But... but... guys.... that's literally not what's happening. James Bond is still James Bond; that lovable, sexist, ruthless, morally dubious chauvinist we all know and cherish. 007 is not his name. He didn't emerge squalling from Mystery Mum's womb as his parents cooed "Hello, little 007!" at him. 007 is a professional designation, a reference to his super-secret (but not that secret really because the villains are always expecting him) badass spy status. And in Bond 25, Bond is retired. Either he ran out of quips, or his eyebrow got RSI, or he just really wanted to take some time to centre himself and work on some self-care, but he ain't going to work on the farm no more. Or maybe M just snapped one day, got sick of James' backchat and called a meeting with HR. And all that killing and swashbuckling won't do itself, so perhaps they sent him on his way and hired someone else to take over. No-one's irreplaceable.
So what with it being 2019, and there being rules and initiatives around diversity in the work place, it turns out Her Majesty's newest secret weapon is a black woman, who we guess will end up running around with Bond (who just does not know the meaning of gardening leave), causing mayhem in Honolulu or Chicago or Tokyo or any of the other cities featured in Ian Fleming's fabulously anachronistic "Thrilling Cities"*. And verily, the sky did fall in.
It's a bumper month for this stuff. There is an unholy Venn diagram that combines the most average specimens on offer in the manosphere, the wheeyyladsladsladsyacunt contingent of the world of football fans, and a grunting, red-capped deputation from the People's Republic of MAGAland. You might call them Men of Venn. They like flags, the army, tradition and men being left to run all the important shit, and their pet peeves are women, self-expression, altruism, anyone anywhere near the LGBTQ spectrum, anyone with tits having pride in themselves, and criticism of the Dear Leader. The crowning of Megan Rapinoe as Boss of the Internet and President of Football, Hair Choices and Trying To Leave This World A Better Place Than You Found It (partly self-appointed, because sisters are doing it for themselves), has not gone down well.
Men on the internet have taken it upon themselves to advise us all what type of role model girls need - apparently an anti-racist, inclusive, World Cup-winning athlete ain't it. Cool.
Society is, again, doomed. Not because we can't even tell if we're talking to other human beings or bots on the internet any more, or because there's a loud, primary-coloured contingent of America aping the behaviour at nazi rallies, or because the latest on climate change is that we only have nine years to deal seriously with the factors causing it before we enter a state of irreversible fucking badness. No no, friends. We're headed for the bottom because a woman is proud of her work and saying so loudly. Because she and her colleagues have suggested that as a species maybe we could move beyond shooting black men in the street for minding their own business with intent. Look her up on Twitter and the words "arrogant" and "disgrace" pop up regularly. (I guess these irate individuals missed the video of her and her teammates hollering "y'got mud on your face! You big disgrace!" during their week-long World Cup celebrations.) Men on the internet have taken it upon themselves to advise us all what type of role model girls need - apparently an anti-racist, inclusive, World Cup-winning athlete ain't it. Cool.
And that's without even getting seriously into the treatment of the Squad, the four congresswomen of colour who Trump has slandered, patronised and incited racial hatred against, and the white noise of the internet mob (real and trollfarmed) who amplify and multiply the hatred. To get really clear about this: the President of the United States, in the year 2019, incited racial hatred against his black and Latino female colleagues, telling an American citizen to "go home", and people are actually taking the motherfucker's side.
As we all know, this is to a large degree about entitlement and chauvinism. It's about the men who got used to feeling like an entire sport, an entire movie franchise, and indeed the running of the country, is a male space. A straight white male space, where men are men, women do as they're told and look sexy or demure on demand, and anyone outside that binary dynamic doesn't presume to exist. I think we're dealing with the kind of folks who miss the days when women didn't go to bars (I guess because they could go and drink to their heart's content while their long-suffering wives did all the work of raising their children). They don't want to hear female voices in conversation, because they've already assumed they know what we're going to say, and they've already decided they won't like it. (Why so defensive?) They're convinced that the way they know is the best way, and others' opinions on the matter are both inconvenient and indefensible.
Football seems to touch the same impulse for this sort of man; it's their Private Club for Manly Men, their nice, blokey space where they don't have to engage with women or acknowledge that we might have something to bring to the table (other than a sandwich). There was a time when I used to go to the football semi-regularly - from premier league matches to my local team, and the guys I went with were a delight. But I also remember encountering the sneers of men outside my friendship group, whose attitude to women and football was that unless she's a walking encyclopaedia on it, she probably doesn't even understand the offside rule, and either way, does she really have to be here? The same attitude is spelled out in black and white on Twitter. In response to the US team bossing the World Cup and the whole tournament drawing record viewing figures, we saw the usual parade of dismissive "women's football is shit", "how cute... in other news, football is back in 28 days!" shade.
