MARK SIMPSON.com

“Where are we going on our Honeymoon then, Adolf?” “Stalingrad.”

This month sees the 65th anniversary of Il Duce’s ignominious downfall after over twenty years as dictator. Given the revival of this pop star politician’s back-catalogue in present-day Italy, where the new mayor of Rome sings his praises, I thought I’d post this review of both his oeuvre and a fan’s revisionist biography which first appeared in the Indy on Sun a few years back.

Comedian in Jackboots

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 29 June 2003)

“I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind a door and made her mine,’ wrote Mussolini recalling one of his teenage wooings. ‘She got up weeping and humiliated and through her tears she insulted me. She said that I had robbed her of her honour. It is not impossible. But, I ask you, of what honour was she speaking… She wasn’t in a sulk with me for long…. for at least three months we loved each other not much with the mind but much with the flesh.’

Benito happened to be describing, in typically Nietzchean poseur stylee, the ravishing/raping of a peasant girl neighbour, but he would have liked us to believe that he could also have been describing his seduction of Signora Italia, whom he famously ‘made his’ during his March on Rome in 1922 (which, actually, was not a march at all but a jolly day out on the train).

This more famous affair not much of the mind but of the flesh ended up lasting over twenty years instead of three months, cost Italy rather more than her honour and some tears - eventually involving a hairy threesome with Adolf Hitler - and did not end until Il Duce (along with his real-life mistress of the moment) was summarily executed by Partisans in 1945 as he tried to flee to Austria disguised as a German soldier, in something of a crimine di passione. Although Italy, like the peasant girl of his memoirs was the victim, it’s not entirely clear that Signor M was quite the towering studmeister he presented himself as being or more of a jumped-up gigolo eagerly playing the role that history paid him to.

Italia, victim or no, did love him. After sanctions were imposed to punish Italy for his unprovoked and mass-murderous invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, Il Duce called on Italians to donate their wedding rings to him - in exchange for steel ones - and other gold to help the invasion effort. Astonishingly, hundreds of thousands of Italians heeded the call from the reverse Midas, and handed over 33,622 tons of gold for steel, literally marrying their leader and providing the dowry themselves.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the Italians who couldn’t resist Mussolini for the first decade or so of his dictatorship. Mussolini was the first pop star politician in the age of mass communication and had a global, frenzied fan-base. The American poet Ezra Pound was besotted, Cole Porter penned a song which helped turn his name into a superlative, ‘You’re the top!… you’re Mussolini’ (the Duce-worshipping lyric was actually written by PG Wodehouse for the London version of ‘Anything Goes’). Pope Pius gushingly IX described him as a ‘man of Providence’. Before he left the Italian Socialist Party, even Lenin spoke approvingly of him. Once he became a bulwark against Bolshevism, The Times and the Daily Mail heaped praise on this ‘great politician’ and ‘foreman’ of the Italian people. Winston Churchill, that great and uncompromising defender of Parliamentary democracy and scourge of tyrants, was a passionate admirer of the original Fascist dictator he dubbed ‘the Roman genius’: ‘What a man! I have lost my heart!… he is one of the most wonderful men of our time,’ he sighed in 1927, providing an early inspiration for the character of Jean Brodie.

In fact, the only other anti-Bolshevik who was hotter for Mussolini than Churchill was an ambitious former Austrian Corporal chancer kicking around Bavaria who desperately wanted to be like his Italian ‘man of steel’. He insisted on eating in Italian restaurants and wanted to know everything about his fave popster Il Duce. ‘He seemed like someone in love asking news about the person they loved,’ recalled one SS Colonel. Hitler made many requests to meet Mussolini but the would-be groupie was continually rebuffed by a Mussolini who was not keen to share the Fascist limelite. Until, of course, Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933. Observers noted that, on meeting Mussolini, the future merciless master of Europe had tears in his eyes. Afterwards he had nothing but praise: ‘Men like that are born only once every thousand years,’ he exclaimed. ‘And Germany can be happy that he is Italian and not French.’

Mussolini’s verdict was less rhapsodic: ‘He’s mad, he’s mad…. Instead of speaking to me about current problems… he recited to me from memory his Mein Kampf, that enormous brick which I have never been able to read.’ Nicholas Farrell, who clearly is one of Mussolini’s growing number of contemporary fans, makes much in his biography ‘Mussolini: A New Life’ (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) of the bald big head’s (as the Partisan who arrested Il Duce called him) dislike of Hitler, both to distinguish Italian Fascism from National Socialism - which was, we can all agree, rather nastier - and also to portray the forthright blacksmith’s son Benito as more sympathetic. Personally, however, I found myself rather touched by Hitler’s crazy devotion to Mussolini, which long outlived the Italian windbag’s usefulness and always surpassed his merits.

Mussolini’s ranting about Hitler, on the other hand, while very funny, seems almost, dare I say, unkind, or at least bitchily ungrateful. Worse, it merely supports the prevalent post-war perception of him as a comic, impotent buffoon that Farrell is so keen to puncture. Mussolini is undoubtedly more likable than Hitler; but he’s also, for that reason, more contemptible too. At the news of Mussolini’s daring ‘rescue’ by German troops from the mountain prison he was incarcerated in after being deposed in 1943, Hitler, bless, was as ecstatic as he was at the fall of France, stamping and dancing on the spot. When Mussolini realised that the men who had arrived in gliders were Germans rather than English he exclaimed, like some Latin Alf Garnet or Sidney Trotter, ‘That’s all we need’. As the pictures taken (for propaganda purposes) during this operation show, the diminutive ‘Roman Genius’ being bundled by towering blond Nazi Special Forces into a tiny Stork aeroplane ready to whisk him off to Hitler’s Hideaway, was definitely not a master of events by this time; he was a situationist comedy in jackboots.

Even though he probably deserves less than most other historical figures I can think of, it’s impossible not to suppress a certain amount of pity for poor Benito by this time. You see, I suspect that he was beginning to realise that Adolf was behaving rather like another Austrian in his life called Ida Dalser, an old flame who used to regularly show up shouting, ‘I am the wife of Mussolini! Only I have the right to be near him!’ Once in power Mussolini would lock Dalser up in a lunatic asylum in Venice where she remained until her death, a prisoner of love. In a strange case of poetic-romantic justice, Hitler was to effectively lock Mussolini up with him in his own asylum until Mussolini himself expired - also a prisoner of love.

After his death, Mussolini’s widow Rachele was determined to have the pocket Caesar to herself as well, despite the fact that he famously met his end with his mistress. She claimed to have received a letter from him just before his death: ‘… I ask you to forgive all the bad things that I have involuntarily done to you. But you know that you have been for me the only woman that I have truly loved. I swear to you in front of God… this supreme moment.’ Conveniently, she said she had subsequently destroyed the letter after ‘memorising’ its contents.

Farrell has drawn on newly discovered letters to write a book that sometimes seems like a 477 page version of that phantom letter to Rachele, albeit written in the style of a Sunday Telegraph editorial, or Spectator column. For Farrell, the Fascist bully boy who abolished democracy in Italy, invaded Ethiopia, Greece, France, Russia and Yugoslavia for no particular reason other than he thought he could get away with it (and made a terrible mess of every campaign except Ethiopia where bombers, tanks, poison gas and half a million men were deployed against tribesmen), who sold Italy to Nazi Germany for the price of the Prussian goose-step (he made his short-legged Fascisti practice it to ludicrous effect) giving Hitler the green light for his European war and the apocalyptic conflagration that followed, was actually a hugely talented, likable, big-hearted giant of a man who, unlike his “cynical” and “ruthless” leftist opponents (whom he had his Blackshirts beat, shoot or incarcerate), always had Italia - his one true love’s - best interests in mind, but who made just one small, involuntary, entirely understandable error in regard to the Second World War that was, anyway, really that nasty wop-hating knee-jerk anti-Fascist Anthony Eden’s fault.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps I have even caricatured the author. But Farrell, in a revisionist history which is not entirely without merit, has caricatured himself rather more. He is even pictured on the jacket sleeve in a black Fedora, a black shirt and black leather jacket. The text tells us that since 1998 he has lived in Predappio in the Romagna ‘where Mussolini was born and is buried like a saint.’

Mussolini, in other words, is still a prisoner of love.

© Mark Simpson 2008

Mark Simpson on the Cold War with Cuddly Toys

(Arena Hommes Plus, Spring 2008)

The titanic Superpower confrontation of the early 1980s between the Soviet Union and the United States saw the deployment of several new and terrifying strategic weapons systems, including Cruise Missiles, Pershings, SS-20s, B1 Bombers, SDI/Star Wars. But undoubtedly the most powerful, most feared and most sophisticated of these weapons systems was a smiley cuddly toy called Misha.

