People are talking about a Capitalism 4.0. Capitalism must change for the better, they say, and become more responsible. The financial crisis that started in 2008 has demonstrated that very clearly.

I don’t know much about macroeconomics, but I find this whole discussion almost as disappointing as I find it interesting. Surely it doesn’t take an economics professor to see that, far from promoting Capitalism 4.0, the financial crash punched market economics right in the face?

Critics of the current set-up often argue, and convincingly so, that our alleged free-market economy is far from free: rather, we’ve got full-fledged socialism and market regulation for the rich – while indeed the 99% have to put up with the harsh conditions of the market. But neo-liberals don’t like this argument. It’s childish, they say, and it’s getting old.

The fact that the only thing they ever seem to be able to counter with is an arrogant frown or a patronising smile and head-tilt would perhaps be quite the give-away if it wasn’t for the fact that the framing of the debates they take part in is always inherently neo-liberal, making any statement critical of the free market sound absolutely absurd. Just like capitalist critiques are only ever met with the rhetorical question ‘So what do you want instead?’, those in search of a Capitalism 4.0 seem to, despite agreeing that the current system is massively flawed, base their reasoning on the assumption that there is no alternative to capitalism. It came, it saw, it conquered; and now it’s here to stay. Except it didn’t quite conquer. It fucked up.

Many have argued that, as part of Capitalism 4.0, the market needs to be more responsible. Fair trade must pay off, as must environmental consciousness. We must promote innovation and long-term strategies. When it pays off for businesses to be responsible, we will get a responsible capitalism. Voila!

Here’s the beef: these people are insisting on a free-market economy, yet they’re dreaming of ideals which are antithetical to the normative principles of market logic. The market doesn’t reward responsibility – it rewards efficiency which leads to the maximisation of profit. It’s plain and simple: the market doesn’t care. Yet we’re so wrapped up in this obsession with the market as the solution to all problems that we think we can nudge it into a position of promoting justice and equality, despite the complete opposites of those values being inevitable symptoms of a capitalist system. If anything is getting old, it’s that naivety. We clearly want state regulation of markets. We clearly have to admit that this is the end of neo-liberalism.

Oh, and one more thing: let’s just clarify once and for all what this economic growth that is being repeated like a mantra really is all about. Economic growth is about the rise in demand for commodities (we want more things!), and economic success is about consumers’ increased ability to purchase those commodities (we’re spending more money on things!). Viewed in a long-term perspective, capitalism has done a good job promoting economic growth – those numbers don’t lie. Yet, it doesn’t come as news to anyone that the inequality between the people buying those things and those unable to afford any things at all is increasing steadily.

Economic growth, then, is about comfortably rich people being able to get more comfortable. And really, in all honesty, how much more comfortable do we middle and upper class people need to get? How much stuff do we really need?

I’m sick of talking about capitalism, free markets and economic growth. Call me banal, but the only economics I want to talk about is the economics that puts people first.

Someone said that it will be difficult to let go of 2011 – that after a year like this, it can only really get worse. It’s a scary thing to say that I feel the complete opposite, but it’s also a relief to put it out there and prepare to turn over a new leaf and start a new chapter. 2011 has been a year of too much pain and sadness, but in order to remember the good parts and really put the bad parts to bed, I’ve made a list.

2011 was the year when:

… I disagreed with Charlie Brooker for perhaps the first and only time in my life;

… the UK Uncut demonstrations took place, and I wrote about why I don’t like the Economist;

… I spent most if not all of Easter on a blanket in the sun in Waterlow Park;

… I admitted to feeling dubios about the ‘Baby on board’ badges;

… I learnt that blood really is thicker than water;

… I wrote about sexist politicians and considered the high proportion of Oxbridge grads at the Guardian;

… I learnt that when your friends say ‘Don’t call, because I’m not ready yet’, you should always, always, always ignore it and call anyway;

… I went to London Feis and was so blown-away by Camille O’Sullivan that I had to write a tribute to everything that isn’t gracious;

… Amy Winehouse died, and, finally, I wrote about loss and how the predictable can be sad;

… I shared my views on the UK riots;

… I quit a perfectly nice, decently-paid full-time job;

… I argued that there is no 12-week rule;

… I considered what it means when androgynous men take over the catwalks;

… I decided that there’s nothing wrong with self-medicating with a bit of polished, well-produced pop – because it works;

… after talking about it for years, I started a master’s in Political Communication and breathed life into a part of me that had been asleep for too long;

… the possibly mind-bogglingly awful film I don’t know how she does it came out, and I wrote about it without even seeing it;

… I published a belated outburst about the panel show and the token woman;

… I stayed in London for Christmas and got a lovely, relaxing break that I needed more than I had anticipated;

… and, last but not least, I discovered the brilliant new Brewdog pub in Camden.