These chaps seem deeply offended that women should have stepped into their space which was clearly marked "no women or gays". Which is a losing battle, if you look at the attendance for football matches up and down the scale these days. It stopped being a men only space long ago. (I've started going again, only this time I'll start with supporting the women's teams, beginning with my local side, Dulwich Hamlet, which just assembled their women's XI from the ashes of another south London team and played their first match last Sunday.) As for the fury when women demand to be treated fairly in that space - you could heat half of southern England on it. Whether it's Pinoe, Morgan and their teammates arguing for more investment in the women's game (yeah, it's not just about their pay packets - they want the actual game built up from the grass roots), or the rape allegations against Ronaldo, what spews forth in response is the predictable torrent of bile about feminism and SJWs.
The religiosity that this portion of America attaches to their flag is akin to the hyper-reverence that certain sects have at one time or another attached to their religious idols.
And in the background of all of this is the rolling stone of nationalism and flag worship. The US seems to suffer from a particularly virulent strain of this. One of Pinoe's worst crimes, according to those who condemn her, was dropping and stepping on the US flag after refusing to sing the national anthem. (Fact check: it was someone else who dropped it, and she didn't actually step on it, before it was scooped up by another player.) The religiosity that this portion of America attaches to their flag is akin to the hyper-reverence that certain sects have at one time or another attached to their religious idols. To refuse to kiss the wooden statue was to declare your enmity to God, and to decline to take part in a solemn singalong is apparently to announce your hatred for the United States of America.
People. Google her and look at her arm. Girl's literally got a tattoo of the state of California. There's pictures of her all over the internet draped in the stars & stripes. She's from a family with major military history. Yeah, she definitely hates America. That's why she's standing in the firing line of critics and trolls to argue for better treatment of American citizens.
The people who are so angry about the careless treatment of a piece of fabric regard it as something that was fought for - and indeed, the union of the states is one of the most important parts of American history. They revere the armed services because they see people who have risked death to defend their home and fellow Americans (we'll leave discussions about America's role in other people's conflicts to another time) from outside threats. They talk about defending an American way of life. Yet the US constitution sets out the terms of that way of life and asserts that everyone is "created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". And when an American woman who serves America as a sportswoman, whose family have served militarily, stands up to defend that most basic of assertions - every American's right to life and liberty, which isn't being defended when police officers kill unarmed black men in the street or beat them up in custody - she is called an anti-American or a traitor. Or they roll out the homophobia, because it's a gift for their confirmation bias that the lefty feminist also happens to be a lesbian. What's the point of defending a constitution and a flag and an anthem and all that those things represent if you fundamentally object to someone else also defending all that those things represent? Is it worse to disrespect a flag than a human being? Does one voice withheld from an anthem matter more than the life of someone's child?
I said in my previous post that people cling to authority and the idea of a strongman because it frees them of a degree of responsibility, and it's comforting to think someone else is handling the big stuff. Maybe that's why this huge symbol matters to them more than the lives of other human beings, and why any dissent or questioning of authority is so intolerable to them.
But in all of these situations, it's a nasty case of missing the wood for the trees. This thing you treasure so much, these hyper-masculine symbols - what do they mean to you?
Football: the beautiful game? An arena in which anyone (*hard stare*) can succeed if they have the talent, ambition and work ethic? The sweet spot where athletic skill, teamwork, nerve, ingenuity and sheer chutzpah meet to produce nail-biting tension, churning disappointment and an outpouring of joy when it all comes to a glorious conclusion? Or simply a space for men to get away from women and not to be confronted with any other ways of life?
James Bond: an over-the-top fantasy world of danger, daring, impossible glamour and high-stakes power games played out on the world stage, peppered with dream cars, the most beautiful locations in the world and the suggestion of easy sex with beautiful people, and only, say, a 30% chance of getting interrogated in a bunker somewhere with a laser aimed at your crown jewels? Or just a film series to watch another straight white man winning?
The US flag: a symbol of a country in which everyone can be free, pursue the life they want and take part in the life of a successful nation? Or, when its values and pledges are ignored, the repository of American white supremacy, where the black man or woman will never matter as much as the white man or woman, where however shit your life is, at least you're doing better than the black or Mexican family down the road, and where those who have will pit those who have not against each other - divide et impera, same as it ever was?
And let's remind ourselves again, because it's important: we can't even tell if we're talking to other human beings or bots on the internet any more. A lot of those angry voices out there are not real.They're bots, imitating human argument and sentiment, or they're rooms full of people paid to stir up arguments on the internet, and every time we engage with them, we amplify the effect they have. We all know this by now. Perhaps if we really wanted to fulfil our civic duty, we'd each spend an hour a day reporting every fake account we come across, every recently joined @AngryofShitsville1938585105 with 2 followers, and never, ever engaging with them. Because when you amplify those voices, and join in with them, you become part of a mob that can be used by those who require consensus to push their own agendas.
