When I was a teenager, my mother’s glossy magazines taught me an important lesson; no matter what you’ve achieved in life, no matter how much money you’ve made or how much good you’ve done, it all means nothing if you haven’t found a husband and had children.  And you’ve only got til your early forties to manage the latter, so best get cracking.

There was article after article about how to cope with being married to an insensitive slob who never washed, ignored you in favour of football, and generally acted like an overgrown four-year-old.  That was your only choice.  You couldn’t marry a man who wasn’t like that, because there weren’t any men who weren’t like that.  You couldn’t be a lesbian, because lesbians only existed as horrifying examples of what you might look like if you picked the wrong outfit.  You couldn’t stay single, because that would involve becoming a sad old woman who went home every night to an empty flat and was secretly pitied by everyone at work. It was the insensitive slob or nothing.

Every single book they recommended was either about a woman whose whole life collapsed after finding out that her husband was cheating, or about a desperate single woman with a ticking biological clock, who eventually ran into a “knight in shining Armani” who took pity and married her. Every article on friendship warned against the negative effects that your friends could have on your marriage. Every article on food told you what to cut out of your diet in order to maintain your clear skin and trim figure. Every article on parenting told you exactly how you were destroying your children’s chances this week. They were pretty great at telling women what they were doing wrong.

They taught us that all women regularly bought size-eight outfits to put in storage for when they’d lost enough weight.  They taught us that our failure to ever lose enough was yet another sign of our inadequacy.  They frequently reminded us that all men fantasised about busty blondes with tiny waists.  If you were not a busty blonde with a tiny waist, you could rest assured that your husband had settled for less by marrying you, and was secretly on the lookout for something better.  Luckily, after every such reminder, they’d print an article about how plastic surgery was becoming more and more socially accepted these days.  And really, didn’t you owe it to the people around you not to constantly horrify them with your hideous body?

And every so often, in the midst of all of this, they would stop and assure us that we were lucky to be living in an age of equality, where women were independent and free to be anything they wanted to be. Now, isn’t that nice?

(The following article was originally published on Women Make Waves in June 2015.)

One of the creepiest things I’ve ever heard came from a nine-year-old I used to know. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming- she’d previously told me her church said that the Na’vi from Avatar were actually devils and that getting the red-eye effect in photos was a sign you were possessed. But one day, when a couple of her friends were happily discussing their great love of Hannah Montana, she told them she didn’t watch it. “You shouldn’t spend your time watching TV,” she said, “If you do that, you’re basically worshipping the TV. You should be spending that time praying to God.”

It took me about an hour to get the goosebumps to go down.

Now, don’t get me wrong- there are a lot of good reasons to encourage children to watch less TV.  It was just the sheer puritanical unpleasantness of the logic that got to me. “You’re basically worshipping the TV. That’s time you should spend praying to God.”. You could apply that to anything. If you read a book, you’re basically worshipping the book. That’s time you should spend praying to God. If you play outside, you’re basically worshipping your garden. That’s time you should spend praying to God. If you listen to music, you’re basically worshipping the music. If you talk to your friends and family, you’re basically worshipping your friends and family. If you think for yourself, you’re basically worshipping your brain.

It’s possible that the girl’s pastor didn’t intend to spread this message. It’s possible that he was just condemning television in particular (since it was invented in the last hundred years and is therefore evil) and just didn’t take his train of thought to the logical conclusion. Honestly, though, I doubt it. I think he wanted her to worry that she wasn’t spending enough of her leisure time praying to God. I think he wanted her to feel guilty that she wasn’t spending all of her leisure time that way. I think he wanted to teach her that the ideal spiritual life is spent doing nothing but praying, possibly with occasional breaks to eat (but possibly not- after all, when you eat dinner you’re basically worshipping Brussels sprouts).

What’s more, I don’t think he did this just because he believed in the value of an ascetic, cloistered lifestyle. I think he wanted to discourage his parishioners from listening to anybody other than him. When you hold people to an impossible standard and make them torture themselves with guilt (“When you breathe, you’re basically worshipping oxygen…”), it becomes easier to control them. It becomes easy to manipulate people’s faith and use it as a tool to keep them in their place. It’s a lot like an abusive relationship, but instead of using violence and emotional blackmail to keep your victims in check, you use threats of excommunication and hellfire.