Unleashed at the height of the Cold War, at the Moscow Olympics of 1980, boycotted by the US and her allies because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Misha the bear cub, or to give him his full, chilling title, Mikhail Potapych Toptygin, left the West completely defenceless. A triumph of art, marketing, propaganda, and plush toys, Misha appeared on hundreds of different badges, in plastic, porcelain, rubber and wood. He was the most commercially successful and thoroughly exploited Olympic mascot ever. It took Communists to realise the merchandising potential and political power of fluffiness.

To understand the scale of the Soviet triumph that was Misha you have to look at (gingerly, through your fingers) what went before: 1968 Grenoble’s Winter Olympics ‘Schuss’ or ‘skiing sperm’ as it came to be known, Munich 1972’s radioactive Wiener dog, and Montreal 1976’s black beaver Amik, a turd tastefully tied-off with a chocolate-box ribbon.

Misha, who became the smiley, irresistibly furry shape of Brezhnevism, was a labour of love. Famous children’s illustrator Viktor Chizikov took six months to perfect him, drawing over one hundred variations. His big dark wide eyes, trusting smile and irresistible cuddliness inverted the Western view of the USSR and Russia as a scary, slavering, lumbering beast. Misha’s humane, friendly face foretold the arrival five years later of that other cuddly Mikhail, the one with that adorable birthmark on his forehead.

The US, understandably panicked by Red Misha, commissioned their ideological department, known as Disney, to come up with a response to this strategic threat. Sam, a bald eagle, the national symbol of the US (and also of the USMC, which the previous year had invaded Grenada), wearing a natty stars and stripes (Capitalist?) top hat and bow tie, was rolled out as the official mascot for the 1984 LA Games. Although better than most mascots, Sam was rather less lovable and much crasser than Misha, and in this Cold War of cuddly toys it was generally agreed that the USSR had won.

The end of the Cold War proper shortly afterwards, and the non-ideological nature of the Games that followed, meant that mascots once again reverted to their pre-Misha harmlessness and tackiness. 1988 Seoul’s ‘Hodori’ looked like Tony the Tiger with tassels. OK, but not Grrrrreat. Better than most, 1992 Barcelona’s sniggering surreal dog ‘Cobi’ was unloved at first but won many over in the end. The Sydney Olympics in 2000 featured a Platypus, an Echidna and a Kookaburra that appeared to be a rejected Aussie kid’s TV line-up (and were in fact rejected by the Australians). Athens in 2004 deployed Athena and Phevos, gods of wisdom and light, who might have been formidable if they hadn’t been rendered in Playdough by an angry two year old.

The undoubted nadir was Izzy (from ‘Whatizit?’) in Atlanta 1996, an ‘amorphous abstract fantasy figure’. Izzy was an aesthetic tizzy who only symbolised how the post-ideological world had no place for iconography or, for that matter, humanism. The End of History meant not only dreary Olympics, but a wider culture lacking a sense of importance or purpose. Worst of all, it meant really daggy mascots.

But now, eighteen years on from Moscow, another Communist giant is hosting the Games, determined to exploit them for every last scrap of propaganda. Consequently they threaten to be the most spectacular yet. The Soviet Union may have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but the country it taught how to organise a proper flag-waving parade, the People’s Republic of China, goes from strength to strength, dividend to dividend - and wants the world to know about it. Everything, from the Stadium to the stickers, is going to be a huge, fluttering statement.

The Games might officially hark back to the freedom-loving ideals of Ancient Greece, cradle of democracy, but it takes a good old-fashioned totalitarian state to show us what they really mean: Ideology and iconography plus choreography.

And all these things come together in… fluffy toys. Undoubtedly, China’s ‘Fuwa’ mascots for 2008, impish energetic cartoons based on popular Chinese animals, have been given more thought than all the ones since Misha put together. That there are also five of them, the most ever, is a reminder of China’s populousness, its dynamism, and its new-found Capitalist wiliness: five mascots = five times as many sales opportunities. And you can be sure these mascots, like everything else theses days, are made in China. (They will also be official: China, the home of cheap knock-offs is cracking down hard on Olympic cloning.)

Beibei the fish symbolises water, prosperity and swimming. Jinjing the Panda: metal, happiness, weightlifting and judo. HuanHuan the (Red!) Olympic Flame: fire, passion and ball sports. Yingying the Tibetan antelope: earth, health, track and field events. Nini the swallow: wood, good Fortune and gymnastics.

A collision of Chinese astrology, Communist ideology and Sino hegemony, perhaps these mascots - with their ‘superpowers’ - symbolise a little too much. Their names also spell out ‘Beijing welcomes you’. Or is it ‘Welcome to a Chinese 21st Century’? The elemental nature of the Fuwa mascots also looks like an augury of the future: given its recent phenomenal growth China may one day monopolise these resources.

The flame of the fluffy marketing and ideological triumph of the Moscow Olympics has been passed on to Chinese Communism - which, unlike the USSR, is still around today only because it effectively went Misha back in the 1980s, now doing Capitalism and consumerism better than the West. Being very, very careful, of course, not to allow the emergence of a Misha Gorbachov: instead at Tiananmen Square the leadership crushed its own people like they were… toys. Rather than granting human rights, China set about making everything the world wanted - and at a snip.

So I predict the Fuwa, or Chinese Spice Girls, will be a great success with kids and adults around the world, and cause China to open a couple of dozen more power-stations, as well as paying for at least another aircraft carrier.

Especially Jingjing the giant panda - Misha with Chinese characteristics.

Special thanks to Jo-Ann Furniss

By Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 21 Jan 2008)

Every child wants to be a zookeeper when they grow up. To run a place where everything is in its place, and has nothing to do but eat, shit and breed - to your timetable. Maybe it’s a yen for revenge on the parents who brought them into the world without asking their permission first, or maybe it’s just because children are all little dictators with a peaked-cap fetish.

Most though abandon these zoo fuehrer dreams when they actually grow up. Not so Desmond Morris. Impressively, this former curator of mammals at London Zoo, doesn’t make do with animals: with best-selling books such as The Naked Ape and Manwatching, this world-famous zoologist has managed to become head keeper at his very own human zoo.

And to be honest, the world evoked in his latest book The Naked Man, ‘a study of the male body from head to foot’, sounds like a place I’d quite like to visit - but only because I’m something of a nostalgic.

Morrisland isn’t just a zoo, you see. It’s also a historical theme park. In Morrisland, millions of years of evolution, red in tooth and claw, have brought us right up to… the suburban 1950s (the decade Morris graduated). In Morrisland ‘long-term pair bonding’ is the universal norm and there’s no need for a Child Support Agency or Asbos or turkey-basters since: ‘Powerful paternal feelings are unleashed the moment a human father holds his new baby in his arms and in the years ahead he will devote a great deal of time and attention to the rearing of his offspring.’

In Morrisland, where everything happens according to the zoo-keeper’s plan, women are 7 percent shorter than men so that their nose will reach inside a man’s hairy armpit, because sniffing his manly, rugged ‘pheromones’ makes her happy and want babies. And, of course, no Western man would shave his armpit. Only ‘members of the homosexual community or the bondage/sadomasochistic communities’ would do that.

By far the biggest attraction in Morrisland is sexual certainty. Within this fenced-off space the distinction between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, is unclouded by all those unnatural modern trends. ‘As nature intended’ is a favourite phrase, one which appears above the entrance gates. In Morrisland, men are men - and there’s a strict golf club dress code. ‘Acceptance of male earrings still tends to be limited to those worn by the younger, more flamboyant males, largely from the world of sport, music and showbusiness,’ you’ll be glad to hear. Male bracelets are simply effeminate. And men only shave their legs - ‘sacrificing their masculinity’ - to swim or cycle faster.

In today’s fallen world, an older man might be called a ‘slaphead’ by unruly yobs - but safe inside Morrisland you’ll find yourself properly respected: ‘it is obvious that baldness is a human display signal indicating male seniority and dominance. It typifies the virile older man…’ (There’s no author photo on the dust-jacket, but a quick Google search confirms that Desmond is completely ‘virile’.)

There is trouble in the Garden of Desmond, however. Apparently ‘A few men - narcissist or masochists - have opted for nipple rings.’ But at least it’s only ‘a few’ - and they’re all deviants. Meanwhile, serpent-like ‘Gay designers’ ‘ignoring male preferences’ attempt to introduce ‘effeminate new leg fashions’. Fortunately, these fashions prove as sterile as the gay designers themselves: ‘they may have looked amusing on the catwalk, but they have never made it to the high street. Crumpled trousers and grubby jeans still reign supreme in the world of the manly male.’

In Morrisland there does exist however something called a ‘‘six-pack’ chest’ - though ‘few are prepared to make the effort to create it.’ Perhaps because a ‘six-pack chest’ would require not just regular visits to the gym, but also substantial surgery.

