Sometimes when you don’t have many memories of someone or something, you keep coming back to the same ones. One of the things I remember about my Grandma is her saying to me: boys will be boys – he’s like Just William, when my brother was teasing me when I was little.

More so than my brother, I was a  fan of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, published during the 1920s and on. I liked the adventures, the gangs, the jokes, the particular, evocative apparatus: catapults, dens, ginger beer, and so on. I think there’s a kind of inter-war literature – Swallows and Amazons, Just William, anything by P.G. Wodehouse – adventuring and even escapist, but not fantastical, that is particularly British, well-loved and easily recognised – the kind of stories that would be published by Boy’s Own magazine. The world is familiar to us as England, despite the fact that no-one alive has lived in any England like this. I think that this kind of inter-war literature seems to represent something very different to its close contemporaries in Modernist artworks, about which plenty’s been written. Just William was first published in 1922, although two more famous publications of that year might be Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land. Unlike these Modernist works, Swallows and Amazons, Just William, Wodehouse, and other country house/schoolroom dramas from this time seem to me to share a kind of escapism rooted in the everyday – a slightly coy, even camp, humorous, rollicking story which turns its face from the things going on in Europe at the time, whilst at the same time bringing the paraphernalia of its world vividly to life for the modern reader.

It’s strange how some people seem to return obsessively to a single point in history. The arrival of the post-war ‘Windrush’ generation of immigrants from all over the world has been branded as the beginning of a multiracial society in England (the HMS Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex on 22 June 1948, carrying 492 soon-to-be Jamaican citizens of England).

Recently elected to represent Britain in the European Parliament, the British National Party’s speeches and policies build on a concept of a pre-Windrush Britain to which we can return through change in government. On the BNP website electoral candidates have uploaded their favourite books to a profile section which tells you a bit about the candidates and their lives and loves.

Alongside the predictable Dickens/Tolkein battering, the BNP’s reading of choice includes Wodehouse and Flashman (memoirs of the Rugby school bully), while a small army of them profess they return again and again to that childhood and adulthood favourite, Swallows and Amazons. Little surprise, given the attitudes they strike, that these people favour books written during the final years of pre-Windrush Britain, in which white people take tea whilst their little, white sons get into scrapes playing practical jokes on lugubrious butlers and cantankerous neighbours, or accidentally shattering the windows of the drawing-room with a cricket ball.

Sometimes boys being boys isn’t such a bad thing. That’s certainly the case with sickmansick. A showcase for the work of a Voltron-esque agglomeration of seriously talented mates (including – full disclosure – Murdofleur’s Cormac McGloin), the site’s been providing a steady stream of A1 audiovisual stimulation for nearly a year and a half. The quality of the mixes, shoots and artwork on show is testament to countless boyhood (and girlhood) hours spent graffing, coding, crate-digging and generally tinkering, and the levels are still being upped; focused on processes rather than products, the site offers the chance to watch skills being developed and projects taking shape before your very eyes, sickness sprouting everywhere like bumfluff on a teenage chin.

Tech savvy, musically literate and achingly well turned-out, sickmansick represents qualities any self-respecting modern boy should aspire to. You might want to take a peep.

Christian Bale’s cold dry hard smile peels off the screen with all the tedium of a tweet. In this film he’s transformed from vigilante outsider (Batman) to vigilante insider (Melvin Purvis, FBI). The potential meditative aspects of his career have been crushed under the sheer weight of machismo. But this man can eat a live snake (Rescue Dawn) – so we’re in business. Perhaps better for boys to be boys than men: the only ‘boy’ herein (Pretty Boy Floyd) is swiftly relieved of his life by a fruity rifle shot from Bale in a bloodstained orchard.

Boys/men, naturally congeal into the gang mentality of Goodies n baddies, cops n robbers. Then a constant flurry of bullets squidges all categories into ambiguity: it doesn’t matter ‘who? what? who? the bazooka was who?’ The viewer is firestormed into admitting their boredom. Bank heists soon cease to be glamorous, elegant and exciting (as in Ocean’s Eleven) and are revealed as the messy extensions of possessive-compulsive behaviour. Women also are disempowered by the dancing tirade of gunshots presented here, oh they’re allowed to be little more than tired holsters for the hot weapons of men.

