Are drag queens as offensive as blackface?

Over the past year or so, some people in the media have apologised for performing in blackface. In this post I'm going to argue that drag queens are offensive in the same way - although perhaps not to the same degree - as blackface is. Consequently, drag queens should be axed from the screens and stages just as Minstrels have been.

Blackface

Blackface, for the uninitiated, is when an actor or performer applies dark make up - typically to the face, but maybe the hands or elsewhere too - in order to perform as a person from an ethnic group with a darker skintone than their own. For example, if a white person was playing the role of a black person, and applied make up to facilitate that role.

George Mitchell, creator of the Black and White Minstrel
Show, was awarded an OBE in 1975 for his work on the show

Performances of people in blackface have not been acceptable on TV for some time. But there was a time when white people wearing caricatured black make up and dancing around a stage was prime-time entertainment. The Black and White Minstrel Show ran on the BBC from 1958 to 1978, and often drew audiences in the tens of millions - it drew a record16.5 million viewers in a 1964 show. The entertainment value of people in blackface dancing around is lost on me, and it is clearly a product of its time. Minstrel shows are thankfully no longer around, but blackface has still been on prime-time TV (albeit in a slightly different format) within the last 20 years. (And shows of people dancing around still unfathomably persist, but that's another story.)

Ant and Dec 'disguised' as Jamaican women
Patty and Bernice, in Saturday Night Takeaway.

Over the past few months, there has been a flurry of celebrities keen to apologise for wearing blackface in their past performances. The list includes Ant and Dec (on Saturday Night Takeaway), David Walliams and Matt Lucas (on Little Britain), and Leigh Francis (on Bo Selecta). The Mighty Boosh and League of Gentlemen also came under scrutiny for their use of blackface, and were removed from Netflix. The celebs are only too happy to eat humble pie and make statements such as "It was wrong then, and it's wrong now". 

In short, blackface is objectionable because it presents caricatured, demeaning stereotypes of black people;* this contributes towards the dehumanisation of black people which was a defining feature of slavery. The donning of black make up -- as if blackness is a costume one can wear for fun -- is a form of morally objectionable cultural appropriation. Given the history of oppression (not to mention present-day discrimination) which black people have suffered at the hands of white people, it's no wonder people object to blackface.
* Sometimes blackface involves an performer impersonating someone of Southeast Asian origin. The prevailing opinion seems to be that this is still offensive, though it lacks the slavery-related offence dimension. 

Drag queens

If it's offensive to dress yourself up as an oppressed (or historically oppressed) group to which you do not belong, then blackface is not the only form of offensive appropriation which exists. Although there are (morally questionable) examples of able-bodied actors playing disabled characters, they generally do not present ridiculous caricatures of disabled people.

However, the same cannot be said of drag queens. 

Drag queens, in my humble opinion, are horrific caricatures of what society (or perhaps just men) judge to be the defining features of women. Huge, coiffured hairstyles, ridiculous volumes of make up, false eyelashes, enormous breasts and/or bottoms, revealing dresses, trashy jewellery.... there is literally nothing fun or pleasant about what a drag queen represents. They represent the very worst expectations of women, donned by men for the sake of trite entertainment - typically in the form of singing show tunes or reality TV.

To be clear, I am not criticising transsexual women (people born physically male but who identify as female) or transvestite men (men who choose to dress as 'normal' women). These people are a whole different ballgame, and I can see nothing morally concerning about these people dressing as or identifying as normal women.

What I am objecting to here is the donning of the caricature outfit (and make up and suchlike) that is a requirement the drag queen. They are offensive in the very same way that minstrels and blackface are offensive, and here's why:

 

1. They perpetuate dangerous and offensive stereotypes. Women are not just big hairstyles, big boobs, trowel-fuls of make up, and showy clothes. But this is the image that drag queens portray when they "dress as women". This stereotype of women as nothing more than a sexualised, glamorous appearance is offensive - after all, drag queens are not impersonating the intellects of female scientists, the bravery of female firefighters, or the compassion of female nurses. The only thing they portray is the vile oversexualised appearance of the female caricature.
2. They involve a powerful group dressing up as a less powerful group. They say that when it comes to comedy, you should 'punch up', not 'punch down'. This means that it is less offensive to make fun of those in power than it is to make fun of oppressed (or historically oppressed) groups. Sexual inequality has been rife throughout history, and still persists today in many areas of our lives. Just as it is offensive for white (privileged) people to portray caricatures of black people, the same is true of (privileged) men portraying gross caricatures of women.
3. They use appropriation as entertainment. With The Black and White Minstrel Show, cultural appropriation was central to the entertainment value of the act: the fact they were white men made up as black men was (apparently) entertaining in itself. White men dancing, or black men dancing, just wouldn't have had the same sort of appeal. Similarly, a woman (dressed normally) or a man (dressed normally) singing the show tunes of which drag queens are so fond - well, it just wouldn't be the same. I suspect that most if not all drag queens are men who have tried to make it as (normal male) singers, failed, and have turned to drag queening as an alternative route to success. Their absurd make up and outfits make them inexplicably more appealing to audiences, just as wearing blackface suddenly (absurdly) catapulted the Minstrels to success.
4. They pick out caricatured features of the target group. The Minstrels had the white eyes and the white or ruby red lips in stark contrast to the dark skin (make up). The drag queens have the enormous breasts, excessive make up, absurd hairstyles, and revealing dresses. Both pick out nonessential features of the target group, and do so in an unsympathetic way. Watching the show does not help us to feel more sympathetic towards the oppressed group, nor see them as equals; instead, it just encourages us to laugh at them. Drag queens and Minstrels add to the oppression because they dehumanise the target group, making them appear as 'other' and presenting a one-dimensional view of the target group.

If it is morally abhorrent for white people to dress up as caricatured stereotypes of black people for trite entertainment, then it is equally abhorrent for men to dress up as caricatured stereotypes of women for entertainment. Just as celebrities (and perhaps non-celebs) today are apologising for their cultural appropriation (blackface) from decades gone by, I think - and I hope - that in future we will see men apologising for the "sexual appropriation" which they engaged in when being a drag queen. 

The make up, hair, dresses, and oversexualised behaviour are inseparable from the drag queen; without these things, the drag queen would simply not be a drag queen. The Minstrels would no longer have been Minstrels without the blackface, the music, and the style of dancing, and so they could not simply tweak their act to make it more culturally sensitive: the Minstrels simply had to go. Similarly, drag queens cannot simply reinvent themselves in a more politically correct format -- without the features I am objecting to, they would simply not be drag queens. They would just be normal men with mediocre singing voices. For this reason, and the reasons outlined above, I maintain that drag queens should be consigned to history, along with The Black and White Minstrels. There cannot be racial progress when those in a position of racial privilege make fun of black people, and the same is true of women. Women cannot fight for sexual equality when they are being sexualised and made fun of by the very group of people who has the power to provide that equality: men.

But people love drag queens!

Maybe so. But people also loved The Black and White Minstrels. As I said above, the show regularly pulled in audiences in the tens of millions in the UK in the 1960s. And just ten years ago we were still laughing at the blackface characters in Little Britain, The Mighty Boosh, and the League of Gentlemen. Times change, and just because there are many ostensibly non-sexist people who like drag queens (as there were many ostensibly non-racist people who loved the Minstrels) that does not make it morally right for a privileged group to caricature a less privileged group. 

Disclaimer

I have argued elsewhere that I have not experienced a great deal of sexual inequality in my life. I stand by that. Most of the men I have met have been lovely, and have not given me the impression that they think less of me because I'm a female. The men who are drag queens are quite probably nice people on an individual level - and I imagine lots of the Minstrels were nice guys too. That said, sexual inequality does still exist in the UK and elsewhere, and it would be great if we could make more progress towards genuine equality. We are making progress with racial equality, and the move away from Minstrel shows was a step forward. Getting rid of drag queens will be a step forward for sexual equality. It will not be a panacea of course, but baby steps are nonetheless a form of progress.

Will people of the future tear down our statues?