Surprisingly, that terrifying 21st Century male phenomenon I’ve been blamed for siring myself - metrosexuals - are allowed in Morrisland. But only those whose heterosexuality is beyond question and ‘are well-known as tough, masculine sportsmen and as famous celebrities… so, for them to become fastidious and fashion-conscious creates no confusion.’ Well, that’s a relief.

Non-celeb metrosexuals don’t exist in Morrisland, because ‘if an unknown heterosexual male were to display over-groomed, narcissistic tendencies, his sexual preferences would be automatically misread by anyone who met him.’ Which would, it goes without Mr Morris saying, be the worst thing that could possibly happen to a man and would render him completely emasculated and ridiculous. ‘This limits,’ explains the human zoo-keeper, ‘the metrosexual category to famous celebrities who are already publicly recognised for their heterosexuality.’

Clearly, not many of those High Street sales of male cosmetics which have increased by 800% since the year 2000, have been made in Morrisland. Though I do worry that the cover model for Morris’ book, an anonymous, headless, naked, smoothly muscular, young male photographed from behind in that sensuous-shadowy advertising sex-object way - offering us his arse - has been bingeing on metrosexual products. I sincerely hope his heterosexuality is already very publicly recognised.

As you may have guessed, Mr Morris has a problem with homosexuality. Throughout his book ‘manly’ means ‘heterosexual’, unmanly means ‘homosexual’ - and vice versa.

But it’s not a personal problem, it’s a scientific one, you see. In a final chapter called ‘The Preferences’ devoted not in fact to the preferences but rather to explaining/pathologising male homosexuality, he writes, ‘Viewed purely from an evolutionary standpoint, there is only one valid biological lifestyle for the human male and that is heterosexual.’ In other words, evolution, like zoo-keepers, doesn’t like waste and wants you to reproduce early and often.

But I can’t help but wonder why, if God/Darwin/Morris didn’t want men to get shagged, why did he give them such itchy prostate glands? And if every sperm is sacred, why did he put their hands at crotch level?

Des’ explanation for exclusive homosexuality (exclusive heterosexuality needs no explanation apparently - and bisexuality isn’t discussed) is, like much else in his book, charmingly mid-Twentieth Century: at puberty some boys fail to move out of the long all-boy social phase of childhood - and also boy-boy ‘sex play’ - and switch into dating girls and home-making, because they have become ‘too attached’. I personally don’t mind the arrested development explanation of homosexuality: I think it rather romantic (like Morris, I attended a boy’s boarding school). I’m not entirely sure though that I’m that much more immature than someone who never gave up wanting to be a zoo keeper.

In conclusion, Morris makes a final impassioned plea for tolerance and acceptance of difference and human variety: ‘Isolating homosexuals as though they are members of some exclusive club does them no favours’.

So true. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the The Naked Male does. Morris’ human zoo separates ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ with barbed wire - and electrifies the fence.

© Mark Simpson 2008

Eminem is overweight, addicted to drugs, suffering attacks of pneumonia, struggling with a heart condition, is a virtual recluse surrounded by parasitic hangers on and can’t write any new music, according to the Sun and his estranged mother’s new book. 

Worst of all, Marshall Mathers, now aged 35 is ’spotty’ eats ‘fatty food’ and has even let his bleached blond hair grow out. Now that is really tragic.

OK, so he’s going through a bad time at the moment, and spent Christmas in hospital with life-threatening illnesses, but there’s really no excuse for such sloppiness in a man these days is there?

Even his beloved daughter Haile appears to be deserting him: now 12, she is reportedly becoming more independent and no longer so keen on staying in and being being doted on by her daddy-mommy. And who can blame her if he’s got spots and needs a bleach job?

The Sun prints a still taken from one of Marshall Mather’s videos spoofing a fat, late-period Elvis who also took ‘traditional black music to the mainstream’ and points up the ‘irony’ of it all, how an obese Elvis locked himself in his Graceland mansion, surrounded himself with parasitic hangers-on and ‘died of a heart attack, aged just 43, after years of drug abuse’.

Well, now, it would be entirely churlish of Em not to complete the eerie paralell and die of a heart attack himself, wouldn’t it? (Note to Em: don’t wait til you turn 43 before helpfully dropping dead on the john as the Sun will have forgotten all about you by then.)

Unmentioned however is the main and most striking paralell between Elvis and Em: two Southern boys who loved their Mommas. And boys, who, in their own ways, never quite got over that - and certainly never grew up. The article does though quote some lines from his prescient song ‘Role Model’ that hint at this pathological Momma Love: ‘I’m bout as normal as Norman Bates, with deformative traits/A premature birth that was four minutes late’. 

Norman Bates, some of you younger readers probably need to be told, was a 1950s Hitchcock psychopath (played by a homosexual actor) with multiple personality disorder (Slim Shady? Eminem? Marshall Mathers?), who kept the preserved body of his murdered mother in his basement and dressed up in her clothes to slash women he fancied to death with a large knife. Seeing as Em has rapped about slaughtering both his ex-ex-ex-wife Kim ‘the only woman I’ve ever loved’ and his smothering mother, the ‘New Elvis’ was clearly living at the Bates Motel instead of Graceland, at least inside his Gothic head. 

As this bilious piece of mine below from 2003 shows, the ‘New Elvis’ turned into the old ‘Old Elvis’ some time ago. (And if you want to understand my disappointment, read this.)

Though in the pic used in the Sun (above) he appears to have turned into Boy George.

His majesty the baby

Isn’t it about time Eminem grew up? Mark Simpson on the rapper who elevated spoilt tantrums into an art form

Independent on Sunday, 27/04/2003

A few years ago a pasty-faced, bleached-blond, underfed white boy rapper arrived on the scene waving a chainsaw who, thrillingly, seemed to hate everyone, especially himself. He took pot shots at all kinds of pretension and bullshit, including the fame that he had achieved for himself and the industry that had made it possible.

Although he was a white rapper, he was decidedly no Vanilla Ice. In fact, there was nothing vanilla at all about this scatologically talented, potty- mouthed misanthrope who sounded like Bugs Bunny crossed with South Park’s Cartman on crystal meth. He was hailed by some as the “new Elvis”, and although the comparisons were full of hubris, like Elvis he had taken a “black” music form and made it his own, and in the process fashioned a new kind of pop. In this instance one which seemed genuinely, dangerously, neurotically interested in words and narratives. For the first time in years, people began talking, arguing and even demonstrating about a pop star.

Marshall Bruce Mathers III, alias Eminem, alias Slim Shady, was the evil, comical, candy-buzz of consumerism laced with melt-in-your-mouth cyanide, promising a little indigestion in a saccharin-sweet, always smiling, aspirational pop industry of boy blands and Britneybots. On his smash-hit work of Gothic genius The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) he famously sneered, “You think I give a damn about a Grammy? Half you critics can’t even stomach me…”

And then in 2001 he appeared on the damn Grammys, in that very disturbing duet with the evil fairy godmother of showbiz pop blandness, Elton John. Millions of viewers were treated to the sight of Slim Shady conscientiously sucking the Grammys’ cock while a pink-polka-dotted bewigged Elton sucked his (Em later claimed he ‘didn’t know Elton was gay’). For his consummate skill at controlling his gag reflex, Em was awarded some Grammy consolation prizes for which he was gosh-awfully grateful. Countless other awards came his way, eliciting various other embarrassing, actressy acceptance speeches in a hip-hop stylee.

Then last year at the MTV Awards, when some audience members booed him, he accused “that girl” Moby of being behind it and threatened to beat him up. This was greeted with many more boos from MTV’s liberal-leaning great and good, and Em, seeing his career slipping away, ended up humbly apologising and mumbling something about attending “anger management classes”. So it was official. Em was just like all the other “faggots” he’d berated so profitably on his records: he only wanted to be liked. It was all about suckcess, again. It was just more showbiz bullshit.

Meanwhile, the critics lauded Em’s mediocre Marshall Mathers follow-up album The Eminem Show, full of empty vanity, forced, phoney politics and pompous 1970s guitar riffs, especially in famously “street” publications such as the Guardian. Maybe I’m just bitter because I feel betrayed, but it seemed that everyone wanted you to know how much they liked Eminem - and how cool, ironic and post-PC that made them. As a final confirmation of his total tiredness, his awesome over-ness, the tedious, toothless autobiographical flick 8 Mile (complete with a Be Nice To Fags public service announcement) which merely showcased his sullen, scrawny lack of charisma, saw the “new Elvis” being hailed now as the “new James Dean” on the front page of the rebel-loving hipster organ the Daily Telegraph. As a sign of the accelerated times we live in, the New Elvis had become the Old Elvis in the space of two years.