Depp’s character (John Dillinger) is self-consciously reductive. He announces to his beau, ‘I like baseball, whiskey, good clothes, fast cars, and you – what more do you wanna know?’ [that’s a paraphrase]. At least he’s honest, and this film doesn’t set out to offer more. However, rivetting the frames with shootouts fails to hold the viewer’s attention. What remains in mind is the self-satisfied flicker of the snake-eating smile in a film that is really about the history of American police.

Vienna: looking at Breugel’s Children’s Games, this little crew in hoodies made

me think of Stockwell – always so, ‘boys will be boys’?

Dorothy Feaver

Ruairiadh O’Connell

The internet’s fresh crop of boys being boys, eating apples again and again

since the very first time – looks like they’re enjoying it.

Dorothy Feaver

Ruairiadh O’Connell

Entourage, for those of you that don’t know, has just finished its fifth season and tells the story of heartthrob Hollywood actor Vincent Chase and his entourage (Perfect title for the show huh?) and is apparently loosely based on the life of Mark Wahlberg (yeah right, is Mark Wahlberg really this cool? He did just star as the lead in the recent movie adaptation of video game Max Payne you know?) Entourage could be described as a ‘sleeper hit’ as it has slowly wormed its way into the consciousness of the entire world after a fairly low key beginning. Personally, I think it’s a great show and I can’t speak highly enough of it, although I feel like the last season was slowing down a bit (probably why the next season will be the last). My favourite episode is the one where they go to Las Vegas – check that one out if you need a starting point.

Predictably I was one of the first to introduce people of England to the show after picking up on it when I used to live in Toronto with a bunch of college guys. We were probably the show’s target audience (BOYS WILL BE BOYS) and this led to such statements as ‘Oh man, I’ve got my finals tomorrow but I just downloaded a whole season ofEntourage and I can’t stop watching it! Fuck’ being uttered with increasing regularity (this particular American ended up back in St Louis the following semester, not too much of a surprise there). It was also unusual to walk down a corridor (it didn’t matter which one it was THAT big) and not hear Jane’s Addiction being blasted from one of the rooms (they do the theme music) and the smell of a joint being sparked up. So just what was it aboutEntourage that had such universal appeal?

In short, that old adage BOYS WILL BE BOYS explains it all (not Clarissa this time guys). An old dear friend once remarked to me that it was simply a version of Sex and The City for boys, and although I didn’t see this at first I slowly began to work my way around to this logic. I mean every girl loves Sex and The City right, that is pretty much a given. Why is that though? Probably because each character perfectly depicts a different woman that everyone knows and can identify with and arguably whose personalities can be reflected as facets of most modern women’s personalities: slut (yeah I put that one first), girl who just wants to get married, girl who has a career and girl who loves shoes. So yeah now we have these characters what do we do? Let’s put them in the ideal situation that most girls want to be in all the time: having coffee/food and complaining about their sex lives. Minimise scenes with work in (unless it has something to do with a relationship in the workplace) and throw in a bit of a sex action and some vaguely emotional scenes and BOOM you’ve got an institution of modern television! Darren Starr you are a genius – notice that Sex and The City was created by a man – and yeah all you smartasses at the back I do know it was based on a book.

But how does this relate to Entourage? It seems fairly clear to me someone at HBO said to Doug Elin, ‘Yo, we need a male Sex and The City’. So Doug Elin thinks ‘what does every guy want?’. Well the answer is pretty simple, to be rich and famous and fuck loads of girls….join the dots…damn, we’ll make a TV show about BEING A MOVIE STAR. Perfect. Then we’ll surround the movie star with a stoner (another male fantasy), a guy who’s always right (another one), a guy who gets angry and shouts a lot and belittles people (whoa, there’s another one) and Johnny Drama (couldn’t work out what he was supposed to represent…the wisdom of age? Figured he’s just comic relief, as he’s fucking hilarious but I don’t think anyone would want to BE HIM), throw in a bit of sex and a lot of arguing and some celebrity cameos from the likes of James Cameron, Seth Green and Scarlett Johannson and what have you got? The hottest show since Sex and The City – only this time it’s a different demographic -and the success ofEntourage probably is proof that BOYS WILL BE BOYS. The effect seems to have been almost universal as it has slowly but surely integrated itself into all of my different friendship groups (for the record I have quite a few) and I’ve lost count of the number of times there’s been a discussion about who in the room matches the characters inEntourage. It’s just unfortunate that the universal decision seems to always be that I would be Turtle.