Black Lives Matter protesters tear down statue of
slave owner Edward Colston

I've written elsewhere about why we shouldn't airbrush our history, and edit offensive bits out of old TV programmes. This isn't an Orwellian novel, where we edit our history to be the way we want it to be... or is it? In recent months, there's been much talk of how we deal with our history, particularly with regard to statues and street names. Several statues of historical figures have been torn down, including Edward Colston, whose statue was torn down in June during Black Lives Matter protests. Some historians have suggested that the removal of historical statues impoverishes history; other historians call such claims nonsense.

Here I'm going to defend the claim that if we think it is morally permissible to tear down the statues and rename the buildings which celebrate people whose views we oppose today, we must accept that it is also morally permissible for future generations to tear down the statues of people who we today celebrate and see as national treasures.

Imagine, if you will, a public figure of present day (ish) who is considered to be highly respected or a national treasure. Perhaps David Attenborough, Trevor McDonald, Michael Parkinson, Princess Diana, Bruce Forsyth, Captain Tom Moore, Claire Balding, or Jamie Oliver.

Let's go with Sir David Attenborough: I think he's fantastic and has done so much for conservation, and is well deserving of a plethora of awards. There is a nature reserve here in Nottingham named after him. There's a ship named after him (remember "Boaty McBoatface"?). There are even a few species named after him. I bet there are plenty of other things too - and deservedly so.  I think he's a national treasure, but if you don't agree, just insert the name of another all-round good egg in instead of him. As far as I know there are no statues of him, but let's suppose that one is erected, and it is there to celebrate all the great things he's done, and what a great man he is.

Now, suppose it's 150 years from now, in 2171, or thereabouts. The Attenborough Nature Reserve is still there, the HMS Attenborough is a museum ship, his statue is still there, and plenty of other things named after him are still around.

Let us suppose also that laws and social attitudes have moved on, and some things which are commonplace, legal, and generally considered permissible in 2021 are uncommon, illegal, and seen as morally wrong - even abhorrent - in 2171. For example, suppose the age of consent is 24, it's illegal to eat animals, and it's seen as just plain wrong to fly in an aeroplane for tourism or entertainment. I know that David Attenborough eats meat and flies by plane to different places; I'm less sure about his sexual experience, but let's say he has, as most people have, had sex with someone under the age of 24 at some point in his life.

How will future people view us? Source: Unsplash

So what would the people of 2171 have? They'd have a nature reserve named after a man who is celebrated for his "conservation" work with animals, and yet he munched down on dead animals on a daily basis. I can easily see how the people of 2171 could call this hypocrisy. There'd be a statue of a man who - wrongly and disgustingly in the eyes of the people from 2171 - had sex with "children" under the age of 24 (for example, a 22 year old). And there'd be a museum ship - itself a polluter of the seas - which was named after a man whose flights around the world contributed to the very climate change he spoke out against in his senior years. The people of 2171 are not happy: they see David Attenborough as a relic of a vile and barbarous past, and they see the man himself as a hypocrite in terms of his treatment of animals and the environment - added to which, he had sexual relations with people who were below the age of consent in 2171.

David Attenborough, so respected and revered during his lifetime, and mourned upon his death, is a figure representing beliefs and actions which are 'of his time', and the people of 2171 have no place in their hearts for someone who treated animals and the environment so badly (by eating them and polluting it, in their eyes), and in his sexual attitudes towards minors.

The fact that Attenborough has done a great deal for the environment, and that his views on meat eating and the age of consent are well-aligned with his contemporaries is lost on the people of 2171. They simply say "Eating animals, polluting the environment by air travel, and sex with minors, is wrong today, and it was wrong back then. The fact that many others in society also had the same values as Attenborough does not make it right. The fact that these things were legal does not make it any less morally objectionable." More 'active' activists tear down his statue, and demand that anything named after David Attenborough be renamed after another person with more palatable, less archaic beliefs and actions.

This is an entirely plausible future history, and is remarkably similar to the stories we see today about statues made in the image of particular historical figures, and the buildings, streets, and other things named after such people. Is eating animals and flying in an aeroplane as morally abhorrent as slavery? I don't think it is. But I do not have my beliefs in a vacuum; they are inherently linked to the time period in which I live. If I'd have lived in a different time, I am sure my views would have been coloured by the commonplace those around me. 

I don't know much about the men whose statues were torn down earlier this year. Maybe they really were monstrous villains who bought their way into the history books and did no good deeds whatsoever in their lives. Or perhaps, like all of us, they did some good deeds in the world, and others which have not stood the test of time, as the moral tides have rolled onwards. Perhaps - almost certainly - the people who we consider national treasures today will not be quite so treasured by future peoples. In all likelihood, our descendants will see us as immoral and uncivilised, the way we look upon our ancestors who supported slavery, and our descendants will be tearing the statues which we erect today.

We can shrug and say so be it: we in 2021 have a right to tear down the statues of slave owners, just as the people of 2171 have the right to tear down statues of anyone whose views or actions they see as morally wrong. But if we think that the people of 2171 would be misguided to tear down the statue of Sir David Attenborough and vandalise it, then we should probably view the protestors who tore down the Edward Colston statue in the same way. 

Human evolution. Source: Pixabay

Evolution continues, and it would be absurd and conceited to believe that we are the pinnacle - the finished product - of evolution. Similarly, our social attitudes are evolving and changing too. Slavery, sex with 12-15 year olds, and owning your wife were once legal and normal parts of life; meanwhile, homosexuality, inter-racial marriages, and sex outside of marriage were not just immoral but illegal. We might like to think that the moral codes we possess today are the right ones and the best ones, but our descendants will probably see us as backward and abhorrent as we today see our ancestors.

Is it wrong to pierce a baby's ears?

In many cultures, it is common for parents to pierce the ears of newborn baby girls. This practice is very ethnocentric, meaning that it is commonplace in some cultures, and unheard of nd frowned upon in others. Some people  claim it is harmless, beautiful, and kinder than piercing the ears of an older child- and others claim it is cruel, sexist, and a violation of consent.

If you'd like to read a range of anecdotes and  viewpoints, see this Quora discussion. Below I examine a range of viewpoints and ultinately conclude that although it is a bodily violation and not medically necessary, it may be culturally necessary in some cultures to avoid bullying.

Wrongness

Many things are wrong. It's wrong to accept d a gift without saying thank you without taking a gift, and it's wrong to put millions of people to death because you don't like their skin colour. Both of these are wrong, but they are not equally wrong. Wrongness is a spectrum, and the above two acts are at opposite ends of the spectrum. If baby ear piercing turns out to be wrong, I'll need to say where on the spectrum it lies - just how wrong it is.

Wrongness comes in (at least) two forms: intrinsic wrongness and instrumental wrongness. If something is instrumentally wrong, it is wrong because of its negative consequences. If something is intrinsically wrong, it is wrong in itself, because of the type of act which it is - even if no negative consequences ensue. For example, we might think that dropping litter is instrumentally wrong because it harms the environment and disgusts people. On the other hand, we might think that lying in court is wrong in principle, regardless of the consequences. Of course, some acts may be both intrinsically and instrumentally wrong. Murder is probably wrong in both ways: it is instrumentally qrong because it upsets people, and intrinsically wrong because it's simply wrong to take a life. I'll show below that altbough baby ear piercing is intrinsically wrong (by a very small degree) it may be instrumentally right in some cultures.

Arguments in favour

First, I'll consider arguments in favour of piercing babies' ears. These are:

1. Babies feel less pain
2. Babies don't mess with their earrings
3. It looks cute
4. Most girls love their earrings
5. The holes stay open for life
6. It helps tell girls apart from boys

Babies feel less pain

The first argument in favour of piercing babies' ears is that babies feel less pain, or that they quickly forget about the pain. As for the first claim, here's a little experiment you can do: lay down a newborn baby next to a child, and an adult. Now, get an object such as a pencil case or water bottle, drop it onto each of them, and see who cries. My guess is that the baby would cry, while the others would not. Indeed, if one were to try a more unpleasant (and possibly illegal) experiment of hitting the people, I think the baby would certainly cry, the child may cry, and the adult would not. So the claim that babies don't feel the pain is totally unfounded.

As for the claim that babies don't remember the pain, this is more plausible. If we had hit the newborn, the child, and the adult, it is likely that 5 minutes after the hitting, the child and the adult would both remember that they'd been hit. Would a newborn baby remember it? There's no way to know. She might not behave like she recalls the pain, but that doesn't mean that the pain has indeed been forgotten. 