Oh, and by the way, Eminem, the voice of teenage angst, is actually 30. If you ever felt that Em was reminiscent of a Harry Enfield character, Nick Hasted’s biography will confirm your suspicions. Em himself seems to know that the Kevin-ish sullen stares, hissy histrionics and spiteful tantrums he has based his career on are essentially childish, and has been shaving a couple of years off his true age, like an ageing rent boy, for most of his career. Until, that is, his estranged mother - damn you, bitch! - “outed” his real date of birth recently. That’s the terrible thing about mothers: they are the original Women Who Know Too Much. No wonder he’s said he wants her dead.

Much as I’d like to be able to add Nick Hasted’s book ‘The Dark Story of Eminem’ (Omnibus) to the long list of embarrassing examples of molesting dad-culture rubbing up against Em’s “enormous pop culture talent” and “credibility”, it’s a largely clear-headed assessment of his career, his strengths and weaknesses, as well as something of an expose of the inevitable deceits this artist famous for reckless “truth-telling” has disseminated.

We learn, hilariously, that little Em was a quiet, shy, sensitive child who liked to colour pretty little pictures, which he would plead to be sent to his absent, deadbeat dad who never once attempted to get in touch with his son. As he grew up, an only child, Marshall’s rage ended up directed towards someone within reach: his single mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs. As we all know, he has accused her, over and over again, of neglecting him. She denies this: “The real problem is not that he had a hard time, but that he resents I sheltered him so much from the real world… I was an over-protective mother who gave him everything he wanted and more.” It’s perhaps self-serving but quite convincing, not least because Em is still bitching and moaning about her neglect into his fabulously wealthy and famous thirties.

So when Mathers-Briggs recalls: “I got kicked out of stores because he’d be like the spoiled brat, lying in the aisle, arms and legs spread open”, it’s impossible not to cackle. After all, little Em managed to turn flailing and screaming about the world in general, and women in particular, not giving him enough attention into a spectacularly successful, attention-seeking career. In an early sign of his Springer-esque instincts, he has bragged how he would tape his mother throwing him out of the house to play to his friends to convince them “how crazy she was”.

Hasted, who did not have access to what Freud might have termed His Majesty the Baby himself, or his fractious family, has assiduously digested the clippings, piecing together a more consistent narrative than most of us have gleaned from the public slanging matches in the tabloids and in Em’s songs. Hasted also assesses the oeuvre, giving credit to Mr Mathers’ real talent, but also not quite letting him off the misogynistic hook with his “Ha-ha I was only kidding ladies, you know I love you” routine at the end of songs about butchering his ex-wife in cold blood in front of their daughter, and analysing his all-important, all-consuming relationships with the women in his life: his mother, his daughter Haille that Em keeps telling us he loves so much, and his ex-ex-wife Kim (since the book was written they are reportedly very much in love again and living together with Haille - the whole family admiring Em’s sweet “Kim: Rot in Pieces” tattoo over breakfast). My abiding impression is that, alas, Em doesn’t hate everyone, just women - and mostly because he is so pathetically dependent on them. Which isn’t exactly very special.

Hasted also visits Mathers’ home town of Detroit and discovers that Em’s background was not quite so white-trash as he has made out - more blue-collar and semi-suburban. Less productively, he spends rather a long time standing in the playground where a young Marshall was allegedly thrown by a bully head-first into a snowdrift (Marshall was a favourite target of bullies, and it’s easy to see why), re-imagining the seminal incident which prompted the song “Brain Damage” and caused Em to be hospitalised for several days. His mother apparently had to nurse him for many months afterwards. (Probably, it seems to me, another reason he hates her: bad enough to be of woman born once, but twice….)

In fact, Em’s fame appears to have been based on the murder not of ex- wives but of mommy’s little boy. Em’s first album, Infinite, now airbrushed out of history by Em, while critically well-received was apparently too sensitive, romantic and polite to be a commercial hip-hop success, especially with the suburban teen white boy audience who buy hip hop to piss off their nagging feminist moms and keep them out of their bedrooms. In other words, the don’t-give-a-fuck, mother-hating, wife-murdering, potty-mouthed - and smash hit - Slim Shady persona conceived (”while I was taking a shit”) after the failure of Infinite, seems to have been all about… giving a fuck.

There never was any Real Slim Shady.

© Mark Simpson 2008

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 23 Sept 2007)

The Chippendales have a lot to answer for.

Big hair atop even bigger pecs. Acres of shaved, orange manflesh bordered by white cuffs and red bow-ties. Rictus grins doing high kicks in black bulging Spandex. Medically-dangerous galvanic pelvic thrusting. Female GERREMORFFFFFFFF!!! hysteria. Not to mention those dangerous oily patches on the floor of the Queen Vic after amateur male stripper night.

Forget Reagan, Yuppies or Madonna, the greatest and hottest product of the 1980s, that decade of unbridled appetites, was hot pectoral muscles basted in baby oil.

If ever you needed proof that women have no taste in men you just have to look at the tremendous, ear-splitting, panty-moistening, glittery global success of the Chippendales, a dance troupe presenting a vision of the male body as a cross between a dancing bouncer in a thong and an especially orange department store perfume demonstrator. Mind you, they also prove how men have no taste in men either - the Chippendales were the pneumatic offspring of a man. A man who seems to have had a lot to answer for on his own account.

‘Do you know anyone who would want to kill Nick DeNoia?’ asks the cop investigating the murder of the choreographer who ‘basically invented the Chippendales’ in the prologue to ‘Unzipped: A True Story of Sex, Drugs, Rollerskates and Murder’ (Canongate), David Henry Sterry’s account of his time as the male strip troupe’s roller-skating MC. ‘Do you want the short or the long answer?’, Sterry replies. Of course, we get the long answer, which is Sterry’s personal memoir, which, disappointingly, is more about Sterry than DeNoia.

The short answer, well-known because the sensational case was widely-reported and spawned at least one TV doc, is that Nick DeNoia was sent to the big dance studio in the sky by a hit man hired by his Indian business partner Somen Banerjee over an argument about who owned the lip-smackingly lucrative touring rights to this troupe of fritzed faux-flashers (faux because they never actually let you see the goods). Banerjee was caught trying to put a contract out on some other associates and committed suicide in prison before being found guilty so that ownership of the company would pass to his family. (I told you that male stripping was a very serious business.)

The long answer, ‘Unzipped’, with its stories of ‘$‘ (as Sterry denotes money) drugs (the strippers were apparently selling them to the punters) and backstage blow-jobs (some lucky, lucky ladies did get to handle the goods) and bust-ups (the ‘Men of Chippendale‘ were very, very bitchy), is enjoyable, funny, and almost as meticulously choreographed as a Chippendale show. Sterry writes about his 80s life with the Chippendales in the kind of pulpy fashion that is required these days, along with a large admixture of self-loathing and self-mockery.

He keeps referring to himself as the ‘ugliest man at Chippendales’, and laments his ‘invisibility’, and seems to have only garnered one blow job, which was only offered because the girl wanted an introduction to one of the strippers (it ended abruptly when the girl was nearly ill). We also get some flashbacks to an unhappy childhood. This is his Sterry’s second memoir: his first, ‘Chicken: Love For Sale on the Streets of Hollywood’, was an account of his time as a teenage gigolo in LA - a job he was introduced to by his boss at the fast-food join he fried chicken at. For someone who isn’t a looker, not very… appetising, Sterry seems to have made something of a career out of the sale of manflesh.

The real star, however, of ‘Unzipped’, as Sterry’s prologue more or less admits, isn’t Sterry, or the male strippers, or even the sozzled screaming ladies clawing and biting at the ripe manflesh jigging around in front of them, but Chippendale choreographer Nick DeNoia, ‘silver fox in cashmere clothing, combination queen mother and charismatic dictator’, a man that Sterry himself seems to love as much as he hates. DeNoia’s theatrically sadistic swishy Sergeant Major way of publicly humiliating people is, as he puts it himself, ‘Faaaaaaaaaaaaab.U.Lous’..

DeNoia’s sharp queer eye is literally what made the Chippendales. While the Chippendales’ ‘bottom line’ was all about pleasing the ladies and prying open their purses - the top line was about pleasing DeNoia by showing him your buttocks, which he seems to have pried open with his eyes. Little wonder that at Chippendales ‘the notions of hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality seem hopelessly outdated. Gay? Straight? Seems like under the right circumstances everybody’s capable of doing anyone.’

Wannabe Chippendales had to submit themselves oiled up in a thong to the pointed gaze of DeNoia, a critic who makes Simon Cowell look like someone you’d like to share a pint and your problems with. In fact, if DeNoia were still around today Cowell would be his Louis Walsh.