Having just been promoted to the Bundesliga’s second division, Berlin football club Eisern Union is about to inaugurate its newly renovated stadium – rebuilt by the loving hands of its devoted fans. Ben Knight helped out for a day.

“Any special skills? Metal work, carpentry?” the man with the clipboard asked me, without irony. Work at the Alte Försterei stadium in Berlin’s Köpenick district started every day at 7 am. It was nearing completion – only the pitch heating system needed to be installed and the club was awaiting delivery of a roof to fit on top of the gleaming white stands.

A lady behind the clipboard man had already looked me up and down, and she spared my apologies. “It’s alright, I’ve already got him down for the painting,” she said. I was duly set the task of giving the ladies’ toilet a new white coat. I had hoped for a go on the welding iron, or maybe a circular saw, but did not push the issue, and accepted my unskilled beta-male status without fuss.

The renovation of the old stadium, which took the whole of last season and continued into the summer break, is a sign of the ambitions of Eisern Union. Their relegation to the regional leagues in 2004 had been an abject humiliation for a team that had played in the UEFA Cup – thanks to a runners-up place in the German Cup – only three years earlier.

But re-entry into Germany’s top leagues requires more than footballing prowess – it requires a stadium that meets certain technical guidelines – pitch heating, a roofed terrace, a certain percentage of seated places – and the club decided to prepare early. As fate would have it, the team won the new third division at a canter this season and will break in its new stadium in the Bundesliga’s second tier. The inaugural match will be a friendly against Berlin’s only first division club Hertha BSC on July 8.

The man with the clipboard took my particulars and pointed me and another newcomer, Eberhard, to the paint and the ladies’ room. “Breakfast is at 9, lunch is at 12. Sandwiches cost 10 cents.” About fifty other men were already gathered beneath the old stand, now looking incongruously decrepit next to the white steel skeleton around us. “Welcome to the best building site in the world!” proclaimed Sylvia Weisheit, a bustling middle-aged lady and pep-talk specialist. The gathered masses, standing around snacking on coffee and cake, displayed an earnest reserve not typical to builders. After Sylvia delivered a cheery status update, we dispersed and Eberhard and I made our way to share a special morning of proletarian solidarity in the toilet.

The sense of community in this singular project was palpable on that rainy morning, and it was expressed mainly through food. A group of women, the Fußballmuttis, or football mums, provided three balanced meals in a tent adjoining the stadium’s modest VIP area. There was even ice cream.

Änne Troester, a Prenzlauer Berg-based volunteer who comes out regularly to help with the meals showed a typical Union enthusiasm: “There seems to be a unique connection between the fans and their club, it’s very Berlin. Like they own the club; they simply take the right to have a say in what the club does. And the fans’ gesture was incredibly generous.”

The snowballing success of the labour-donation campaign has taken everyone by surprise, and it has had a, well, concrete benefit. At last count, some 1,800 volunteers have contributed a total of 80,000 hours’ work. This is estimated to be worth €2.5 million – half the total cost. The success is apparently driven by shame – when fans gather on the stands for next season’s home matches, no-one wants to be among those who didn’t help out.

The club’s spokesman Christian Arbeit also admits that the project was born of necessity. “There was an element of desperation. Berlin is a city heavily in debt. Most cities finance their new stadiums, but in Berlin Hertha’s massive World Cup stadium exhausted the budget and the political will. Instead, the city offered us the Jahn-Sportpark in Prenzlauer Berg, which, with the addition of pitch heating, would have been acceptable for the second division Bundesliga.”

But, mainly for emotional reasons, this was not an option. In communist East Germany, the Jahn-Sportpark was the home ground of BFC Dynamo, archrivals of Eisern. The bitterness between the clubs had a political edge to it. Dynamo, serial winners of the East German league, and backed by the head of the secret police the Stasi, stood for the political elite. Those of an anti-authoritarian bent gravitated to Eisern Union.

So although the Jahn-Sportpark was accepted as a temporary home for last season, and was the stage of their biggest success in recent years, it was the last place Eisern could move to permanently.

Union’s dissident history also explains the healthy mix of sub-cultures represented among the fans. The eastern German working classes that live around Köpenick make up the majority, but they are interspersed with punks and students. This is reflected in the club’s theme song, a pounding synth-pop track that segues into metal guitar performed by German music icon and Eisern fan Nina Hagen.