If it is true that babies forget the pain whereas children and adults do not, then it would seem to be more permissible to hit a baby for fun, than to hit a child or adult for fun. This seems intuitively distasteful. But this doesn't mean it is wrong, of course. There is not a clear way to ascertain whether babies remember the pain.

Babies don't mess with their earrings

It is important to keep newly-pierced ears clean; that much is certain. Adults with newly-pierced ears are good at keeping them clean, but children (aged 2-10) are likely to mess with their earrings with germy hands, possibly causing infections. Very young babies are not able to control their limbs properly, and couldn't fiddle with their earrings even if they wanted to, so their new piercings are likely to stay cleaner than those done on an older child.

But that alone isn't reason enough to pierce their ears. Amputation of the legs is likely to heal better (and be coped with more easily) when performed on a newborn rather than an older child or adult -- but that alone is not reason enough to amputate a baby's legs! We'd need to have some other (positive) reason to pierce a baby's ears or amputate their legs in addition to babies' advanced healing abilities.

It looks cute

I can understand why people think it looks cute, but I myself do not find it cute. It's not commonplace in the UK to pierce babies' ears, and yet we still have babies and children which are very cute. 

Besides, many things might be cute - surgically grafting cat ears onto a baby's head, or tattooing little hearts onto their bodies, but this does not give us adequate reason to do it. Later on, when I discuss consent, we will see that cuteness is insignificant when weighed against body modification.

Most girls love their earrings

This is probably true. Most girls like to look girly, and the chance to wear sparkly earrings like a princess is undoubtedly attractive to many girls.

But not all girls. Some girls don't want to wear earrings, but by the time they are old enough to object to their earrings, they have already had their ears pierced.

But for girls who don't want to wear earrings, they can just take them out, and the scarring is minimal. So ear piercing on a baby isn't like tattooing a baby, where it is significantly more difficult to reverse the procedure if they don't like it.

The holes stay open for life

Oddly, this is often given as a reason in favour of baby ear piercing. People say things such as "I haven't worn earrings in 10 years, but the holes are still there so I can put earrings in if I want to". This contradicts the above argument - that one can just take out the earrings if one doesn't want them. But the fact that the holes stay there for life is surely a reason to say that baby ear piercing is a lifelong infliction - a reason against it. And yet, proponents of babies with earrings use "the holes never heal up" as an argument in favour of ear piercing in newborns. Counterintuitive, huh?

It helps tell girls apart from boys

Among cultures where baby ear piercing is commonplace (such as Spain and other Latino cultures), this argument is frequently put forward, but it is utterly flawed.

First of all, why is it essential for people to know the sex of a baby? They should act the same way towards the baby regardless of its genital configuration or whether it has small pieces of metal in its ears. Perhaps they just want to know which pronouns to use, so they can say "She's gorgeous" or "He's gorgeous" rather than "It's gorgeous". Fair enough, but there are many cultures where baby girls' ears are not routinely pierced - how do they cope with telling baby boys apart from baby girls?

The answer is this: they dress their babies in gendered clothes such as pink flowery dresses or blue dungarees. Or, if one encounters a baby dressed in unisex clothing, one asks "is it a boy or a girl?", and no one takes offence. 

So this argument - the aid to telling boys from girls - is absurd. One doesn't need to tell a baby boy from a baby girl, but even if they do, they can look at the clothes or just ask - piercings are unnecessary for this purpose.

It's tradition 

This is probably one of the weakest arguments in favour of baby ear piercing. There are many abhorrent traditions involving the ritual alteration or mutilation of people's bodies. Some examples include Chinese foot binding, head binding, female genital mutilation, circumcision, tribal tattoos, and the stretching of the neck.

A tradition is only a tradition as long as people keep practicing it. If a tradition is cruel, outdated, unwarranted, or just plain stupid, then there is no need to keep following it. There is a saying: Who is the greater fool: the fool, or the fool who follows him? It suggests that copying stupid actions is even more stupid than the person who did it in the first place. The practice of foot binding (for girls) in China had been a tradition for a long time, but thankfully, people stopped practicing it, and it is now seen as the vile and unnecessary practice it truly is.

So piercing babies' ears solely because it is a tradition is absurd. We would need a better reason than mere tradition for piercing babies' ears.

Arguments against 

Now let's consider some of the arguments against baby ear piercing. These are:

1. It's dangerous
2. It's sexist
3. It's body mutilation
4. It requires consent

It's dangerous

Earrings can be grabbed and yanked out by the baby themselves, or by other children. They can get caught when removing clothing, or when playing, hugging etc. and when this happens, it hurts. But in the UK, quite a few kids (again, mainly girls) have their ears pierced, and almost all women do. How many people have had an earring ripped out such that their earlobe was actually torn? I would say the number is minuscule. Ear piercing is not dangerous.

It's sexist

Recall the argument above in favour of piercing girls' ears because "it's cute". Why is it only cute for girls and not for boys? The answer, of course, is because we have gendered ideas about what is attractive for boys and girls.

When people pierce a baby's ears, it is always baby girls whose ears are pierced. Very occasionally, one might pierce a single ear of a baby boy, but this is much less common than piercing both ears of a baby girl.

And the reason why it's girls rather than boys who have their ears pierced is undoubtedly because women wear earrings to look beautiful, like princesses and so on. So piercing the ears of a baby girl is a symbolic act which says "I want my daughter to look beautiful". This is highly distasteful, the reinforcement of the idea that girls should look beautiful, with sparkly jewellery, whereas boys should not.

This ethos is unpleasant enough when it circulates among adults, but it becomes more and more grotesque when inflicted on young children and babies. Does a 5 year old need to look beautiful? Of course not, so a new born baby girl certainly does not.

On the other hand, gendered clothes exist for children of all ages, including newborns. If we object to ear piercing among baby girls solely on sexist grounds, we should also object to gendered clothing. It should either be abolished, or it should be acceptable to dress a baby boy in a flowery dress. But many people against ear piercing still think that gendered clothing is acceptable, so sexism alone can't explain the wrongness of ear piercing.

It's body mutilation

Forcing pieces of metal through a child's skin is a form of body mutilation, as is tattooing, circumcision, female genital mutilation, foot binding, and several other (once) common practices. If we object to ear piercing, but not another form of body mutilation, we would have to show that ear piercing is more harmful or less necessary than the one which we accept.

Let's take circumcision, since it is shockingly common. Figures show that over 80% of US males are circumcised, and over 90% of males in Muslim-majority countries. I find this abhorrent and shocking; in the UK, only 4% of males are circumcised, and I can't fathom why anyone would do it to a baby. Given that there is no good medical reason for routine circumcision on babies, I find it sickening and intrinsically wrong that someone would remove part of the genitals of a newborn baby. Of course, people often claim that it's more hygienic (which it isn't), but mostly that it's a tradition - often underpinned by religion. As shown above, tradition alone is no good reason to alter the bodies of babies.

Anyway, since the removal of part of the genitals is far more intimate, invasive, and irreversible than the piercing of the earlobes, it is impossible for anyone to seriously claim that routine circumcision is acceptable but ear piercing is wrong.

Of course, someone might claim that both are wrong, because both are mutilation. This seems true, as they both irreversibly alter the baby's body. However, it is possible to remove earrings, and the remaining ear is very similar to an unpierced ear (there may be a small pinprick still visible). Compare this to circumcision, which irreversibly alters a boy's penis - if a circumcised boy decides he doesn't want to be circumcised, tough, he cannot reverse it, whereas removing earrings will give the person an almost identical ear to an unpierced one. Moreover, when one considers that a man will use his penis for urinating, making love, and masturbating, but a girl will use her earlobes for absolutely nothing, this further shows why ear piercing is far, far less harmful and less invasive than circumcision is.

It requires consent

This is related to the above argument. The suggestion is that body modification is something which morally requires consent, and a child - much less a newborn baby - is unable to consent. Some people even suggest that any touching of the body requires consent. 

This latter claim is reasonable for adults and older children, but is absurd with regards to nonverbal babies and perhaps even all children under 10. Babies and young children need to bathed, dressed, and to have their toileting needs met, but I cannot obtain consent to change my new born baby's nappy - I just change it. The fact that she cannot talk does not seem to be an issue - few if any people claim that I am violating the bodily integrity of my new born by changing her nappy without first obtaining her consent.