One NY Latino guy dares to turn up a little overweight to a ‘viewdition’. DeNoia, standing ominously behind him, grabs his love-handles and squeezes, painfully. ‘That. Is. Un. Acceptable…’ he decrees. ‘The Men of Chippendales are not fat. It’s disgusting, it’s laziness, it offends me. Do you think a Lady wants to come to Chippendales to see a pudgy, fat little fuck? Helloooooooooooo?’

The Latino doesn‘t seem to mind. He just smiles and replies: “Hhhey, tha’s jus’ more of me to lub!.”

DeNoia is impressed by the man’s spunk - ‘I like spunk’ - and commands him: ‘Go. Leave. Make yourself beautiful. Call me.’ Which is, from DeNoia, a tender dismissal indeed.

Twenty years on, in a world conquered by metrosexuality and covered in baby oil, we can see that men did indeed make themselves beautiful. Terrifyingly beautiful. Being ‘lubbed’ in a thong is what men seem to aspire to today. DeNoia’s heavenly - or hellish - cellphone must be ringing off the hook.
Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Kodachrome film was devised to flatter Caucasian skin. Mark Simpson explains how ‘colorisation’ revolutionised our world

(First appeared ‘Independent on Sunday’, 14 September 2003)

Living as we do in a makeover world where everything, from historic buildings, to royal families, to working-class political parties has been revamped and redecorated by popular taste, it is inevitable that the dowdy, gritty black-and-white past should be made over too. Hence the yen in the last few years to render the past in colour. Aesthetic revisionism aims to turn history into a coffee-table magazine.

Clearly the most tragic thing about, say, the Second World War, is that it was shot in black and white. I mean, such a gorgeous and expensive fashion shoot with a cast of hundreds of millions and the photographer only brought his monochrome film? How are we supposed to get the cover? And so, inevitably, the photographer has been sent back in disgrace to get his colour film (which only began to be generally available in the late 1930s).

The relatively tiny amount of colour film that the last World conflagration was exposed to, and the even smaller percentage that has survived (early colour processes used organic dyes which faded faster than English tans), has now been assiduously collated by researchers into TV documentaries and books.

Kodachrome, made by the American Eastman Kodak Company, was by far the most stable of the early colour formats: the yellow dye, the most volatile, when stored at the correct temperature, fades in the dark by only 20 per cent over 185 years. Thus Kodachrome has literally become the “color” of the past. However, the remarkable stills in ‘Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World, 1939-1959′ are not simply aesthetic revisionism; covering as they do the two decades in which the world was “colorised” and also Americanised, they also offer a document of how this came about.  This is history as a coffee-table magazine - but, to paraphrase Winston Churchill: some coffee, some table.

Culled from magazines and government archives, they include celebrity publicity shots and historical events: Elvis Presley rubs shoulders with Dwight Eisenhower, Rita Hayworth with the Korean War, Joe DiMaggio with the Bikini Atoll test. This is as it should be: the magazine culture which American “color” made possible has equalised celebrity and history - as long as history can look like a celebrity.

The famous Yalta Conference of 1945, the meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill which shaped the post-war world/American hegemony, is depicted on the cover. Very little is added by seeing it in colour. Because it is a picture of 1940s male politicians in formal dress, it is effectively still in black and white, except for the faces. Stalin looks swarthier and more brooding. Roosevelt looks sicker (he was to die not long after) but more hard-faced. Churchill looks fatter and tipsier, and also more vulnerable (he was largely playing gooseberry by this time to the two new superpowers). Eden, his foreign secretary glamour-boy, looks quite flushed (perhaps because he appears to be being buggered by the grinning man standing behind him). In other words, historical figures and ciphers have been turned into fully fleshed personalities by “color”.

This is not suprising, since the entire tonal palette for Kodachrome was based on rendering the skin tones as pleasingly as possible of those who would be its principal consumers: caucasians (hence Stalin looks less “caucasian” because he actually came from the Caucasus). “Color” is literally the colour of American consumerism. Japanese Fuji colour film followed the same imperative, but for Asians. Pinks and reds are the colours which “color” recognises and amplifies most dramatically, though sometimes it is slightly mortician: people occasionally appear as if they have been painted after death to give the illusion of life, which of course is, historically speaking, exactly what has happened.

Just as it is difficult to tell whether pink is a diluted version of red, or red a more intense version of pink, it can be difficult to tell the difference between blood and make-up, heat and death. Veronica Lake appears in Wagnerian splendour in a publicity shot for I Married a Witch (1942), but most of the colour comes from the flames (of Stalingrad?) behind her. A prettyfemale worker in a munitions factory inspecting .30 machine-gun rounds sports lipstick and nail varnish which appears to be exactly the same red as the tips of the rounds. Even her rouge appears to be of the same tint. She seems eerily stained in blood: a collision of purity and sex, death and life. By comparison, a tinted picture of her young soldier husband by her side appears ominously anaemic.

This collection also reveals that while, until Elvis Presley, white men were in mono, except for their faces, white women were in colour, except for their faces, which appear kabuki-white, the only colour being the red gash of the lips; perhaps the result of the dominance of black- and-white photography and movies until this time. The only colour in a 1948 publicity still of black-and-white film diva Bette Davies is her scarlet lips. A very young Liz Taylor snapped in the same year on the other hand is allowed a certain bloom, perhaps because she promises a fully colorised future.

In colour the Nazis, who understood almost as much as Hollywood about the power of aesthetics, are not nearly so smartly and powerfully dressed as they appear in black and white (or contemporary Hollywood movies): they look cheap and kitsch. Hitler’s face looks rattier and more dissolute. Brownshirts turn out to have pink borders on their caps: the same pink, it just so happens, that explodes from the dress and lips of the model on the cover of American Vogue in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor. Two years later, pink has intensified into red lust in the form of a skimpily dressed and reclining Jane Russell in a poster for The Outlaw : appropriately enough, the same sinful red heat that suffuses a picture of the Bikini Atoll test in 1954.

In a portrait of black American boxer Sugar Ray Robinson (1950) in a pink suit standing next to his pink Cadillac parked outside his businesses in Harlem, the pinkness of his car and of his suit appears to bleed into everything: his face, the street, the buildings, the crowd of black men looking on admiringly. Pink in a colorised world is the sugar ray colour of success, of money, of power, of whiteness.

As pictures of (not many) other black stars here such as Frankie Lymon illustrate, black skin is rendered especially strangely by honky-Kodachrome: like a melting chocolate gateau. Hence the unintended salience of a photograph of a nuclear test mannequin showing that dark clothing and skin - but not light skin - burn at 7,000ft from ground zero: the Kodachrome bomb.

Looking at this collection it becomes apparent that pink became the defining colour of the 1950s because of Kodachrome’s palette. As demonstrated by the pastel pictures of Elvis towards the end of the book: a man whose favourite colour was pink. It was his pink lips, much more than his swinging hips, that were the key to his success and the manner in which he became the icon of that decade.

What we understand by “colour” today is entirely shaped by “color” and the advances in colour reproduction techniques since the 1950s which have made Kodachrome itself almost obsolete. Colour, pre Kodachrome, was simply life. Photographs were shadowy representations of life - hence they were in black and white.

These early colour photos in their chromic crudeness do not reveal a brilliant world suddenly illuminated by the sun peeking from behind a cloud, but rather a world which is still mostly blissfully innocent of what “color” is, a world where magazines and consumerism have not yet sucked the juices out of life.

In 1939 people had not yet learnt to see the world through Kodachrome eyes. By 1959, however, this was all they could see.

© Mark Simpson 2007

Growing up in the 1970s, frustrated and bored with waiting for someone to invent the Internet, I got my teenage kicks at the Central Library.

Dropping in on my way home from school, I would furtively rummage through the dusty sociology section looking up dirty words, especially ‘homosexuality’ and ‘penis’, (blissfully unaware that in the gents both these abstract ideas were freely and really available). One of the most fertile resources for my highly subjective researches was ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male’ by a Dr Kinsey (1948).

According to the sensational biography by James H Jones, ‘Alfred C. Kinsey-A Public/Private Life’, published last year to scandalised uproar, the Good Doctor’s interest in these words was less academic than mine. Apparently he was ‘a homosexual’, driven by personal demons, who cruised parks, bars, cinemas and public lavatories and frequently had sex with the men he interviewed. In other words, the Good Doctor was a pervert and his research was to be handled with rubber gloves.