This demographic showed up at the building site too. At lunchtime in the makeshift canteen, there was a pale, scrawny boy at the next table, masked slightly by his piercings. With his head low over his meat and potato soup, he spoke to no-one. On his bedraggled coat, which he did not see the need to take off, there was a patch that read, “Shitting Is Work.” It seemed to offer a wise perspective on the heavy lifting going on all around. Defecation, the scrawny boy was inadvertently implying, was more work than this, a labour of collective love.

Eberhard alongside me surveyed the boy philosophically. He turned to me and uttered further wisdom on the camaraderie all around. “Well, one day at Eisern is like a year’s worth of integration,” he said. It wasn’t really true, but I can see what he meant.

This article first appeared on the website The Local on 6 July 2009.

We let men be anything, or everything, they want.  And women, or girls?  We are allowed nothing, NOTHING.  There is NOTHING we are allowed to be, and I have scientific evidence for this.

I actually teach for a living, English to unemployed German students.  At first glance, Germans aren’t quite as misogynistic as British people, their language is moderate, fair, kind.  But the reality is that their hatred of women is, underneath, just as pronounced.

I taught a lesson once on ”Celebrity Gossip.”  As an experiment, I wrote the words “CELEBRITIES WE LOVE TO HATE” on the board, and collected names.  Women’s names tumbled out of my students’ mouths like drunken sluts out of a taxi.  Verona Pooth, Paris Hilton.  Madonna.  Jordan.  Posh Spice.  Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, Heidi Klum.  Kylie.  Dannii.  Desiree Nick.  Charlotte Roche.  Sonja Krauss.

“Oh, what’s her name again?”
“Oh, what was the name of that girl again, the one who…?”
“Oh, shit, I’ve forgotten her name!”
“Oh, I can’t exactly remember what her name was, the girl who….”
“Oh, she’s annoying.”
“Oh, she’s totally annoying!”
“Oh, how annoying is she?”
“If I could only remember her name…..”

Do you know who the first man was, the first man they mentioned, after multitudes, thousands, MILLIONS of silly slutty women with too much make-up and not enough clothes on?

GEORGE W. FUCKING BUSH.

THAT IS HOW BAD A MAN HAS TO BE, TO BE AS BAD AS A MILLION SLUTS WITH TACKY TASTE IN EYELINER AND BIKINIS.  He has to actually destroy two fucking countries and almost destroy the whole fucking world.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying those girls aren’t silly sluts.  As much as the word slut exists, that’s what they are, probably.  PROBABLY.  They should go and put some fucking knickers, on, alright?  No, ALL I am saying is that those stupid silly girls haven’t killed one poor bastard between the whole slutty lot of them.  They couldn’t have.  They were too busy putting lip-gloss on and puking up their fucking dinner.

This is what we do to women, this is all we allow them to be.  We allow them to be nothing – nothing with eyeliner on, cunts with legs.  We allow men to be everything, all they can be.  We allow women to be nothing, and we promise them, that if they reduce themselves enough, at some point we’ll forgive them.  Reduce your thighs, scrape out your pussy, pump up your forehead with poison and maybe at some point you’ll look so dead we’ll forgive you for having had the audacity to be born a woman……

So, I know a boy who fucks around.  Maybe he fucks three girls a week, maybe less.  Probably less, a lot less.  But he would.  You know. He also does dangerous stuff with fireworks, and drinks so much, takes so many drugs he has to throw up, or get hospitalized.  He throws glass around, he carves up people’s bookcases while they’re asleep.  He breaks plates.  He’s kind of dangerous, and totally free.

Now when I got together with my boyfriend, my new mum-in-law didn’t like me.  Not one bit.  Well, I have a kid, and no husband, a lot of people’s mums wouldn’t like me, probably.  But the thing with my boyfriend’s mum is, she was also a single mum when he was growing up.  She had two kids by two different men and she survived, she was okay.  If anyone’s mum was gonna like me, then his.  And she didn’t.
“You’d think she’d like me,” I said to The Dangerous Boy.  “I mean, she did have two kids to two different men.  I’m only on my first.  If anyone’s gonna accept me as a daughter-in-law, then her.”
“Oh, come on,” he replied.
“What do you mean?”  I asked.
“Come on, Jacinta,” he said.
“What do you mean, come on?”
“I think anyone can understand - anyone can understand – that a mother is going to worry, when her son falls in love, with someone who already has kids.  Anyone could understand that.  It’s totally understandable.”