Sometimes young children who can speak say they don't want to have a bath or to have their nappy changed, but their wishes should not universally be respected, or they'd be living in filth, which is not in their best interests. Sometimes children's lack of consent should be ignored for their greater good.

This argument works for nappy-changing, but not quite so much for ear piercing, unless we could show that a child's wellbeing would be severely limited as a result of failing to pierce her ears. In somewhere such as the UK, it seems evident that young girls with pierced ears have a childhood indistinct from young girls with unpierced ears. But elsewhere, things may be different.

Recall above that ear piercing is, in Spanish and Latino cultures, used as a shorthand for telling the sexes apart: girls have pierced ears, boys do not. This means that a girl with unpierced ears may be met with confusion or unkind comments, in the same way that a boy who wears dresses may be treated in the UK. This could mean that a girl with unpierced ears could be an easy target for bullies, and this would limit her wellbeing. This alone might be incentive enough to pierce a baby girl's ears.

I said above that traditions are only traditions as long as they keep being practiced, and that is true, but the first few people who break with a tradition may have to be remarkably thick-skinned. Children can be remarkably cruel, and the sphere of gender roles is somewhere that children can bully one another mercilessly. A child who doesn't conform to gender expectations can be an easy target.

A parent might think that baby ear piercing is a silly tradition and that it's unnecessary, but go through with it nonetheless to spare their daughter the burden of being different. If one lives in a Spanish or Latino culture, then failing to pierce a baby girl's ears may be setting her up for a difficult childhood.

Conclusion 

Piercing the ears of a baby girl is invasive and unnecessary. It will be painful to the baby, but she will probably forget about the pain soon after, and the piercings will heal cleanly if the ears are pierced when she is young. It is reasonably non-permanent, and girls who later decide not to wear earrings can remove them and almost no scar is left.

Generally, people should have autonomy over their own bodies, and consent should be obtained prior to invasive procedures or body modification. Ear piercing is a slightly intrusive and momentarily painful procedure, so requires consent (circumcision definitely requires consent). However, we often think it acceptable to give a baby a painful inoculation in spite of the pain or her lack of consent, because we believe it is medically necessary. 

Pierced ears are obviously not medically necessary, and since it is painful and a form of body modification, we can say that it is wrong. It is intrinsically wrong to unnecessarily modify someone's body without their consent, even if no harm ensues. But how wrong is it on the spectrum if wrongness? I believe it is at the end of the spectrum, right next to going to a birthday party without a present. Although I maintain that it is intrinsically wrong to pierce a baby girl's ears, it is only a tiny crumb of wrongness.

It is intrinsically wrong, but, I maintain, it may be instrumentally right, because although it isn't medically necessary, it may be culturally necessary. In the UK it is seen as trashy and oversexualised for a little girl to have pierced ears, so it is certainly not a cultural requirement here. But some places have girls' earrings so ingrained in their culture that having a little girl with unpierced ears is like putting a boy in a pink dress with a bow in his hair. It could be seen as cruel to treat a child in such a way, because it invites confusion and unkind comments from others. So in cultures where it is commonplace for all young girls have pierced ears, it might be best to safeguard girls from bullies by piercing their ears - and probably the best time to pierce them is in the first few months of life, when they heal cleanly.

Should sports segregate by sex? If so, how?

A couple of weeks ago, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled against South African athlete Caster Semenya. The findings about her case in particular are supposedly confidential, but based on the ruling, it is easy enough to work out what her sexual situation probably involves, and it has been all over the news. It is thought that she has a disorder of sexual development (DSD); such people are commonly referred to as intersex because of their ambiguous genitalia or mixed sexual chromosomes. Semenya has hyperandrogenism - unusually high levels of testosterone for a female. Women with hyperandrogenism might have external genitalia resembling standard female genitalia, but internally, they may have testes, and they may have XY chromosomes, unlike most women who have XX chromosomes.

Semenya has been subjected to over a decade of speculation and testing of her sex, to determine whether she is "in fact" female. The ruling earlier this month states that she must lower her testosterone levels  (via drugs) if she is to compete in female events.

Below I argue that we should have sex segregation in strength / stamina sports and as such, it is fair and reasonable for sex testing to occur and for sporting adjudication bodies to make rulings regarding the sex of athletes. Although it might be annoying for Semenya herself, it is fair for Sport that the ruling reached the decision it did. (For the flip side, there's a great article here giving 10 reasons why the ruling is flawed.)

Let's get back to first principles: why do we have sex segregation in sports? We have it because on average, men are stronger and faster than women. That's not to say all men are stronger or faster than all women, of course; if we take some top female athletes I'm sure they'd be faster than most men with office jobs.

I recall when I was at Keele University doing my undergrad degree back in the 90s, some of the female sports teams had an idea to prove how great girls are, which rather backfired. The idea was this: the female teams would play male teams from other sports clubs at the female team's own game - so for example, the female football team would play football matches against the male hockey team and the male rowing team; the female athletics team would play athletics events against the male rugby team and the male swimming team. As I said, it backfired horribly, as the women's teams lost at their own games a startlingly high number of times. What was intended to show Girl Power instead only showed that men were better at sports - even ones they'd hardly ever played - than the women who practiced them every week! It was a tough bullet to bite (I was on the hockey team and we got trounced by the male cricket team in a hockey match). It showed us that men were faster and stronger than women were, and that gave them a huge advantage over us.

If men were to compete "on a level playing field" against women, then Olympic teams would probably consist of over 95% men. There are some events - say, shooting, horse riding, diving, synchronised swimming and a few others, where strength and speed are not so important and women could fare well again men. But for the most part, men will outperform women in almost every sport. Most people think that because of this, there should be men's events and separate women's events. This seems fair in the same way that we wouldn't expect a primary school football team to compete against a university football team; the primary school team should play other primary school teams, to make for a fairer contest.

So let's go with the idea that it's not fair for men to compete against women because men have greater strength, speed and possibly stamina too.

Now for a trickier question: what is a man, and what is a woman? In the old days this was an easier question to answer: at birth, babies with a penis were called boys, everyone else was called a girl, and that sex stayed with the person for their whole life.

Now things are a little more complicated. There are people whose sex doesn't correspond to their gender identity; there are people with ambiguous genitalia; and there are people whose sex hormone levels are unusually high or low. Of course, such people have probably existed throughout human history, but weren't recognised. Quite simply, way back when, if you were deemed to have a penis at birth then you were a man, and if not then you were a wonan, end of story. So those who had female bodies but felt they were male, were still classed as female. Those with ambiguous genitalia were classified at birth and that was that. People who had, for example, testes inside the body, no uterus, but an externally "normal" looking vulva would have been classified as girls, and it would probably never have been discovered that they had testes. And the same goes for those with female genitalia but abnormally high testosterone levels - they would have been classified as girls and probably no one would ever have discovered their high testosterone levels.

But that's not the world we live in today: those things can be discovered, and then we have issues for people such as Caster Semenya.

Let's ask ourselves what it is that makes men stronger and faster than women. I'm not an anatomist, but the people in the know suggest that it's because men are taller and have proportionally greater muscle mass than women do (both of which are caused by testosterone levels) and that testosterone levels themselves increase endurance and oxygen transfer or something or other. I don't really know, but the experts do know, and they say that higher testosterone levels give athletes an advantage over others with lower levels.

Testosterone is what causes bodies to develop into a male physique - taller, more muscular, broader shoulders, and so on. And of course, high testosterone levels are closely correlated with external male genitalia. So we usually see higher testosterone levels in men than in women. I haven't been able to find the exact details of Semenya's testosterone levels, but I'm guessing they must be closer to normal male levels than to normal female levels - or at least, that she has substantially more testosterone than most women or most female athletes.

So if it's testosterone which gives a person an advantage, (and which is usually correlated with being a man), then it seems right that someone such as Semenya whose testosterone levels are excessively high is prevented from competing against other women with a more average level of testosterone.

