BooksOctober 24, 2018

Feminism for men and women: Alex Casey on the furious, phenomenal Clementine Ford

Senior writer

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more succinct summary of the way that sexual violence lives in the air that we breathe,” writes Alex Casey of Boys Will Be Boys.

I’ve never written a book review before, so I’m assuming it’s totally canon and intelligentsia to start by talking about the cover. Boys Will Be Boys, Clementine Ford’s furious and phenomenal second book, is the exact same neon green as the sentient goo in sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997). If toxic masculinity had a physical form, I think it would be a lot like flubber. Even though men (Robin Williams) think it’s benefiting them, flubber ruins everything in its wake. When left unchecked, it can be fully absorbed, turning some men (Tim Curry) into absurd, violent, twitching demons.

It’s this oozy green of the patriarchy and “the toxic bonds of mateship” that get obliterated in feminist writer Ford’s latest book. Walking to work last week, I was thinking about how best to summarise Boys Will Be Boys. How do you “review” something so blistering, so thoughtful, so ferocious in a way that would still entice those who need to read it the most (men)? Maybe I was just being hysterical, maybe I was on my period, maybe I was overthinking it’s magnitude because I famously have a “sandy vagina” (brave commenter on The Spinoff, 2015).

Lost in those thoughts, I dropped my phone on the footpath because I forgot my stupid fucking pants don’t have stupid fucking pockets, because no women’s clothes have stupid fucking pockets. And then, when I bent down to pick up my stupid fucking phone that had slipped because I didn’t have stupid fucking pockets, a van full of men drove past, tooted at my butt and yelled “woo!” like I was performing some kind of intricate sidewalk sex show. The green goo began seeping out of the drain below me. Flubber.

Where her first book Fight Like a Girl read like a feminist manifesto and a call to arms for women everywhere, Boy Will Be Boys shifts the spotlight to examine how the patriarchy and gender roles affect men as well as everyone else on this godforsaken planet. Tackling something as vast as the patriarchy is a mammoth task, so Ford takes what I call “the Michele A’Court approach” and eats the elephant with a teaspoon, breaking it down into essays ranging from the ‘not all men’ movement to the representation of men and women in popular culture.

Armed with statistics, studies, and reference points spanning Audre Lorde to Return to Oz (1985), Ford constructs bulletproof arguments and devastating snapshots of a gender shitshow. There are grim facts about childhood classics (Mulan is 77% men talking, Aladdin is 90%) and serious analysis of how crucial representation in pop culture is. Namely, if you’ve grown up with “men being heroes, men being villains, men being funny, men being serious. Men – so many men – navigating the world with purpose and adventure,” then where do the rest of us fit in?

Beyond realising that all movies are fucked – even Frozen – every foggy interaction with sexism and gender violence you’ve ever had will be pulled into sharp focus. A chapter about how the perceived primal sexuality of men and the ‘purity’ of women reminded me of how my primary school banned girls from wearing Canterbury shorts (not long after I made them cool *sunglasses emoji*) because they were deemed too short. I was 12 years old, and the only fashionable thing I’ve ever done was ripped away from me for fear of how boys might react.

Taking on those flubber-like qualities yet again, rape culture and sexual violence permeate every chapter of Boys Will Be Boys, some of which you may need to steel yourself for. I may also have ruined the vibe of our sunny long weekend holiday by loudly declaring “I just don’t want to read about rape anymore” on the beach, but I meant every word. Ford takes us on an extremely uncomfortable whistle-stop tour of sexual violence, be it Brock Turner, Steubenville, Donald Trump or Dane Cook and the ongoing defence of rape jokes.

For all the many, many intelligent words Ford has written on the topic of rape culture in her two books and hundreds of columns, five simple words packed the biggest wallop: rape is in the room. Rape. Is. In. The. Room. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more succinct summary of the way that sexual violence lives in the air that we breathe. Make no mistake, every woman that you know has a story of sexual violence or harassment, or knows someone who does. Ford makes that abundantly clear, before posing the biggest question of all: who is doing it to us?

