Alternative Editorial: Looks Like Evolution
In the era of media studies and decolonising, when words and language are being devalued for the way they maintain the status quo it helps to look for interesting signs of change in the images and sounds that dominate the public space.
Images have always been used to attract audiences to content, but in the age of Instagram, Tik Tok and Facebook, images have come to do much more work, often making textual content unnecessary. The previously dark arts of advertising have today become more common skills, as more and more of us can capture complex agendas in the blink of an eye.
In the news this weekend was the Brits awards, news headlines informing us of the winners and the controversies. Many papers reported on how making the nominations gender neutral failed to ensure equality, or include non-binary candidates. While the first year of this change saw women winning as much as men, this second year has fallen back into running an overwhelmingly male list, with a dearth of female and non-binary winners. Sales figures showed a great variety of talent in the best artist category—but all the nominees were men.
At the same time, when the mainstream news tends to deliver diversity as a series of battles, claiming even that there is growing censorship of traditional terms, the Brits were noticeably different. Over the years, the parade of artists arriving at the event has been a celebration of difference. Men identifying as men appeared in classic suits, in dresses and deliberately engineered combinations. Non-binary artists came wreathed in art works that defied description - check Sam Smith. More than one woman displayed her baby bump as the centrepiece of attention (as did Rihanna at the Superbowl event) - making Motherhood the point.
While the Brits’ spectacle did all the work of displaying difference as joyful abundance (rather than sparking tension), we should try to capture it as a moment of political disruption.
Firstly, note the direction of travel towards feminisation all round. While there was a plethora of men stealing from what was once strictly female style and adornment - skirts, make-up, nail varnish - there was very little going in the opposite direction. (Adwoa Aboah maybe an exception in her strict black suit and trousers, but still bejewelled).
Harry Styles at Brit Awards 2023
In business, women have of course adopted a more masculine form of dress for half a century in the office. Not only wearing suits and trousers but even shoulder pads to emulate the masculine ideal, in a public space where men still held overwhelming power. But in the private space, stereotypes of men and women in the late 20th Century kept their wardrobes distinct: men sticking with functional clothes, women having far more license to adorn, to be creative to emphasise the shape of their bodies. We lived with clear binary definitions in non-work spaces.
At the end of the last century, a man wearing feminine dress (while not in drag) - Kurt Cobain, Prince, Billy Porter - was a rebellious act, a defiance of conservative, and then capitalist structures that upheld stereotyping. But the radical opening up of the public space via the internet has changed the context of these acts. Digitality gives us access to so much diversity of expression, gaining the ability to fill its flows with so much soft imagery - kittens, babies, anime - previously shared in the private domain.
This process has blurred the boundaries for all genders. Sam White described their own shift away from a heterotypical masculinity in conflict with feminine traits. This wasn’t a protest, but a letting-go of having to choose between genders - feeling freer to be something less easy to define.
Fair enough, we might say—that’s the carnivalesque world of art and music. Is there any sign that will translate into the wider world of gender representation in the public sphere, where struggles around gender identity remain polarised? By this we mean not in the straightforward feminist terms of equality between men and women. But more complexly, the battle for and against a shift in the public understanding (backed by law) about what it means to be a woman or a man.
Contending for the same front pages as captured by the Brit Awards over the past week have been the contrasting images of male heroism arriving from Syria, Turkey and Ukraine. On the one hand, we’ve watched highly emotional scenes of the White Helmets - officially Syria Civil Defense, a volunteer organisation that operate in opposition-controlled territory - working in freezing conditions 24/7 to pull survivors from beneath the rubble of a devastating earthquake.
Behind that imagery is the knowledge of a long, self-disabling war in Syria that has left the country unable to receive aid easily from international responders. In Turkey, the growing story is of a corrupt building industry and a government increasingly under fire for not paying attention to the need for reform. Even as the (almost entirely) men continue to struggle with their bare hands to lift out miracle survivors, building contractors are being arrested.
On the other hand, the front pages also show President Zelensky, an actor by profession but now always in his army uniform, calling for fighter planes to win the war against Russia. Standing on the steps of the UK Parliament, calling for "Wings for Freedom", Zelensky speaks to editors everywhere; male MPs compete with each other to champion his cause, with the disgraced Boris Johnson easily leading the fray.
Behind that imagery is a growing tension: that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia will tip over into a much wider world war between NATO countries and Russia's supporters. Johnson does not hesitate to highlight the possibility of Putin’s use of the nuclear option. We hear less about the young Russian men risking their lives by refusing to go to war.
As the men fight to lead the news agenda with these different versions of heroic masculinity, the women are consistently shown weeping. Weeping for their children buried under the rubble. Weeping for the sons, lost on the battlefield in the Ukraine, that they risk life and limb to find and bury.
In our own patch, we could add weeping for yet another young woman murdered while walking home at night by a man misusing his power. More and more young women are standing up to demand change —only to discover they are all the more vulnerable for asking.
Maybe we should step into the future, and look back at this palette of images nestling against each other, on the front pages of newspapers and all over the internet. Doing so might help us see some progressive direction, in what for now can only be spoken of in confusion and pain. Could men evolve their own sense of what it means to be masculine by developing their heroism within a much more “fluid” landscape of actions, as Sam Smith - but also many others, in different ways - describes?
Will women confidently own the feminisation of public space, granting themselves more agency within the new sphere they have built? Rather than compete for power in the old male structures, are there new ways to keep opening up the space of society for more diversity rather than less? Can they develop a womb energy - regeneration, incubation, visualisation - without excluding any male refugees from masculinity as they do?
Waking up and moving forward into the future makes this less about a war to win, and more about an evolution driven by compassion and courage. Less the polycrisis or the chasm, more, as AG Co-initiator Pat Kane writes, the play space for progress. We try to define the right language or terms of debate by which we can contain these gender disruptions. But long before we do that, couldn’t we enjoy and revel in a kind of imagery that can prepare us for more beauty and play in our public space?
We should welcome each demand for the right to be uniquely oneself as a sign of life in the wreckage. We should see each new creative leap not as a threat to the old ways, but as a miracle of recovery, transforming our lives together.