But then, so the argument can go, what about people who have an advantage because they are tall, sturdily built, have long legs, long arms, a bendy body etc.? They have an advantage that was afforded to them by a mere whimsy of genetic chance, but they are permitted to compete against other smaller, chubbier athletes as if it were a fair contest. Also, it cannot be denied that some ethnic groups seem to have an advantage over others in particular events: the Jamaicans do well in sprint races, but not so well in swimming; the Kenyans do well in marathons, but not so well in sprints ... so if we want to make things fairer by counteracting genetic traits, we'll have a lot of work to do with regard to non-sexual genetic traits.

But the point is this: we don't (thank goodness) segregate events based on ethnic group or height - although some events such as judo, boxing etc do separate events based on weight, because weight is an advantage in such sports. But we do - universally in the world of sport, I think - separate events based on the sexes.

If we think it is fair and right to prevent men from competing against women because they have a physical advantage, then we need a way to determine the sexes in a definitive way so that it is clear - for the purposes of competing in the sport, at least - who is in which category. I think it would be fairly universally agreed upon that women should not have to compete against men. (I imagine even staunch feminists would agree on sex segregation - especially if they were to experience humiliating defeats at the hands of men in the same way my university colleagues and I did!)

So if we want sex segregation then we need a segregation method. The Court  of Arbitration for Sport have used testosterone levels as one method of segregation, and there are many people - including Semenya herself - who say that testosterone levels is not a fair method of segregation, so what are the alternatives? Here are three possibilities:

- external genitalia
- genetic sex chromosome testing
- gender identity

None of these are unproblematic.

First of all, external genitalia. Imagine the indignity and the personal intrusion and embarrassment of having a sports adjudicator judge the status of your genitals to see if they are female enough to run in a race! But embarrassment aside, it would not be an unequivocal test which satisfied everyone, would it? Because there are people with ambiguous genitalia who would then be test cases for whether a penis is penisy enough to be called a penis. Also, because if a male sportsman were so inclined, in a bid to win medals, he might decide to have surgery to give him a vagina. Unlikely but probably some might try it (see my argument below about gender identity and the danger of fake transsexuals).

Sex chromosome testing is an option rather similar to what they are currently doing, where unseen genetic markers are used to determine an athlete's sex. A potential problem with this is that there will probably be some people who are physically male and identify as male and are trying to make it as sportsmen - and perhaps not succeeding - and then a test reveals that they have XX chromosomes and suddenly they can compete against women - even though they are physically male. Then they are suddenly a really successful athlete! This is far from ideal. Besides, this is unlikely to please the people who support Semenya's case because it is thought that she has XY chromosomes, so if chromosome testing is the decider, then she should compete against the men.

Gender identity has been a buzzword (well, a buzz phrase) for the past decade or two, even though people with gender dysphoria probably existed throughout human history. In everyday life - shopping, the workplace etc - it is nice if we respect people's gender identity, even if this means that we let people who are physically male into female areas such as toilets because they identify as female. And aside from (probably unfounded) worries about sexual predators, this doesn't really cause a problem. It doesn't make much difference whether the person in the cubicle next to mine is a cisgender man, an intersex person, a non-binary person, a transsexual woman, or a cisgender woman... but it does make a difference if these people are competing against me in a race. This is because - as noted above - testosterone levels enhance performance. The average cisgender man has higher testosterone than the average cisgender woman. I don't know enough about gender dysphoria or non-binariness to know whether they are correlated with differences in sex hormones, but if it turns out that a transgender woman (whether or not she has had gender reassignment surgery) has testosterone levels which are normal for a cisgender man, then that person has an athletic advantage over cisgender women athletes. Simply claiming to identify as a woman cannot be sufficient reason to allow that person to compete against women. Or else the event is not an event for women, but for anyone who decides to say they're a woman. Boxing weight categories are based on boxers' actual weights, not merely the weights they claim to be - and the same should be true for sex. "Ah, but gender is different because if one identifies as female then one is female; but identifying as a Featherweight does not mean one is a Featherweight. The two are not analogous" I hear you say. And that is true, but the point is that anyone can claim they identify as female and we would just have to take them at their word. This is fine in most aspect of life, but in sports we'd have to let them compete as a female sportsperson. A (largely unfounded) worry about transsexuals and toilets is that straight cisgender men could gain access to female bathrooms by claiming to identify as women. What would such men gain from pretending to be transgender in a bathroom situation? Some say they'd gain the chance to hurt or rape women; this seems like very little "gain", given that a man can walk into a female bathroom to rape women at any time without claiming to be transgender. A would-be rapist would not be deterred by the woman symbol on the door. So a bad man gets almost no gain from pretending to be transgender. But what could a man gain from claiming to be a transgender sportswoman (if gender identity is what counts in sport)? Well, he could gain thousands or millions of pounds. Consider: the US Open tennis championship has $3.8 million for the winner of the women's singles. Are there any half decent male tennis players with little moral integrity? Why yes I would think there are (and yes he might only need to be half decent to beat a top ranking female tennis player). And that is a second reason why gender identity cannot be the only factor to decide in which event one competes. (The first was mentioned above - namely that transsexual women may well have male physiques and testosterone levels in the normal male range, giving them a physical advantage over cisgender women.) Gender identity should be respected in everyday life, but should play no part at all in sporting sex segregation. When huge sums of money are involved, any man can claim to identify as a woman, win a few huge cash sums, and then 'revert to being male again. It would be immoral, but allowed under te rules if we were to say that gender identity is what counts.

So where does that leave us? We could let men and women (and all the people who have gender dysphoria, disorders of sexual development, and everyone else) compete against one another without restriction, and thus confine almost all female athletes to obscurity... or we can accept that men and women should compete against their own sex. Some sort of 'middle ground' could involve a handicap system such that all people have their testosterone levels, chromosomes (or whatever we decide) assessed, and are given a handicap score or a head start. This would certainly change things drastically, and could mean that the fastest and strongest people no longer win the events... This would seem odd, not to mention confusing to watch (I like to watch the Paralympics but I do find it frustrating when the person who comes first in the race is deemed not to have won because of his disability score; sometimes I give up watching the races and just read the results. This could happen if everyone has a testosterone score which deducts or adds points to their score: how would we know who'd won?! It would perhaps be fairer, but a lot less compelling.)

If we choose to clearly segregate by sex into just two categories, then there must necessarily be a way of discerning who competes against whom, and whatever method is chosen, some people will be placed into a category which they or others might see as objectionable. Unfortunately that is the price to be paid. Chromosome testing and testosterone levels seems as good and as scientific method as possible, and so although it may not please Semenya and her coach, it is reasonable, and it protects women's sporting events from competitors who have genetically male hormone levels and/or chromosomes, which gives them an advantage on a par with a man.

Should we ban some Christmas songs?

Baby it's cold outside has met with some controversy recently, with some radio stations refusing to play it because it endorses pressuring women into sex, or even date rape. A couple of weeks ago, before I'd heard this news, I was musing to myself that perhaps the lyrics should be: "I really can't stay / OK fair enough, take care." And then the rest of the song could be an instrumental! I find Tom Jones a bit creepy, and the thought of him trying to convince a less than willing young lady to spend the night turns my stomach.

A man who just won't take no for an answer in real life might be a problem... But this is a song, not real life. Tom Jones' creepiness notwithstanding, it seems to me that really, the song needn't be interpreted as date rape, as some people have suggested. I would think that many of us in relationships have had conversations where one partner says they need to go somewhere, and the other tries to convince them to stay. So I'm not convinced that the song is endorsing anything untoward, and I don't think it needs to be banned.

But what of the other contenders for most offensive Christmas song? People have objected to Do they know it's Christmas and Fairytale of New York too.

Do they know its Christmas has been torn to shreds. It's been accused of treating Africa as one homogenous culture, and making factually inaccurate claims (no rivers flow - what about the Nile? There won't be snow in Africa - what about atop Kilimanjaro?) And it's been charged with being patronising (do they know its Christmas? Well yes they probably do, given how many Africans are Christians) and it is said to propagate the "white saviour" mentality. I discussed this issue in another post, in relation to the issue that misinformation and white saviour mentalities help to secure more donations for Comic Relief, and I argued that documentary footage for the programme ought to be honest even if fewer donations are received as a result. But a charity song seems a different kettle of fish, where factual accuracy seems less important. Or as Geldof so eloquently put it "It's a pop song, not a doctoral thesis. They [critics] can fuck off." So Do they know it's Christmas can stay off the naughty list, methinks.