Gathorne-Hardy’s Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred Kinsey aims to liberate Kinsey from the nonce-wing of sexology by refuting Jones’ reductive approach to his sexuality, arguing that he was as complex as his subject-matter, that the sex-pioneer from Indiana was a living testament to the value of his own refusal to countenance that there was such a thing as ‘a homosexual’; there were only homosexual or heterosexual acts. On Kinsey’s famous 0-6 scale, where 0=exclusively heterosexual behaviour, 3=equally homosexual and heterosexual behaviour, and 6=exclusively homosexual (and 7=Harvey Fierstein), Kinsey moved in his own lifetime from a Kinsey 0 to a Kinsey 4. Gathorne-Hardy argues persuasively that Kinsey’s bisexuality and pro-active approach was actually a help rather than a hindrance in his research, contrasting it with that of the ‘blue rinse’ brigade who conducted the research for a recent American sex survey (As one respondent put it succinctly: ‘I’m not gonna tell someone who reminds me of my mom that I suck cock’)

Gathorne-Hardy also demonstrates why Kinsey’s data, despite all the statistical brickbats hurled at it, is probably still more accurate than any gathered since. Recent sex surveys both here and in the US have sneered at Kinsey’s failure to ‘random sample’. But the trouble with random sampling in regard to these sex surveys is that it isn’t random. Around 30% of people randomly selected in the recent mammoth British sex survey refused to take part. In contrast, over a quarter of Kinsey’s data was garnered from 100% responses from the Universities, factories and associations he visited. Even when you remove the so-called ‘dirty data’ of prisons and homosexual groups, this has little or no effect on the findings that most people who attack Kinsey today are concerned with - that more than a third of all adult American males admitted experiencing sexual contact with another male ‘to orgasm’.

And yet one can’t help feeling that Gathorne-Hardy should have spent less time refuting Jones and more time reading Foucault, whom along with Freud he has no time for. Gathorne-Hardy, like his behaviourist subject, is allergic to theory. But this fetishism of facts, refreshing as it was in a 1940s sexologist, is simply frustrating in a 1990s biographer. What is most interesting about Kinsey is what is omitted here.

Gathorne-Hardy dismisses as ‘irrelevant’ and a ‘swamp of words’ Foucault fan Thomas Waugh’s intriguing observations on Kinsey and the scientific study of sex: ‘How can the pleasure of looking be separated from the pleasure of erotic looking… the drive for visual pleasure, in which knowledge and desire are interlocking terms of power?’ And yet, on the very next page, Gathorne-Hardy, introducing Kinsey’s study of the female orgasm, cites a story which graphically presents precisely this question. Beck, a pioneering sex researcher was examining a woman for a collapsed uterus. Her cervix was clearly visible through her labia and he was about to probe here when she told him to be careful: if he touched her she would almost certainly have an orgasm. ‘Beck suddenly realised he might have a chance to see the female orgasm in action. He ignored her and… “swept my finger three or four times across the space between the cervix and the pubic arch, when almost immediate orgasm occurred…”.’

Foucault may have been too ready to play the French phoney, but I can hardly think of a single historical figure more deserving of a Foucauldian hermeneutic than Kinsey. Everything is there: the confessional, the integration of power, knowledge and sex, observation as a form of control. Kinsey even insisted that his male assistants have sex with him, arguing that it would help them with their homosexual interviews. If they objected this was taken as proof of how much they needed to have sex with Kinsey to overcome their inhibitions (judging by the plates of some of his young, beefy assistants, I can’t help feeling it’s an argument that I would have used too).

In effect the Institute for Sex Research was one gigantic sexual panopticon with Kinsey at its centre, surveying the most private, most intimate behaviour of literally tens of thousands of people. Kinsey personally observed hundreds of acts of coitus and masturbation, and his institute filmed and photographed thousands more. As an example of the whimsical power of this voyeuristic potentate, on one occasion, Kinsey ordered the ISR to film a thousand different men masturbating to determine whether men actually ejaculated, i.e. threw out their semen, or whether it just fell out (most men are dribblers was the conclusion).

Of course, it doesn’t take a Foucault to see that the thousands of in-depth sex interviews that Kinsey conducted could themselves be interpreted as a form of sex, (even if you didn’t know about his habit of measuring his male interviewees erections). One indignant NY hotelier famously made the connection. Fed up with the constant stream of disreputable types of men lining up in his foyer to be interviewed by Kinsey who was lodged in one of his rooms at the time, he turfed the Doctor out shouting, ‘I WILL NOT HAVE YOU UNDRESSING PEOPLE’S MINDS IN MY HOTEL!’

Kinsey started a trend that has become unstoppable. Nowadays any sex surveyor has to begin their interviewer with the question, ‘When was the first time you were interviewed about your sex life?’ Kinsey’s sexual liberationist approach has become mainstream. Turn on the television, open a newspaper and be confronted with another ‘sex survey’ or new series claiming to ‘uncover the secret of sex’. Even Republicans are at it. Kenneth Starr, the right-wing Kinsey, conducts an investigation into sexual behaviour even more ambitious and more famous than Doctor Sex’s. Relentlessly making the private public in the name of the public good, he aggressively pursues evidence of extra-marital, extra-vaginal sexual activity. And you can be sure than when Mr Starr extracted a confession of oro-genital contact from the President of the United States himself he had no doubts about the relationship of knowledge to power. (Interestingly, like Clinton, 40% Kinsey’s respondents didn’t consider oro-genital contact as ‘sex’).

Explicitness is now as compulsory for our age as hypocrisy was for Kinsey’s strict Methodist father. Given this, Kinsey’s increasing fascination with homosexuality was entirely appropriate, since homosexuality is the most ‘naked’, most ‘explicit’ kind of sex-i.e. non reproductive, non-institutionalised sex-for-it’s-own-sake. Interestingly, the number representing exclusive homosexuality on the Kinsey scale-six-is ‘sex’ in Latin. Little wonder then, that as our age has become more obsessed with sex it has become more obsessed with homosexuality.

However, there is a huge irony here. Kinsey’s ambition to demolish the category of ‘the homosexual’ by revealing the common-ness of homosexual acts has not been realised. Instead, homosexuality is in some senses even more ghettoised than in the 1940s. Male-male activity, precisely because it is more visible, is probably less common these days. Knowledge about ‘sexuality’ of itself changes the meaning and practise of what people do with their bodies. In Kinsey’s day it wasn’t queer unless you were taking it or weren’t ‘tied to the pier’ (as sailors used to say); nowadays any sexual contact between males is ‘gay’.

But, despite some admirably thorough leg-work and some astute observations, you won’t find these points discussed by Gathorne-Hardy. He’s too busy using Kinsey as a behaviourist battering ram against theory, psychoanalysis and religion. The end result is that Kinsey himself is lost in the noise of liberal partisan warfare.

Gathorne-Hardy repeatedly cites Richard Webster’s ‘Why Freud Was Wrong’ like some kind of charm warding off evil spirits and refuses to seriously discuss Kinsey’s unconscious life because he doesn’t want to give credence to Jones’ idea that Kinsey was ‘pursued by demons.’ But Kinsey himself confided to a friend that he was afraid of psychoanalysts, apparently he had a feeling that they could divine his ‘innermost and most secret thoughts’.

Whether or not Kinsey might have benefited from some psychoanalysis, is difficult to say, but this biography certainly would. Kinsey was himself the best example of the limits of sexual liberationism. He died an unhappy, broken, impotent man in 1957, aged 63. According to Gahorne-Hardy, this was due to overwork and the result of the triumph of the reactionary forces that “cut off” Kinsey’s funding. But perhaps it may also have had something to do with Kinsey’s own driven, controlling nature and his masochistic tendencies - later in life he liked to suspend himself from the ceiling by his scrotum, and he announced to a surprised friend that he had recently circumcised himself in the bath.

Kinsey and Gathorne-Hardy may not have had much time for theories about the super-ego, but it looks as if an especially punitive one had plenty of time for Kinsey.

Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 1997

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Frederick, like a lot of ‘greats’, has some dodgy fans. Most famous of course is his historical stalker Adolf Hitler who hero-worshipped the general king who established Prussia as a first rank power, and saw himself, as really scary fans do, as his true heir.

And in fact, the unmarried Austrian corporal’s military and diplomatic genius did manage to arrange for a Twentieth Century replay of Frederick’s heroic Eighteenth Century battle against a combination of most of the major European powers (Hitler’s masterstroke consisted in the truly inspired addition of the United States to the list of opponents ranged against him). As we all know, Adolf the Shortarse’s reign achieved the opposite results to Frederick the Great’s: abject defeat, devastation on a scale unimaginable in Frederick’s time, partition, and a Berlin occupied by Russians.

And then there are Frederick’s other ‘dodgy’ bachelor fans who wish to claim him for their cause. After all, he spurned the affections of his wife Wilhelmina, he sired no children, women were almost invisible at court, and his name was not linked with famous mistresses as most other princes of the period worth their codpieces were. Instead he collected statues of Antinous, Hadrian’s lover, and Ganymede, and ‘was known to caress, tickle, pinch the ear of some favoured page’.