I admit, I don’t know much about what God is like. Nobody does. But I have a really hard time believing that He (or She) put us in a massive, varied world, full of wonderful things to see and experience and a ton of horror and tragedy to fight against, and intended for us to ignore all of it. And, honestly, I don’t think there’s anything in the Bible (or, say, the Qua’ran or the Bhagavat Gita) to suggest that’s the case. Sooner or later you’re going to do something other than pray, if only so you’ll have something to pray about. That’s not a bad thing. You’re only in the world for 80 years or so, you might as well go out and have a look at it.

When a religious leader tries to guilt his congregation out of experiencing the world, it’s usually because he wants to have a monopoly on their minds. Anything you do is something you’re doing instead of praying… unless it’s something that he wants you to do. It’s never actually about God, or faith, or prayer- it’s about the powers that be asserting their hold over those they deem inferior. When you do that, you’re basically asking your congregation to worship you. And that’s time they really could spend praying to God.

(The following article was originally posted on Women Make Waves in Autumn 2014.)

When Rik Mayall died earlier this year, a lot of fans comforted themselves with one of his best-known lines:

“Aha, kids, do you understand nothing? How can Rick be dead when we still have his poems?”

And Rik Mayall can’t be dead when we still have Rick from The Young Ones. Mayall’s legacy includes a long list of vibrant, memorable characters, but before anybody even thought of Lord Flashheart or Drop Dead Fred, there was a whiny, spotty little brat who thought Cliff Richard was a revolutionary leader. On one level, Rick is a typical egotistical comedy protagonist who has no idea how he comes across to others, a lot like Alan Partridge or David Brent. But The Young Ones is a deeply political show, and Rick’s alleged anarchic beliefs are central to his character. In a way, he’s a bit of a cautionary tale for anybody who wants to be politically active.

The world of The Young Ones might be a place where bricks explode when you bite them and vampires suddenly appear in your living room to try and trick you into forgetting to return your rented video player in time, but it’s also got one foot in reality. The characters frequently discuss their hatred of Margaret Thatcher. The police are shown as corrupt, racist, or just plain incompetent. University Challenge is rigged in favour of the posh kids. Casual drug use is depicted in a completely non-judgemental way, but sexist beer ads are mocked mercilessly. Thirty years later, it still feels subversive, mainly because the political aspects of the show happen alongside the sillier and more surreal humour. With The Young Ones, you’re never really prepared for what’s coming next.

People tend to use the phrase “equal opportunity offender” to mean, “I can make as many sexist and homophobic jokes as I want, because I’m so ironic and hardcore.” But to me, The Young Ones represents what that phrase should really mean- the willingness to mock the shortcomings of your own side just as readily as you would those of your enemies. So, in addition to the racist policemen and the rigged game show, we have Rick.

Rick thinks of himself as an anarchist, and spends a lot of time reminding anyone who’ll listen how much more politically sound he is than them, but he is chronically unable to put his money where his mouth is. He plans to boast to his friends about refusing to pay his TV license, but, when the inspectors show up, he tries to shift the blame to his housemates. He meets an old man in the post office and berates him about his (presumed) reactionary attitudes, but soon ends up complaining that “the country’s in such a state” because the government gives away too much foreign aid. When Vyvyan upsets him, he begins to write a letter to his MP, until Neil (whose radical beliefs are, in contrast, shown as silly but sincere) reminds him that he doesn’t have one. In general, he comes across as somebody who doesn’t know much about what it means to be an anarchist, and probably only picked the label because it seemed cool.

It’s easy to imagine Rick as a more right-wing archetype- say, a fundamentalist Christian who constantly tells everyone else that they’re going to Hell even though he’s as badly-behaved as they are- but if he was, he wouldn’t be half as interesting. When Rick says, “Neil, the bathroom’s free! Unlike the country under the Thatcherite junta!” the joke isn’t that the writers think he’s wrong. The joke is that he’s so self-satisfied about it. Later in the same episode, Alexei Sayle breaks character, talks about his real-life Marxist principles and reassures his allies that appearing on television doesn’t mean that he’s sold out… before launching into a Pot Noodle advert. The message is clear: Your beliefs are worth taking seriously, but if you start taking yourself seriously, you’re screwed.