Fairytale of New York is about two people who fall in love, then it all turns sour. With gambling, alcoholism, and epithets such as 'slut' and 'faggot', it doesn't seem the most likely contender for a favourite Christmas song - yet it is. Those words are offensive, but why should that make us ban a song? Bleep it if necessary. I must admit that when I heard my little boy singing "you scumbag, you maggot..." I did think oh no please don't say it. But he followed it up with "you piece of old junk" (which he obviously borrowed from the previous verse - and cleaned up the language too!)

But songs with dodgy lyrics aren't a specifically Christmassy problem. I had the same feeling when I heard him singing "for 24 years I've been living next door to Alice. Alice? Who..." But again, mercifully, his innocent little ears told him the lyrics which followed were "Alice? Who's the talking Alice?" So yes, Fairytale of New York does have some words in it we don't want our kids to learn, but it's still a great Christmas song (and one of my son's favourites), and deserves to be played. I heard a version by Ronan Keating which used the lyrics "you're cheap and you're haggard" instead of "you cheap lousy faggot", so that should hopefully satisfy critics.

"But Christmas is wholesome"

There are thousands of songs out there with offensive themes and explicit lyrics. It seems to me that rap songs are frequently about knife crime, drive-by shootings, nonconsensual sex, and that the "songs" are littered with words like bitch, ho, ni**er and of course the F word. But these songs are widely available and widely enjoyed. Compared to rap music, Fairytale of New York is like a nursery rhyme (not Baa baa black sheep though, that song is as offensive as black coffee and a blackboard.)

But maybe the objection to Fairytale but not to rap songs is grounded in the idea that Christmas songs ought to be more wholesome than non-Christmas songs?

Well...

I was born and raised in Macclesfield; a nondescript northern town whose only real claim to fame is the Macc Lads - a rock band whose songs have some... um... controversial lyrics. Most of their songs are about getting drunk, sex, chips and gravy, fighting, and bodily functions. To give you a flavour, here's an excerpt from the Macc Lads' song Fluffy Pup "I spent last night tryna chuck me bird / But she were clinging to me leg like a lovesick turd / I said "Your tits are too small and your legs are too short / I want a fit bird from Sunday Sport / I can't hear me records when you sit on me face" […] "You can cook / you can fuck / you can do the washing up / but I've had enough / go on, fuck off..."

You probably wouldn't expect a band like the Macc Lads to produce a Christmas song, but they did. When Feed the World was in the charts back in 1985, lead singer and lyricist Muttley Macc Lad didn't pass up the opportunity to offend, and wrote a little Christmas ditty called Feed your face. Here's an excerpt: "Watching Live Aid 'Sit up straight you scruffy ni**er' [...] Feeling peckish so I went down the chippy, bought some pies and pasties / didn't give any to the starving ni**ers so I'm a fucking Nazi / Feed your face, don't give them a second thought". Now that is an example of an offensive Christmas song which doesn't get much air time. Geldof quite rightly slammed it. But should the Macc Lads' song be banned? No, I think not. (If you find the N word as objectionable as I do, then it's worth reminding ourselves that rap uses this word with far greater frequency than the Macc Lads do - in fact, I think this may be their only use of the term.) It's just music, and - like rap - people should, generally speaking, be allowed to listen to what they please.

John Stuart Mill (I love Mill!) in On Liberty wrote that offence is not harm. There should be freedom of speech, and that involves the freedom to offend. As ever, Mill hits the nail on the head. You might be offended by Feed your face, Feed the world, or indeed Baa baa black sheep, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to exist.

Am I a hypocrite?

My last blog post was calling for books about child abuse to be banned, and now here I am supporting artistic freedom - am I being hypocritical? Well, I think not, and actually, last week's argument and this week's argument are very similar.

Last week:
X is similar to Y
X is banned (illegal)
Therefore Y should be banned (illegal)
(Where X was child porn, and Y was child abuse books)

This week:
X is similar to Y
X is not banned
Therefore Y should not be banned
(Where X is rap music, the Macc Lads etc, and Y is the Fairytale of New York etc)

All I'm calling for is consistency in what we ban or don't ban. If music is an area where we support artistic freedom to the extent that we allow music about drive-by shootings and fights, then a song about a man trying to get a woman to spend the night, or a song which uses the word "faggot" is small fry.

If someone were to turn my argument against me and call for consistency in my beliefs, they'd need to show that a book about child abuse has enough in common with a Christmas pop song that they ought to be treated the same. I think Socrates himself would struggle to show that.

Conclusion

Some well-loved Christmas songs have the odd word or sentiment which some might find at odds with 2018 political correctness, but if people enjoy listening to such songs, let them. It's Christmas after all, live and let live.

If you aren't in the PC brigade, then you might like this tongue in cheek list of offensive Christmas songs. Some amusing examples are "folks dressed up like Eskimos" = cultural appropriation;  "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake" = Santa is a peeping Tom. And how about "Children gays open-mouthed, taken by surprise" = supporting homosexual abuse of children.

Happy Christmas.

Driverless cars, the trolley problem, and tyranny of the majority

Today BBC News ran an article entitled Driverless cars: who should die in a crash? The news story has come about because researchers at MIT have conducted a study analysing more than 40 million responses to an online 'trolley problem'-style ethical survey.

The trolley problem is a classic philosophy problem (which, by chance, I taught today to a class of Year 5 pupils). The problem is this:

A train is hurtling along a track; and on the track ahead are five innocent people who will die if you do nothing. You can't stop the train (its brakes have failed) but you can pull a lever to switch it onto another track - where it will kill just one innocent person. Should you pull the lever or not?

My 'Trolley Problem' powerpoint for the Year 5 pupils.
Several of them said it would matter if some of the people were
criminals; no one said the people's skin colour or gender mattered.

Most people (and indeed the pupils I taught today) say that one should pull the lever based on purely utilitarian grounds - this can be phrased in the words of Spock from Star Trek: "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". In other words, although it's bad for one person to die, it's even worse for five people to die, so pull the lever and kill one.

It's OK for us to hypothesise about what we'd do in this very unlikely scenario, because it's just a thought experiment: it's not real. But driverless cars are forcing us to reconsider this problem not as a hypothetical possibility, but as a very real possibility. If a driverless car is in a no-win situation where its brakes have failed and someone will die, who should it be? The passengers, the toddler on the zebra crossing, or the old ladies on the pavement?

Well, the people at MIT designed a survey / experiment ("The Moral Machine") to find out people's responses to these very sorts of questions. So far so good you might think, but here comes the troubling part: BBC News quotes the MIT people as saying:

"Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms, and to the policymakers that will regulate them."

Now although this falls short of their suggesting that we use the results of the survey to inform the moral programming of driverless cars, it certainly seems to be in that ballpark. But this, I maintain, is a dangerous and morally troubling step towards eugenics-by-driverless-car. Why? Because in the Moral Machine survey, people's choices about who should die and who should be saved are based on judgments about factors such as age, gender, class, weight, and how law-abiding the person is.

Screenshot from the Moral Machine survey

An optional section of the survey involves moving sliders according to how important you think that particular factor is. For example, you can say that saving higher class over lower class is really important, and saving the young over the old is fairly important. One factor which didn't feature in the survey was race/ethnicity/religion. The people at MIT probably thought it was just too controversial to see whether people would save a black man rather than a white man, or a Muslim woman rather than a Christian woman - but these are probably factors which would yield interesting and distasteful results --but no less interesting and no more distasteful than the actual results of the survey, which show that people choose to save:

• Women more than men
• The young more than the old
• Fit people more than fat people
• Middle class more than lower class

So why am I troubled by this? Well, driverless cars are on their way, whether we like it or not. And they will be faced with genuine moral decisions, whether we like it or not. And they will need some moral guidance or 'rules' to follow in order to make those split-second decisions about whether the fat young person or the thin old person should die. Yes, a moral system programmed into the cars will be absolutely essential - however....

Basing the moral system of a driverless car on the results of a survey - however large - is a huge issue. Even if we ignore the fact that there is no barrier to the same person taking the survey more than once (I took it twice) and even if we ignore the fact that details of the pictures in the survey aren't immediately clear (in my first time around, I didn't notice that some people were crossing the road on the red man, nor that some of the stick men were supposed to represent homeless people) there is still a massive problem in the form of the tyranny of the majority. 