So it is entirely understandable and perhaps even commendable that David Fraser, a former General in the British Army should want to save Frederick from both these kinds of Fans of Freddie in his major biography Frederick the Great. After all, Hitler and, until very recently, homos were two things the British Army knew it was against. However, Fraser’s brusque dismissal of both these kind of claims in the early part of his authoratitive, impressive, if occasionally gruelling tome ‘Frederick the Great’, is not entirely convincing. He claims that because Frederick was an Enlightenment man, cultivated and an aesthete, he could not therefore be any kind of progenitor of Nazism - but then, as Theodor Adorno argued, Nazism was not so much anti-Enlightenment as the Enlightenment’s dark side. Besides, Hitler was an architect, a painter and the author of a philosophical treatise called ‘Mein Kampf’ (he was a terrible philosopher and a mediocre artist; but then, Frederick was a mediocre poet).

More generally, it could be pointed out that Hitler was much more of a continuation of Prussian ideals and goals than is comfortable for many Germans to admit - now. Hitler’s extremely popular - until it brought the Red Army to Brandenburg - policy of ‘lebensraum’, which aimed to annexe the Ukraine and much of European Russia and which was the motive for his pre-emptive war against France and Britain, was not a Satanic Nazi invention of his but a continuation of the goals of (largely Prussian) Officer Corps of the First World War. Which in turn was of a piece with the Greater Germany created by Prussia’s expansionism under Bismarck.

With respect to the rumours of rum bum goings on, Fraser acknowledges the ‘homosexual’ reputation Frederick has gained, outlines his lack of interest in the fair sex and admits that this ‘together with his unabashed aestheticism and the delicacy of his tastes… gave plausibility to his alleged impotence or homosexuality.’ (The two, of course, being interchangeable). He also admits that their were rumours that Frederick enjoyed what Fraser calls the ‘pathic’ role in sodomy (looking up ‘pathic’ in my dictionary I discover, with a thrill, it means ‘victim’ or ‘catamite’ - presenting an irresistible chat up line: ‘are you active or pathic?’). In the end, however, Fraser is unconvinced and claims that Frederick was probably asexual, or at most a non-practising sodomite. And then moves smartly on to the business that really interests him. War.

Now, while it is certainly refreshing in an era when everyone, especially historical figures, have to be interpreted and interpolated according to whether their nether regions pointed East or West, to find someone much more interested in the battle order of Frederick’s Regiments than his bedtime antics, Fraser doesn’t really get away with it. In fact, as with the other Fans of Freddie already mentioned, it does seem here as if we’re learning more about Mr Fraser’s foibles than King Frederick’s. As, for example, in the passage where he cites, as evidence against Frederick’s alleged ‘homosexuality’, the fact that he bought some erotic paintings featuring five pairs of ‘male and gloriously female lovers’.

Especially since, a little later, our sceptical author seems keen to suggest that, despite his philosphe inspired distrust of superstition, Frederick did have some religious beliefs - when there is considerably less evidence that Frederick was attracted to the idea of a Deity than he was to the idea of sodomy. As Fraser puts it himself: ‘prejudice has too often clouded perceptions of one of the most extraordinary men ever to sit on a throne or command an army’. Fraser is, of course a Fan of Freddie too. However, aside from the relatively minor lapses already mentioned, he isn’t a dodgy one, but for the most part a fairly objective ‘straight’ one.

Frederick proffers fertile material for some of the psychological speculation which Fraser eschews. He was terrorised by his father Frederick William ‘the soldier king’ who beat him and declared he was ‘not prepared to tolerate an “effeminate creature, with no manly inclinations,” who… was uncleanly in his person and wore his hair long’ (of course today these latter two habits would be categorical proof that Frederick wasn’t gay). A young Frederick tried to escape Prussia to England but was caught and imprisoned by his father, after being forced to watch his best friend ‘whom he probably loved’ being beheaded. Which would be enough to turn any lad a bit odd, and maybe even into a military genius (there are some interesting parallels here with Alexander whose warlike father Philip was also a tyrant who tormented his son - a son who also went onto to surpass his father’s considerable military achievements - and gain a reputation for ‘pathic’ behaviour). As Fraser puts it, Frederick came to manhood ‘in frightful circumstances, circumstances which would plead for understanding had he subsequently become a criminal, a degenerate or a lunatic rather than, as happened, a genius.’

Certainly that criminal, degenerate, lunatic Voltaire seemed to think Frederick was a genius, or at least a ‘philosopher king’. He also described him as ‘the Solomon of the North’ and ‘the hope of the world’. And perhaps it wasn’t just because he had received a very large Burgandy bill that week. Frederick was a Fan of France; he hated German and spoke it ostentatiously badly, preferring to speak and write in French, frequently dropping the ‘k’ from his name in signatures to Francify it. He hero-worshipped Voltaire and they exchanged countless effusive letters in verse in which they attempted to flatter one another to death. Voltaire was even invited to move to Berlin and was awarded a house and a fat pension (Rousseau was made a similar offer, but made the mistake of asking Frederick, in the fashion of some do-gooding Hollywood celeb: ‘what was being done for those who had lost limbs in his service’). Frederick eventually discovered the downside to French intellectuals: ‘he has the malice of a monkey,’ he declared exasperatedly after another scandal erupted involving Voltaire’s greed and heinousness, ‘but I need him for my French studies.’ Voltaire was eventually sent packing and, characteristically, he offered his services to Maria Theresa of Austria, Frederick’s arch-enemy. (To her credit she rebuffed him saying: ‘Voltaire belongs not in Vienna but on Parnassus’)

For all the exhaustive, often dramatic and always conscientiously detailed accounts of Frederick’s exemplary career on the battlefield offered here, dashing around Prussia fending off the Russians in the North, the Austrians in the South, the French in the West (and getting his horse shot from under him several times an hour, it seems), it is through Fraser’s account of Frederick as a ruler, or ‘Solomon of the North’ that Frederick’s genius - and his modernity - is grasped by the civilian. Frederick, who frequently claimed to loathe soldiering, understood the importance of tolerance, for personal as well as political reasons. Against the custom for scorn, he defended an unmarried female servant in his household who had become pregnant. In Silesia, which had a large Catholic population, a Catholic soldier was convicted of stealing jewels from a statue of the Virgin in a Church. The soldier claimed, cannily, Mary had given them to him. Frederick assembled some theologians and asked them whether Our Lady could do such a thing. They concluded that it was improbable but not impossible. Frederick annulled the sentence. He had, he said, no power to forbid Our Lady from giving. But, he added, he would in future punish with death a soldier or anyone else who accepted such a gift.

Frederick’s sense of justice was remarkably democratic for an absolutist monarch. A distinguished French traveller struck a postilion, who hit back and threw him out of the carriage with his valise. The Frenchman, as Frenchman do, wrote indignantly to Frederick who told him to be less free with his whip in future. ‘What an infernal country this Prussia is,’ complained the Frenchman, ‘where you cannot thrash a postilion without bringing blows on yourself!’ Frederick’s tolerance might have been a desire to prove his intellectual as well as his temporal mastery. In a precursor of Stalin’s famous question about how many divisions does the Pope have, Frederick was given reports of a man in Berlin who called him a tyrant and was proposing treason. ‘What resources has this man?’ asked Frederick. ‘Can he raise an army of 200,000?’ ‘No, sire,’ came the reply. ‘He is poor, a private individual’ ‘Well,’ laughed Frederick, ‘that’s all right!’

Not even a philosopher king can master his legacy, or his followers. Another Fan of Freddie’s, after routing the Prussians decisively at Auerstadt and Iena in 1806, visited his tomb at Potsdam. ‘Hats off messieurs,’ Napoleon commanded his generals. ‘If he were alive we would not be here.’ Indeed, but on the other hand, if Frederick hadn’t lived, Napoleon might not have come.

Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday February 2000

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Gender is a lot like Star Trek.

Self-described ‘gender outlaw’ Kate Bornstein is apparently beyond gender and hence is is a fan of politically correct, not to say sex-less Star Trek: The Next Generation. I, on the other hand, am clearly not beyond gender just beyond hope - because I prefer the original, sweaty, sexist, sexy Sixties series.

Perhaps this is why, after totting up my score on the ‘Gender Aptitude Test’ in ‘hir’ (sic) My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You or Something Else Entirely, I found myself in the top-scoring (i.e. oppressive), ‘perfectly gendered’ (i.e. reactionary) category and was mockingly informed: ‘You’re Captain James T. Kirk!’

Obviously my role-model should have been the ‘transgendered’ android Data. On the other hand, I should point out that Kirk is not exactly most people’s idea of a ‘real man’. He wears a corset, tight trousers, lots of make-up, and the camera lens is slathered in Vaseline every time it goes in for yet another close-up.