Rik Mayall played a lot of great characters in his time, but we should probably be most thankful for Rick. Not just because he’s hilarious, but because he actually teaches the audience something. Don’t use other people’s problems as an excuse to draw attention to yourself. Don’t get so wrapped up in the superficial aspects of a movement that you forget about the substance. Don’t assume that fighting against awful, wrongheaded political opponents automatically makes you wise and virtuous. And, no matter how much they annoy you, don’t ever call your nice hippy flatmate a “fascist.”

(The following article was originally posted on “Women Make Waves” in Autumn 2014.)

There’s an internet post – first forwarded through e-mail, then later shared on Facebook – that congratulates the generation that grew up in the Fifties and Sixties for surviving their childhoods. They must have been really tough, argues the post, to survive doing dangerous things like playing out in the streets without adult supervision, riding in cars with no seatbelts, or eating food that hadn’t been checked for peanuts first. They must have been really tough to survive teachers who didn’t have to consider their self-esteem and parents who were actually prepared to punish them when they did something wrong.  The message of this post is clear; the way their generation was raised was the correct one, and modern children are spoilt and mollycoddled. Whether or not you agree with this, it’s true that childhood in the Fifties and Sixties was very different to childhood today. Standards change a lot over time, and it’s not surprising that people who were born into a world that worked in one way can find themselves confused and annoyed when it starts to work in another.

However, a few months ago, I saw a version of this post that was headed, “To everyone who grew up in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.”

That was perplexing for several reasons. For one thing, I’m almost certain that seatbelts and teachers who worried about self esteem existed even back in the Nineties. For another, the original post dates from around 2002, so I’m pretty sure it was originally written to criticise children who’d grown up in the Nineties. But the children of the Nineties are in our mid-to-late twenties now, so we’ve been deemed old enough to be included in the looking-down-our-noses-at-younger-people club. I’m sure we’re all honoured.

Well, actually, some of us are. Every other day, I see posts on my Facebook page from people in their twenties about how today’s children are growing up to be unholy hellions because their parents don’t beat them enough. Alternatively, they’re growing up to be uncultured morons because they’re not watching Dexter’s Laboratory and Bananaman like we did. It happens in real-life conversations, too; three times in the last month, somebody has told me about working in a school and being shocked at how rude and badly-behaved the children were. It’s nothing like our high school years, they say. (Meanwhile, I left a job in a secondary school earlier this year partly because it reminded me too much of my high school years. Clearly at least one of us has a faulty memory.)

It seems as though every generation can be easily convinced that the one immediately after it is made up of demons from hell. There are writings from the Roman playwright Seneca the younger in which he complains about the youth of today, who grow their hair too long and don’t listen to their teachers. So we can either conclude that the ancient Romans were paragons of virtue and wisdom and every generation since has been a slight decline (which would require us to ignore most of what Nero and Caligula got up to in their spare time), or that, just maybe, it’s not fair to judge any generation based on the way they behave as teenagers.

Oh, but we’re right this time, you say. Those kids today are dangerous. They’ve got BBMs and violent videogames and Justin Bieber. They’re a menace.

To which I reply: You do realise that’s exactly what people were saying about us ten years ago, right?

Alright, maybe not the part about Justin Bieber, but ten years ago, you couldn’t move for stories about how awful the young people of 2003 and 2004 were. When a teenage girl was arrested for indecent exposure while on holiday in Greece, the tabloids went bananas about how out-of-control modern kids were. The Mirror printed a shock report on teenagers getting drunk and flashing their breasts, and called on the parents of Britain to do something. The Daily Mail printed a photo of a group of teenagers getting on a plane, with a caption stating that the world would be better off if they all crash-landed in the sea. Then there were ASBOs. These were basically just the government’s new strategy for dealing with minor crimes, but the papers treated them as though they were a sign that everybody under the age of twenty was criminally insane. You’d see references to “ASBO youth” and “the ASBO generation” scattered here and there. When the word was accepted into the dictionary, the papers treated it as a sign of the wickedness of the modern age. The verdict was clear- the youth of that time represented a new low.