John Stuart Mill (I love that guy!) in On Liberty wrote that we must take steps to guard against the tyranny of the majority - this is when a large group of people get their way simply because they are greater in number than a small group of people. Now if you ask me, the majority getting their way is unproblematic if we've taken a vote about whether we should have chocolate ice cream or strawberry ice cream - or about whether we should visit a castle or the beach tomorrow... but the majority verdict really does become tyrannical when the issues at stake are the welfare, lives and rights of people. And these are the very things that are at stake with these driverless cars trolley-problem-style dilemmas. The results of the Moral Machine survey show that the majority prioritise the young over the old, and the rich over the poor - and suppose a similar survey also shows the majority prioritise able-bodied people over disabled people, and white people over brown people. This alone is disturbing enough, but if we then proceed to program the moral system of the majority into driverless cars, and set them free on our public highways - well, it's the tyranny of the majority at its most foul, and a recipe for eugenics by carcrash.

We simply cannot allow the vulgar prejudices of the majority to inform the moral systems of driverless cars. Driverless cars need a way to determine which action to take, of course, but this should be based on non-prejudicial factors such as the likelihood of surviving the crash, the number of people, and the location of the impact: the age, gender, class (etc.) of people should not - ever - be a factor in decision-making about who lives and who dies.

The funny side of disablism?

A few days ago, a comedian with cerebral palsy and who cannot speak won Britain’s Got Talent 2018 – and the runner-up was a comedian with Asperger’s syndrome. (I know my last blog post was about BGT too, but would you believe I haven’t actually watched it - except the two men I'm talking about here.) Some people are talking as if this is a watershed moment for disability, but I'm wondering whether we’ll look back in years to come and feel uncomfortable about what has happened. Should we be laughing about disablism and disability?

Disabled people can get a pretty raw deal at times; I am able-bodied (now), but I spent most of my twenties in a wheelchair and in pain, and so I have first-hand experience of some of the obstacles (both literal and figurative) that disabled people must overcome. There is some debate surrounding whether autism is a disability (cerebral palsy is recognised as one) but for now I’ll sidestep this debate and just talk about both men as being disabled.

Disablism exists, and disabled people are largely excluded from TV and positions of power. So on the one hand, it’s great to see that disabled people are getting some air-time on a prime-time talent show. Decades ago, this simply would not have happened, so that’s progress. It’s also progress that the voters – who decided the winners of the show – have voted a disabled comedian to win the show.

What made bothered me slightly was that the winner – the Lost Voice Guy – made so many jokes about his disability. (This was true of the runner-up Robert White to a far lesser extent, although he did make some jokes about his social awkwardness.) Winner Lee Ridley’s cerebral palsy means that he is unable to speak, and he used a voice synthesiser to tell his jokes on stage. Many of his jokes centred around his disability: his voice synthesiser sounds like the “Cashier number four please” voice you hear at the post office; someone on the bus wanted him to give up his seat as another person was more disabled; people asking him “what’s wrong with you?”; his mum and dad still wondering whether his first word will be ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’… the list goes on. Even his T-shirts sported captions such as “I’m in it for the parking”. His jokes were funny, and I found myself laughing along with the audience, thinking the guy was a really good comedian, but his routine should give us pause for thought.

If disabled people were treated fairly and disablism didn't exist, then this sort of routine wouldn’t be possible. Many of his jokes revolved around the ways in which he’s been treated negatively, discriminated against, and the obstacles he faces, and people might suggest that it’s good that he can ‘see the funny side’ of his disability and disablism by sending himself up, but experiencing disablism is not something anyone should have to see the funny side of.

A few decades back, when people of colour were first ‘allowed’ to perform comedy for a mainly white audience in the UK and US, it wasn’t uncommon for their routine to include jokes about their race, or racism they’ve faced. People laughed about it then, but I think we’d feel pretty uncomfortable now listening to a black person joke about their fear of getting shot by a police officer and suchlike. We feel uncomfortable because we think that racism shouldn’t happen, and laughing about it trivialises it. So the fact that the Lost Voice Guy can have people in stitches with jokes about his disability and disablism might not be the watershed moment that it seems to be. Nonetheless, it might be a step forward. For a long time, people of colour weren’t part of the comedy scene in the UK and US, and now they are – and so that transitionary period where they made jokes about their skin colour may have been a first awkward step forward towards acceptance. But a black comedian who is popular because he makes jokes about a range of topics (or a particular topic, such as politics or sport) would surely be preferable to a black comedian who makes jokes about the racism he faces on a daily basis. (Note that I’m not saying that people should keep quiet about the racism they experience; I’m saying that the racism shouldn’t happen in the first place.) Similarly, disabled comedians who continually joke about their disability and disablism are, for me at least, an awkward first step towards a time when we can hopefully accept a disabled comedian not because he makes funny jokes about disability, but because he makes funny jokes about all kinds of things.

Some might say that I am being overly defensive, and that I should lighten up – after all, the Lost Voice Guy (presumably!) wrote the self-deprecating jokes himself, and the audience liked the routine, so why am I putting a downer on it all? The reason why is that disablism is a daily reality for many people, and being on the receiving end is a humiliating and soul-destroying experience. I am in no way a criticising the Lost Voice Guy (or Robert White), because comedy can be a way of regaining control over a situation and dealing with negative treatment, not to mention a way of drawing people’s attention to the fact that (a) disablism exists, and (b) disabled people are in many ways that really matter, just normal people. I think that disabled comedians should be allowed to joke about their experiences if they want to, but what we should take away from it all is a harsher message: jokes about disablism are only possible because disablism exists. We should work towards ending disablism, not just laughing about it.

Bigots Got Talent: why we should separate issues of talent from issues of bigotry and criminality

When news about Kevin Spacey's alleged sexual misconduct emerged, it wasn't long before the public were tweeting that people should boycott all his movies, as well as the upcoming House of Cards series which was due to screen on Netflix. And recently a news story has emerged regarding a Britain's Got Talent (BGT) contestant who has liked and commented on homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist YouTube videos. Below I argue that we should separate art from the artist; that we can with a clear conscience enjoy the talents of Kevin Spacey and Jenny Darren (the BGT contestant) whilst condemning their (alleged) actions in their private lives. The issues in the two cases are slightly different, so I'll deal with them separately: BGT first, and Kevin Spacey second.

So, a contestant on BGT liked some YouTube videos which were by all accounts, expounding bigoted opinions. The show has apparently 'reprimanded' her, but I'm not fully clear on why they have reprimanded her. Racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia are undoubtedly unsavoury, (prima facie) wrong, and in some cases illegal, but what concern is it of the BGT team if a contestant is a bigot in her life offstage? The show is Britain's Got Talent, not Britain's Got Politically Correct Viewpoints. The woman's talent (or lack thereof - I haven't seen her perform) are entirely independent from her ability to sing, dance or otherwise perform. It's not clear to me why BGT should only permit people with benign and politically correct viewpoints perform. If she were a drug addict, a football hooligan or a dog-beater would they reprimand her for that too? These things are horrible, problematic and even wrong ways of life, but they would not detract from her talent.

If someone's act on stage involved dressing up as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, having a bigoted stand up routine, or singing racist songs, then I would thoroughly understand and endorse the programme stepping in to prevent such broadcasts, but that is substantively different from a singer who performs a crowdpleasing song, but has offensive views while offstage. Even if a performer was a crowdpleaser onstage but was abusing other contestants while offstage, I'd understand the bosses telling the performer that their behaviour is inappropriate. But when the performer's views do not form part of their act, nor their behaviour while at the shows, it's not BGT's place to police contestant's viewpoints. 

The winner of BGT will be chosen by the public, and the public may well take someone's personal views into account when voting, but then it has ceased to be a talent show, and instead become a popularity contest. To be honest, it sails pretty close to that line most of the time anyway, with talentless but likeable people faring pretty well in the public vote. However, this doesn't mean that winners should be chosen in such a way. If BGT really is a holistic assessment of contestants' opinions and lifestyles, then the show should just come out and say it - and perhaps rebrand itself as Britain's Got Nice People With Talent. It's not as catchy, admittedly, but it would be more accurate.