Although Boys Will Be Boys draws primarily from Australian examples of sexism and violence, New Zealanders can hold their heads up high in the knowledge that our culture is entirely just as bad. We love to stay on par with the Aussies, don’t we? They have the AFL scandal, we have the Chiefs scandal. They have their misogynist named Tony (Abbott), we have ours (Veitch). Before you get defensive, consider the fact that police knew about the Roastbusters page for at least two years and ridiculed this Beast of Blenheim survivor when she came forward.

When Ford wrote that “the vision of Australian mateship has always felt distinctly male to me, and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to fit into it,” my eyes immediately rolled back into my head and conjured up a vivid vision of Speights-drinking, barbeque blokeyness. You know that tunnel full of shocking images that Willy Wonka drags the kids through in the original? It’s like that, but instead of worms and bugs, it’s John Key wearing a ‘I’m not sorry for being a man’ t-shirt, Stuff comments and Thane Kirby on loop. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to fit into it.

For all of the infuriating, terrifying parts of Boys Will be Boys, I can’t overstate Ford’s withering wit. She describes incels as a “turducken of toxic masculinity, entitlement, self-obsession and rank misogyny” and has the most brilliant use for yoghurt culture since at-home thrush treatment. Throughout, she takes care to explain the ways that women of colour, LGBTQIA+ women and disabled women come out of the patriarchy even worse. You won’t get any millennial pink #leanin guff here, but instead an ongoing dissection of her cis white privilege.

And still, somehow, there’s lots of jokes.

Beginning and ending with her own personal reflections on the birth of Ford’s son, Boys will be Boys is wrapped with a tenderness and an empathy that even the most incensed, feminazi-hunter MRA Reddit user would find hard to deny. “I want this world to be different for you,” she writes, “I want you to have more choices about the kind of boy you want to be.” Waah. Look, even if you hate feelings, Boys serves as an incredibly thorough time capsule of the modern fight for gender equality. It’s also some of the most essential and electric feminist reading of the year. Buy it for the special man in your life.

Boys Will Be Boys: power, patriarchy and the toxic bonds of mateship by Clementine Ford (Allen & Unwin, $37) is available at Unity Books.

Clementine will appear onstage at the Freemans Bay Community Centre in Auckland, on Tuesday, November 27; and at LitCrawl in Wellington on Friday, November 22 at Victoria University’s Memorial Theatre, and Saturday, November 24 at the Double Denim HQ in Cuba St.

Keep going!

BooksOctober 23, 2018

A portrait of Wellington’s literati, minus the art

Charlotte Grimshaw

Guest writer

Charlotte Grimshaw endures a novel full of ‘knowing and coy references to real people’ in New Zealand literature.

I have a friend who refers to a certain weekly newspaper column as “the Seventh Form essay.” I recalled this description recently while reading Anne Kennedy’s new novel, The Ice Shelf.

“Seventh Form essay” not only implies writing that’s callow, self-absorbed and insular, but also, perhaps, subtly institutionalised. The tone my friend is registering is that of a writer with an anxious eye to external forces, concerned with pleasing others. The school student is a prisoner of the teachers. True creativity is the antithesis of enslavement. If you want to be a good writer, in other words, you’ve got to get out from under.

The Ice Shelf is a comic novel about Janice, a wry, accident-prone writer. Janice leads a literary life in Wellington. She attends awards ceremonies, book launches and creative writing sessions. She joins a Book Club (playfully called Cook Blub.) She mentions arts boards, the CEO of Arts New Zealand, the Authors Fund. She has a falling out with Feather, a Writers’ Association of which she is an Associate Member. She speaks of “arts luminaries” and “the literati.”

Applying for an Arts Grant, she discusses with her creative writing teacher which bureaucrats and well-connected writers she should flatter if she wants to receive the grant. She name-checks actual Wellington writers. She engages in activity on Twitter in an attempt to ingratiate herself with literary figures playfully called Dean Cuntface, Roderick the Dick and Dame Carol. (Are these based on actual “luminaries”? Will they raise a “knowing laugh” in “some quarters”?)

Janice is tough; she’s game for anything. She lives by her wits and strives to be free. So why does she seem like a prisoner of the system?

