girls and there was giggling and I felt most uncomfortable… I felt very humiliated. I finished the walk over the bridge and there on the other side was the Thirty-seventh London Territorial Association of the Royal Field Artillery. I walked straight in and re-joined the Army.”

Another man quietly describes the morning his brother, a miner, received a feather in the post. “He opened the letter at the breakfast table and a white feather dropped out, there was nothing else in it than that. Just a white feather. He got up off that table, white faced, and he went out of that house. That was the last time I ever saw him alive.”

Another recalls how his under-age cousin was “blew to pieces” after women’s taunts led him to enlist, and how insults drove an over-aged friend to insanity and eventually death. “The look in his eye has haunted me ever since… The cruelty of that white feather business needs exposing.”

This is all but deleted from our collective memory of WW1. Now this comedy series, one of the few occasions when the vicious practice of shaming men for cowardice is remembered at all, chooses to humiliate and mock those men once again. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that very funny.

By Dan Bell

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‘Do I look like I’m ready for war?’: 17-year-old boy on conscription and WW1

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http://youtu.be/PJ4J4jKqNCo

No-one bothers to ask what conscription-age boys think about the gendered slaughter of WW1.

So we did.

Here are the thoughts of Josh O’Brien, a 17-year-old boy who during the First World War, would have faced the prospect of conscription and being sent to the trenches.

What do you think? Why doesn’t our culture and media discuss the slaughter of WW1 in terms of being a gender issue for men?

To watch more of Josh’s videos, check out his YouTube channel here.

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