In sport, the person who runs the fastest, throws the farthest or scores the most points is the winner. If that person happens to be something of a bigot or an otherwise unpleasant person in their private life, then that does not feature in whether or not they are awarded the gold medal. It seems evident to me that, with the few exceptions I mention (the opinions are on-screen or directed at a fellow colleague), this is the way talent shows and entertainment should be. In sport, if someone is an excellent sports(wo)man but a bit of a $@#! in their private life, then so be it; that doesn't - and shouldn't - prevent them from being recognised as an excellent footballer, runner, tennis player etc. Acts which occur within the sport - a footballer shouting racist abuse at a member of the opposing team, for example - isn't and shouldn't be tolerated, but what happens off-pitch should stay off-pitch.

The Kevin Spacey (Weinstein, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Cosby, or any of a seemingly endless list of male celebs of a certain age who've been accused of sexual misconduct) situation is a little different, since it involves not just offensive views, but (allegedly) criminal behaviour. If one were to be casting for a new film, and looking for an actor to play a significant role, one would need to take into account the safety of the other members of the cast and crew. Bringing a convicted sexual assaulter or rapist into the cast could spell trouble (and no, I don't think someone merely being accused of something by a single person is reason enough to exclude him, because not all accusations are true.) Kevin Spacey has not denied the accusations, and he has offered an apology of sorts - so  this might be considered an admission of guilt. Given this, it's reasonable for any future casting directors to avoid casting him, for the safety of others. But retrospectively boycotting all films or series with Kevin Spacey in them is just ludicrous. People who've decided not to watch House of Cards, Seven, The Usual Suspects etc in virtue of the fact that it has KS in it are misguided. I understand the motivation is that they don't want KS to receive any money for his work (but since films usually pay actors a set fee rather than continual royalties, this boycott doesn't deprive KS of any money at all.) If anyone is deprived of money, it will be the directors, producers etc who in all likelihood are decent hardworking people who had no idea hat KS was a wrong'un. Depriving them of profit because they lacked the clairvoyance to know who was a sexual predator and who wasn't, (in the absence of any allegations,) is absurd and pointless. Kevin Spacey has been in some fantastic movies, and they don't become any less fantastic in virtue of knowing that he's (allegedly) a $&@!# in his private life. 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post where I argued that we should stop criticising Donald Trump for his tiny hands or silly hair, because these features are not relevant to his ability to be a good President. And here again I make a similar point; knowing that Kevin Spacey has been accused of criminal behaviour, or that a contestant on BGT has liked some anti-Semitic YouTube videos is entirely independent of their ability to be a talented performer. It strikes me as decidedly odd that when the bigoted opinions and behaviour of someone really matter for his job (because he makes laws, for example) we focus on his hairdo, but when the bigoted opinions of someone don't matter for their job, (because they're a singer or actor, for example) we're all about judging the off-screen behaviour as if it's central to their job. In the arts, art can be separated from artist, and (allegedly) bad people can be brilliantly talented. We can and we should admire the talent while condemning the (alleged) bigoted or criminal behaviour.

Stop ad hominem criticisms of Trump

Judge his actions, not his hair.

Trump is orange. His hair is ridiculous. He has tiny hands. He has a micropenis. He looked at the sun. There seems to be no end of ad hominem attacks against President Trump, and they really ought to stop.

I argue three interlinked reasons why we should stop with these sorts of criticisms:
1) It weakens the force of any criticisms we have about his policies and behaviour (which are the real problem)
2) It teaches children (and reinforces in teens and adults) the idea that looks are really important
3) His hairstyle, hand size etc are irrelevant to his ability to be a world leader

The first reason is the most important, and I shall deal with it first.

Trump's behaviour as President (and indeed before he was President) is contemptible. His "locker room talk" about grabbing women by the pussy is inappropriate for a President, not to mention that the things he describes amount to sexual assault. He has openly flaunted the fact that his privilege as a wealthy man has meant that he is able to get away with sexist, objectionable and even criminal behaviour towards women. His policies on immigration are troubling, and his disdain for Muslims is prejudiced, antagonistic and discriminatory. His policies regarding abortion are deeply troubling. And his aggressive and defiant tit-for-tat attitude towards North Korea may be the catalyst which begins
World War 3 (although a meeting between the two of them is now on the cards.) I could go on and on listing Trump's objectionable and offensive behaviour and policies, but this is unnecessary: suffice to say that he is a vile and dangerous man.

Constant criticisms of Trump's hairstyle, hand size etc serve as distractors: we watch the magician waving a red hankie around while he pockets the ball which we'd taken our eye off. If we get into the habit of criticising Trump's every feature, we have our attention diverted away from his genuine flaws to the extent that it weakens the impact of meaningful criticisms of him. Suppose the newspapers run the following stories over a 10 day period:

Monday: Trump has tiny hands
Tuesday: Trump walks around with his shoelaces undone
Wednesday: Trump calls a woman a 'hottie'
Thursday: Trump 's hair blows around in the wind, looking ridiculous
Friday: Trump says that Muslims should get out of America or suffer the consequences
Saturday: Trump's suit jacket doesn't match his trousers
Sunday: Trump 's fingernails are too long
Monday: Trump looks at the sun
Tuesday: Trump signs a law allowing all Mexican illegal immigrants to be put in forced labour camps
Wednesday: Someone makes a statue of trump with a micropenis

It's easy to see how the really disturbing stories get lost in the smorgasbord of futile ad hominem criticisms of Trump's appearance and other minutia, and when we become accustomed to a daily diet of Trump criticisms, it weakens the force of the things which we really need to pay attention to. We are so distracted and fatigued: blah blah, another Trump story. The constant barrage of hand / hair criticisms are irrelevant and they should be stopped, lest we ignore the real reason why we should be alarmed by Trump's time in office (and his behaviour in general). His policies and behaviour should be the foci of our criticisms of him; not his hairstyle.

Judge his actions, not his moustache.

Consider how it would seem if we were to criticise Hitler for using too much hair gel, or for having a silly moustache. These criticisms may well be true, but they are missing the more important point: that the Holocaust is the real reason we should criticise Hitler. Criticising Hitler's moustache is actually pretty offensive, as it implies that his moustache is the worst thing about him; it belittles and ignores the true horrors of what took place before and during WW2 under Nazi rule. Now, I'm not suggesting that Trump is in the same league as Hitler (yet) but the analogy works: criticise the behaviour of the man, not his looks.

Now I consider my second reason for ceasing these criticisms of Trump's appearance. When the media focuses on Trump's physical features rather than his behaviour, it reinforces to children that these things are important. Children learn from the examples set by adults, and so when we make fun of someone for having small hands or silly hair, children see that these are legitimate criticisms to make of a person. The children may reproduce this towards others in the playground, on social media, or later in their adult lives. Moreover, they may come to think that appearance is an apt way to chose a political leader, and that would be disastrous. Politics is already too focused on style over substance - reinforcing it with the next generation of voters is not going to do anyone any favours. We need to set a good example to children and demonstrate to them that a person's hairstyle, skin tone, and body shape and size are less important than their behaviour; we can't do this with a constant influx of "Trump has silly hair" stories.

The third reason we should abandon these ad hominem criticisms of Trump is that the size of his hands, the style of his hair and the colour of his face is irrelevant to his ability to be a world leader. In politics, even if in no other area of life, we need strong leaders with just policies and fair outlooks; if such a leader happens to look less than perfect, this should be irrelevant to us. Now, I do not believe that Trump is strong, fair and just, but if he were, then his hands, hair, face or penis size should not matter to us, and so they should not matter to us if we think he is unjust and dangerous either (recall my point about Hitler's silly moustache).

If we believe that there is any value at all in avoiding prejudice and discrimination, we should shun these attacks on Trump's appearance: if he were a woman, non-white, disabled or from another minority group, we would (maybe, I think) not tolerate criticisms of his appearance. Trump himself may make fun of people for things which are not their fault, but we (rightly) find this abhorrent; let us not sink to his level by making fun of his hair, hands, face and so on. This would make us little more than hypocrites. So let us focus on the real reasons we should find Trump objectionable: his sexist, racist, disabilist, transphobic, and generally bigoted behaviour - not the size of his hands or his silly hairstyle.