Like Janice, I write fiction and live in New Zealand. I once asked a psychotherapist, “Why am I not able to schmooze, gossip or tweet?” He replied, kindly and firmly, that one couldn’t run before one could walk; perhaps we should focus first on why I was often harassed beyond belief just trying to work out who was who in the room.

This inability of mine to schmooze, gossip and tweet had made me sad (why wasn’t I normal?) but at some point during my close reading of The Ice Shelf, I began to regard it as an advantage, not a handicap. If you can’t engage in all this manoeuvring, if you’re not tweeting and slyly winking and following and cosying up, if you’re not always paying court to some group, you have only one thing to fall back on: the writing.

The idea that a writing life should be a kind of school story, with powerful figures to steer around and battles of wits on Twitter, and hi-jinks, and knowing and coy references to real people, and ubiquitous asterisks (presumably referring to Twitter and its importance) is disturbingly insular and claustrophobic. Where is art in all this? Where is the outside world?

Are any of these authors referenced in The Ice Shelf? Maybe, who knows

The Ice Shelf is billed as an “eco-comedy.” While I’m unable to schmooze, gossip or tweet, I do like a good laugh; in fact I’m frequently in hysterics about something or other. Comedy is always welcome. The comedy in The Ice Shelf runs along these lines: Janice has a fridge she’s very attached to, and when she splits up with her boyfriend she decides to steal it from him.

She and her friend break into the flat and drag the fridge up the hill in the middle of the night: “On the way along the balcony, we did make a bit of a racket with Mandy’s blundering footsteps, and I suppose me banging the cart into a couple of clothes racks and peg baskets didn’t help, but then trust Mandy to trip on a flowerpot and go kersplat. I shushed her wail and groaned inwardly. We were goners.”

Many pages later: “The fire escape is rather rickety, and a couple of planks gave out under the fridge’s weight; in fact we almost lost it once or twice. There was much giggling and shooshing and pausing for breath, I can tell you. What a hoot.”

What a hoot, indeed.

Later Janice, evicted again, tows the fridge on a cart to an awards ceremony. People look surprised, but she doesn’t care. Some writers (rivals, so they must be conceited shits) ask her about the fridge: “Beatrice Grant, sporting a tonne of pancake makeup and wearing her signature long and only slightly pretentious eighteenth-century frock coat, looks me up and down and after a beat asks, with dancer-type eye-widening, what my fridge *is.* I laugh because the question is actually quite funny.”

Amid all this hilarity, we go back in time to Janice’s childhood, when she’s forced to live in a fantastically squalid commune. The comedy, involving the chaotic group evading health inspectors and fighting among themselves, is interrupted by a horrendous description of a child being raped. The abrupt change of pitch is disorientating. There’s a sense here of a writer wanting to have it all ways, to use serious material but then to undermine it. It’s an odd lack of commitment to any particular tone.

Janice has a strong line in acid irony: she thanks all the bastards who’ve hurt her along the way. If they hadn’t ill-treated her, she explains, she wouldn’t be a writer. One old luminary, Dame Bev, gets it in the neck (she really has a thing about Dame Bev) for giving Janice a negative review: “Why a person so successful as to have been awarded a dameship for services to literature would still write reviews for almost no money is curious. It may be because a dameship is actually not successful in monetary or global or real terms.”

Her tone has hectically lowered here, from hapless charmer to snarling little loser, unable to understand why the Dame would serve literature for free. She’s all over the place, this Janice. She cares but she doesn’t. She’s serious but she’s not. She wants it all but she’s humble. She’s angry, but her sense of humour is so cute. Don’t take me seriously, she signals. I am no threat. She puts asterisks in a description of child rape.

Janice has written a novel, The Ice Shelf, and as the story unfolds she discards sections of the manuscript, editing it down as she goes. It’s possible to imagine a different editing process, involving a stern examination of what really matters. Writing matters. There’s a lot of material here, there’s energy and the elements of a great story. But it’s useful for a writer to be self-driven, focused, intellectually free. To have the sense that the only thing to be served is right there, on the page. That nothing and no one else is in sight.

The Ice Shelf by Anne Kennedy (Victoria University Press, $30) is available at Unity Books.