This is what we do – we let men throw fireworks in people’s faces, start wars, commit rape – but we don’t let women be.  A woman isn’t allowed to be Jordan.  She isn’t allowed to be Posh Spice.  She isn’t allowed to be thin, pretty, drunk, clever, stupid, crazy, fat, intelligent.  She isn’t allowed to have purple hair, she isn’t allowed to fall over.  We print pictures of women in magazines with circles around their cellulite and arrows pointing to them.  What we really want is these women dead.  What we really want is to burn Paris Hilton, maybe to rape her first but then to burn her, burn her like a fucking witch.

Of course it has to be this which frees us, as women, in the end.  We will never please any of them, we will never be accepted, because they will never let us be.  That means all we can say is: FUCK OFF.  That’s all Jordan can say, all Posh Spice can say.

FUCK OFF, I have facial hair.
FUCK OFF, I have cellulite.
FUCK OFF, I have saggy boobs.
FUCK OFF, I have dandruff.

FUCK OFF I AM A WOMAN.  Here is my cunt – let me drip period blood all over your forehead.

I am a bitch – slut – cunt – girl – feminist – woman.  This is all I ever will and can be.  I don’t give a shit what youse think because YOU WILL NEVER BE SATISFIED.

NOW JUST LET ME BE

by Caleb Klaces

In December this year representatives from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen for the 15th UN Conference of the Parties (COP15 [http://en.cop15.dk/frontpage/faq]) to discuss international targets for the reduction of CO₂ emissions. The roughly 1,500 delegates will mostly be men, as they always have been. During the period 1996–2006 (COP 2–COP 13) the share of women in COP delegations increased slightly (from 20.5 to 28%), while the percentage of female heads of delegation dropped, from 13.5 to 12% (UN Commission on the status of women, 2008).

A new report [http://www.gendercc.net/resources/gender-tools/analysis.html] from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with too many partners to list, argues that there is a ‘causal interrelationship between climate change and gender’ as such: ‘(1) climate change tends to exacerbate existing gender inequalities; (2) gender inequalities lead women to face larger negative impacts’. Approximately 70% of those who live on less than a dollar each day are women, many of them in areas acutely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The argument goes that because of their gender-defined roles, these and other women are in general more vulnerable to climate impacts, which in turn could make things even more skewed in favour of men.

So there are inequalities in women’s ability to influence policy on climate change, and in the severity of its effects.

Putting aside the question of how that inequality might and should change, I wondered if there was any evidence that we would have greater cause for hope for stronger emissions reduction targets – targets that might give us a better than 50% chance of not passing the crucial 2°C rise in global temperatures – if most of the COP15 delegates were women?

An unscientific survey for this blog, looking at the gender of leaders of countries with strong environmental legislation, draws no firm correlation between green policies and women heads of state. That is partly because it’s a small and eclectic groups of countries: arguably the UK (David Milliband pushed through the impressive Climate Change Bill), Germany (female Chancellor), Sweden (male Prime Minister), Iceland (male President, female Prime Minister), Costa Rica (male President) and the Maldives (male President). Around the same ratio (30%) as the women in delegations at COP13.

A better source is DEFRA’s 2008 ‘Framework for Pro-Environmental Behaviours’, which uses social research to divide the UK population into 7 segments according to their opinions towards environmental issues and then ability and willingness to act on them. Most of the segments are only very slightly more likely to be more male or female, but it is noteworthy that the groups more willing to accept responsibility for climate change were more also more likely (just) to be female. Also, the segment described as having ‘one of the most negative ecological worldviews’ was 7% more likely to be male above average. This ‘Honestly disengaged’ segment is characterised by an indifference towards environmental issues and a belief that climate change is too far in the future to worry about.

It’s unlikely that any of the COP15 delegates will fit into the ‘honestly disengaged’ segment. More telling is what other studies show – that men tend to trust in technical solutions for energy-saving, while women tend to opt for behavioural or lifestyle changes (Gender CC). So a female-biased COP15 might believe that we can significantly reduce emissions right now through ‘soft’ measures, like campaigns to change habits, rather than depending on a single future technological innovation.