But now that the youth of that time have grown up, everybody’s changed their minds. We’ve been promoted from the worst generation ever to the last good generation before the rot set in. And, to show our gratitude for being accepted into polite society, we should all turn round and decry the awfulness of children today, in sheer glee that it’s not us anymore.

It’s lazy thinking, plain and simple. It’s egotism. It’s narrow-mindedness. It’s the refusal to accept that any childhood that isn’t absolutely identical the one we had can possibly be healthy, that what was good for us might not be good for somebody else. It’s the refusal to see anybody younger than us as a human being. It’s the refusal to consider that somebody might make mistakes because of immaturity rather than because they’re naturally evil. It’s the choice to throw something away because it’s not working exactly how we want it, rather than trying to fix it. The children who grew up in the Nineties have been asked to join this club, but if we’ve got any sense, we’ll say no. Because we’re still young enough to remember when we were the generation of demons from hell, and we’ll never solve the problem just by passing the bile onto someone else.

(The following was originally posted to “Women Make Waves” in Autumn 2014.  Once again, sorry about the formatting.)

The best piece of safety advice I received as a child was, “It’s okay to hit, kick and scream if a stranger is trying to take you away.”  The best piece of safety advice I’ve received as an adult is, “It’s better to be rude than dead.”*  Both of them are essentially saying the same thing- if you feel that you’re under threat, don’t worry too much about being sweet, likeable, or well-behaved.  Put like that, it sounds obvious, but people- and women especially- are put under a lot of pressure to be polite at all times.  We’re told to smile sweetly at people who get on our nerves.  We’re told that swearing is unladylike.  We’re told that getting angry only makes us seem shrewish and bitchy.  The same people who warn us never to walk home alone at night are perfectly happy to tell us to make friends with total creeps.
Take my former housemate, who, on our very first conversation, made sure to ask me if I had a boyfriend, then, after I said no, asked, “So when are you going to show me your room?”  When I mentioned this conversation to my mother, she said, “Aw, why don’t you invite him in?  That’s how you make friends!”  I didn’t invite him in, no matter how often he hung around my door looking hopeful.  Once he’d got into my room, it might have been nearly impossible to get him out.
Or the two men who ran into some of my friends at midnight, and tried to convince them to come with them into a dark subway because there was a really cool nightclub on the other side of the road.  (My friends could see across the road, and there wasn’t.)  They said that they had to get home, but the men explained to them how simple it was to get to the nightclub through the subway, and that my friends didn’t need to worry because they could trust them.  For some strange reason, my friends didn’t take them up on their offer.
Or the man who, upon visiting our flat, told me and my flatmate, “Yeah, I met up with a friend of mine earlier today.  I almost said, ‘Hey, I’m going to see these two girls later on.  You should come- one for me and one for you.’  But then I thought ‘No,’ cause you’re mates, ain’t you?”  We weren’t even that- we’d met him exactly once before.  When I deleted him from Facebook a week later, he sent me a message demanding to know why.  Three hours later, when I hadn’t replied, he sent another saying, “So there’s no reason, then?”  He then sent several whiny messages to my flatmate asking why I’d deleted him, and spent the next four months or so telling all our mutual friends that I was a total bitch who forced my opinions on people.
The criticism you often hear in these situations is, “Well, if you hadn’t been so uptight, you could have made a new friend.”  But, even working on the assumption that a man who lies to tempt a woman into a dark subway is remotely interested in friendship, why would you want to be friends with somebody like that, anyway?  If you humour him instead of running away screaming, the absolute best-case scenario is that you have to put up with him for the foreseeable future, and nobody wants that.  Besides, the worst-case scenario just doesn’t bear thinking about.
The creepier somebody is, the more likely they are to try and take advantage of your better instincts.  Your instinct to be polite.  Your instinct to give people the benefit of the doubt.  Your instinct to build people up instead of knocking them down.  These are good instincts to have, and you should never lose them.  But your safety is always, always more important than some creepy stranger’s ego.
* A Google search tells me that “It’s better to be rude than dead” originates from Gavin De Becker’s The Gift of Fear. The other piece of advice comes from a child safety pamphlet whose name I’ve forgotten. If you recognise it, tell me what it is.