It’s nothing new. Here’s Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, analysing how hatred of the Jews was whipped up for political purposes:
"The protagonists of the antisemitic movement ... were noblemen, and its chorus the howling proletariat... The aristocracy, in a last desperate struggle, tried to ally itself with the conservative forces of the churches ... under the pretext of fighting liberalism with the weapons of Christianity. The mob was only a means to strengthen their position, to give their voices a greater resonance. Obviously they neither could nor wanted to organise the mob, and would dismiss it once their aim was achieved. But they discovered that antisemitic slogans were highly effective in mobilising large strata of the population."
Divide et impera. When pundits make a racket about someone on the liberal side of political/social views, and invite everyone to contribute their ire, does it not bear asking what they hope to achieve from it? When media websites post a headline about "the new 007" deliberately making it look like Lashana is taking over from Daniel Craig, is that not what we'd call clickbait, and is someone not profiting from all the ad views and tweets that follow - did they pay you for the energy you spent ranting? When we talk about "fake news", is the issue really about the detailed reporting being done by trained, determined journalists at the New York Times and NBC, or is it actually about the thousands of random websites that duplicate content across the web however unreliable, and the outrageously partisan pundits that pose as the conduits of news and common sense, asking strawman questions, and the POTUS himself, deliberately spreading the staggering lie that an American congresswoman married her brother to get citizenship?
Your anger about the things that are wrong in your life, turned into a weapon to be used against someone who never hurt you, while the people doing the twisting don't do a thing to help you because they're too busy strategising the next play.
And when we add our voices to the howling mob, rather than taking a step back and asking ourselves, "What's the context? What's the background? What am I really angry about?" are we helping ourselves, or assisting someone who doesn't care about us at all? The thing about mobs is, they seem to want to exist - they're like iron filings around a magnet. They're easily drawn together, but their energy is that of everyone's individual discontents and hurts, skilfully heightened and directed towards a defined other, an enemy we can all agree on. Your anger about the things that are wrong in your life, turned into a weapon to be used against someone who never hurt you, while the people doing the twisting don't do a thing to help you because they're too busy strategising the next play. When people join in with mob anger online, they're saying more about their own lives and inadequacies than the people they rage at, and they trade the sting of disappointment and insecurity for the vengeful red glow of satisfaction from lashing out and hitting something.
So, I guess there's a choice. Question what you hear and read, learn a little about the history and background of anything you take an interest in. Ask yourself what you really have to lose by welcoming other people into a world you already enjoy. Get curious about why this politician or that pundit really wants you to be angry at this group or that person - what do they stand to gain? Report and block the 0 follower trolls, and read more investigative journalism. Read books by the journalists whose work you find interesting. Redirect your anger towards a punching bag, or towards the people above you that exploit you. Take a day off from the internet.
Or carry on ranting, bolstering the fortunes of the Trumps and Katie Hopkins and Piers Morgans, justifying the existence of troll-farms, helping to hand elections to people who despise the people they use. Carry on blindly accepting the nonsense headlines you see on Twitter, and letting people you'll never meet weaponise you to target people you have no real quarrel with, to divert any focus on their own wrongdoing. Cling to the notion that the narrow views and actions that you've been told represent "tradition" and "patriotism" are the only possible lens through which to see the world. Decry anyone who takes a stand to ask for more kindness and less cruelty in the world, call them libtards and SJWs and communists, exclude people while railing against "elites", and sneer at safe spaces while demanding a safe space from modernity itself. Let me know, in a few years, if it improved your life any.
* It's actually a really amusing read or dip-into, something between a personal travelogue and a very selective, ancient Rough Guide for the gentleman who knows exactly what kind of socks he wants to buy while abroad, with a mini-Bond story thrown in for good measure. New York is still a crime den stalked by mobsters and rapists, LA hotels are still bungalows, and expense accounts are a new and horrifyingly vulgar tragedy that will ruin everything for the rest of us. Obviously it's crashingly sexist, talking breezily about the delights of the Reeperbahn, describing female mud fights and noting with satisfaction that this or that club doesn't allow women in til after 3pm, allowing the cultured gentleman room to enjoy his newspaper and martini without such fluttering distractions. You're shocked, I know. But if you can summon an opinion on the finer points of a Bond film - and I can, because flag-flying feminist that I am, I still love the absurd, campy, fictitious, jetset glamour and always-on jeopardy of the Bond universe - you probably won't clutch your pearls hard enough to break them.
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