The problem with Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook: How To Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely, apart from its ominously overlong-title, is that like most efforts at ‘re-education’, it only succeeds in re-ingraining your ‘worst’ prejudices. It’s finger-wagging, Maoist approach to the ‘false-consciousness’ those of us unfortunate enough not to be transgendered like Bornstein labour under tends to make you rather fond of gender - that ‘obsolete’ system of oppression that Bornstein rails against. Sentences such as: ‘Gender over the past couple of millennia has been twisted into a very lop-sided power arena as represented by the gender/identity/power pyramid,’ don’t exactly charm, either.

Nor, frankly, does the cutesy style of this harangue - presented in the form of a school exercise book, with tests, diagrams, role-play/sex-talk conversations from the Internet, ‘wacky’ fonts and ‘fun’ exclamation marks!! and campy tone - succeed in disguising its essentially serious looniness.

Faced with the goody-goody characters in TNG you can’t help but side with the baddies. Likewise, who, faced with the ‘multiple choice’ questions here would have any choice at all?:

Q: Do you have a “type” of person you regularly fall for?

A. Definitely, yes.

B: I try to keep my mind open about this sort of thing, but I usually fall for one type.

C: I seem to fall for lots of ‘types’ of people, but usually they’re all the same gender.

D: What? You want to know if I fall for typists? What a silly question. I fall for anyone I can connect with and who connects with me.

Upon reading the ‘D’ (right-on) option anyone with a modicum of self-regard will immediately go back and tick the ‘A’ (right-off) option.

There are countless such exercises in this book. After a while - about five minutes - even the schadenfreude of ticking the ‘wrong’ box isn’t enough to inoculate you against the kind of boredom that will make your genitals pack their bags and leave home, slamming the door on their way out so hard that your nipples fall off.

But perhaps this is the point. Kate Bornstein is neither a man nor a woman but ‘hir’ own special transgressive creation - and, inevitably, something of a travelling circus. ‘Ze’ was born male, raised as a boy, opted for a sex-change in adulthood, and became a woman. A few years later, she got tired of being a woman so she stopped - but didn’t want to become a man again. And I think most of us can identify with that. Since her disillusionment with both sides of the gender divide, ‘ze’s’ has become an evangelist for the joys of being transgendered.

‘Gender’, which used to be a polite euphemism for ‘sex’ has come to stand for something separate from (if related to) the fact of internal/external genital organs. Being a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ is not dependent on the shape of your squishy bits any more, apparently. In other words, ‘male’ is not the referent of ‘man’. More than that, to take the postmodern/gender studies line, they are both signifiers without referents, since even ‘male’ and ‘female’ are not unambiguous, concrete terms, given the hermaphrodite tendencies of many babies who have to be surgically altered to ‘fit’ the ‘natural’ categories, and the sex-changing tendencies of certain adult humans, not to mention certain fish that have been in the news lately.

But acknowledging that gender is constructed, not simply a biological given, and that the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality is not as adamantine or natural or coherent as we like to think is one thing, but to suggest that you can ‘work through’ gender and simply re-construct it to match your shoes - or dispense with it altogether - is quite another, neutered thing (unless you happen to be David Bowie and it’s the early Seventies). ‘The way you live without gender is you look for where gender is, and then you go someplace else,’ says Bornstein. Yeah, but where do you get hold of a flying saucer at affordable rates?

Freud suggested that the first question we ask ourselves on meeting someone was ‘are they male or female?’ It may be that the question people should be asking is, ‘are they a sci-fi fan’? As my pre-op tranny (i.e. not transgendered) friend Michelle obsessed with Star Wars told me after dipping into Bornstein’s book before tossing it aside in frustration: ‘Bleedin’ ‘ell. I suppose my gender is Wookie!’.

Originally appeared Independent on Sunday, January, 1998

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

“No more f****** Abba!!”

So bellowed an ageing transsexual Terence Stamp in Priscilla Queen of the Desert, driven to distraction by his fey fellow bus passengers’ obsession with the silly Swedish 1970s super group.

Some hope. We’re all trapped on a Day-Glo bus full of drag queens squawking along to a loop tape of Abba Gold playing on the stereo. And that’s just watching the Sydney Olympics. The Abba revival in the 1990s turned out to be not so much a rediscovery of a critically overlooked band, as an ascension to pop cultural Heaven and eternal airplay.

Bjorn, Benny, Frida and Agnetha are all our angelic friends now - and we believe in them, something good in everything they do. We hear their sweetly harmonious voices almost every day, though they stopped making records 20 years ago. And we still see their warm, smiling, never-ageing, non-aligned Nordic faces, the epitome of benignity. They just want us to be happy. In fact, Bjorn, Benny, Frida and Agnetha are not just our friends - they’re our parents. Not our unconvincing, biological ones, but our shiny, postmodern ones who will never let us down, except perhaps in their dress-sense. After all, the cute acronym of their names Abba means “Our father” in Aramaic (though in Sweden it’s also the name of a tinned fish company).

Abba were a fiendishly clever and catastrophically successful Scandinavian plan for total world domination. Deploying pop singles instead of longboats, aspirations instead of horned helmets, they kidnapped pre-teen children everywhere, ultimately making the world safe for that other Swedish four- letter word: Ikea. Abba were the ultimate suburban aspirational group and the two crooning couples the ultimate aspirational parents. Now that we’re grown up, we’re all Abba now. We’ve all bought the dream of Swedish bourgeois classlessness, excellence and niceness, the soft furnishings and cool green frosted glass kitchen cabinets that scratch easily if you’re not really careful.

It’s significant that nowhere was Abba’s strategy more successful than in Australia, where not just pre-teens, but pretty much the whole country was abducted overnight. When they performed on TV there, more than half the population tuned in. Abba: The Movie was set in Australia. The Abba tribute band Bjorn Again is Australian. Australian films are obsessed with Abba (eg Priscilla and Muriel’s Wedding).

Why did Australia go “ABBAustralian” as one paper put it at the time? Unkind Poms might say it was because the Aussies identified with the Swedes’ problems with the English language, but the truth was that Australia, the former penal colony, was a “bastard” country looking to be adopted by well-mannered parents with nice teeth who weren’t sheep farmers or uranium miners.

The Abba makeover to which Australia surrendered worked perfectly: nowadays Australia is a country of nice, friendly middle-class people, dental hygienists, publicists, models, personal trainers, lawyers and cheery soap operas. In other words, once assimilated, Australia was able to go about the business of running the AbbaWorld. Hence that triumphal climax of last year’s closing ceremony at the Sydney Olympics, broadcast around the world to billions, featured AbbaChild Kylie Minogue on a Priscilla float singing “Dancing Queen”, the national anthem of AbbaWorld. (And a literally irresistible pop song - which is to say, it wrestles your better judgement to the floor, sits on its face, and leaves you free to make a complete fool of yourself.)

Britain was the first non-Scandinavian country to succumb to Abba, that Eurovision night with Katie Boyle back in 1974 at the Brighton Dome was when we met our Waterloo. It’s probably why that nice Mr Sven has had so much success with his makeover of the English football team, most of whom were born post Abbassimilation and have no trouble recognising their masters.

Scandinavian design, with its clean lines, high quality, what-you-see-is-what-you-get lack of hierarchy, is the only kind of bourgeoisdom we Brits seem willing to recognise nowadays. Those satanically clever and clean Abba hook-lines and impressive arrangements (praised now by everyone from Pete Townsend to Bono) were the product of craftsmanship and professionalism. The very things that made them deeply unhip in the 1970s and led to them being described as “cynical” and “icy” are what makes them the soundtrack to a careerist, managerial age. Those tunes may have sounded innocent to kids back then, but now that they have grown up they’re glad to discover that they weren’t -that like everything else these days, they were very, very calculated.

I’m not sure how much of this fellow Swede and uber AbbaChild Carl Magnus Palm, author of Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of Abba would agree to. The flyleaf describes him as “the world’s foremost Abba historian”, but really his book isn’t as bad as that would lead you to believe. It’s all clearly and soberly written, painstakingly detailed and incontrovertibly definitive. Very professional. Well crafted. The prose slides in and out smoothly like a fitted kitchen drawer. But there are not enough clean lines. Some of this detail and definitiveness is not likely to appeal, unless you’re the world’s No 2 Abba historian. Thankfully, his main thesis about “the Nordic angst being there all along, just beneath the surface” isn’t really borne out. So the band members turn out to be actual human beings who have rows and bust ups? Big deal. There are fewer “dark shadows” here than in an Ikea showroom. And, being an AbbaChild, the author can’t contemplate the possibility that Abba itself may have been the “dark shadow”.

As a pal of mine, a blonde male-to-female transsexual Abba fan (”Abba made me what I am today!”) pronounced after devouring the book: “There’s no dirt. No one’s ever been able to find any.”

She didn’t sound disappointed. Which is, perhaps, the scariest thing of all about Abba.

Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday October 2001

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007