What I take with me from 2011 is that trying to control things is a waste of time, because you can’t; that investing time in yourself is always worth while; that a bit of blogging, some well-produced music, and time spent in a sunny park with your dearest family and friends can go a long way; and that if you marry the right person, together you can get through anything. I am now very much ready to pour myself a glass of pale ale, spend the last night of the year with some of my favourite people in the world, tell 2011 to fuck off, and look to a brighter future.

Come on, 2012. You’ve got an easy act to follow. Onwards and upwards.

Is Dame Helen Mirren an actor or an actress? In the Guardian, she’s an actor, and a recent article on the subject explains why. While readers wondered why the profession of acting wouldn’t deserve the same kind of distinction between male and female as titles such as duchess and duke, the style guide editor explained: “We described Harriet Walter as one of our greatest actors. Calling her one of our greatest actresses is not the same thing at all.”

This is of course something he’s put a lot of thought into, and I’m sure there’s fine egalitarian reasoning behind his decision. The irony is that through his statement he pinpoints exactly why this is complex: if saying that someone is one of our greatest actors seems like more of an all-encompassing compliment than suggesting that they’re one of our greatest actresses, we suggest that the latter is the exception, that one can be our greatest actress without for that matter necessarily competing with male actors at all.

In a recent episode of Stephen Fry’s new linguistics show, Planet Word, he pondered how our linguistic identity affects our world view, and a guest on the show explained how the word for ‘bridge’ carries different qualities in different languages. Germans, for example, are more likely to describe a bridge as beautiful, slender, even fragile, while Spanish people tend to talk about bridges as tall, strong, and solid. Why? Because in German, the word (die Brücke) is feminine, while in Spanish it (el puente) is masculine. Further to making me want to avoid German bridges, this says a lot about our psyche. Just think about the implications of our linguistic make-up for our world view!

There is of course nothing wrong with distinguishing between traditionally feminine and masculine, and I doubt anyone would suggest that we should get rid of these distinctions altogether. What this highlights, though, is that these traditional values and properties are deeply ingrained in our culture, and if we are likely to judge a bridge by them, we are probably very likely to do the same with people. Moreover, the fact that there’s always a norm means that there’s always an exception. That the norm is more often feminine in regards to professions to do with care, physical weakness, childcare and tidying won’t come as a surprise to anyone, and I’ve argued the case for dentists and surgeons before.

I would never dream of criticising a bipolar homosexual (that’s Mr. Fry) for a lack of understanding for those deviating from the norm. In fact, I’m not trying to criticise anyone here: expressing cultural heritage through the use of our dear language is not only a necessary exercise, but one can prove very interesting. I am merely hoping to act as a spotlight on that cultural heritage. And I’m hoping that the next time you cross a German bridge, you will think about this whole thing with masculine and feminine, norm and exception, once and for all.

Four episodes of this season’s BBC1 panel show Would I Lie To You have been broadcast so far, and they all had one thing in common: a token woman.

Please forgive me. I don’t mean to underestimate the value these female guests bring to the show, or suggest that they don’t have what it takes to join forces with the regulars who take up a majority of the panel show air time available today (and there’s plenty). In fact, I’ve avoided writing about this simply not to do that, not to make them into a token, a gender and a box ticked. Until I read Elin Grelsson’s column on the topic, that is.

Grelsson writes about the artist Marie Capaldis, whose paintings were displayed at the Gothenburg museum of art alongside a sign explaining that the museum since 2005 has a gender awareness policy which is taken into account when art is purchased.

Gender perspective? Well done. But in describing a woman’s art while boasting about the institution’s gender awareness policy, all they do is highlight the fact that the male artist is still the norm, completely undermining Capaldis’s work.

“How can you promote marginalised groups without making them into exceptions, which in the long run only reinforces the norm?” asks Grelsson. I think the answer is that it’s incredibly difficult, and this explains very well my reaction to the Would I Lie To You trend.

Friends who work in the industry will say that it’s not due to lack of effort. The few successful female comedians around are approached indeed – but they don’t want to take part. You can’t get women on the panel shows, goes the explanation.

I think they’re telling the truth, but I don’t think it’s good enough. When you week in and week out invite a relatively unknown female comedian to take part in a show with a male presenter, two male team captains and three famous male guests, you’re merely ticking a box, while the culture that stopped other female celebrities from accepting the offer remains as strong as ever.

All the token woman does is clear the conscience of production companies that should be asking themselves where it all went wrong.

“If you want to have it all, it’s your job to work out how to do it. If you can’t, give something up.” That’s David Cox’s advice to Kate, the high-flying fictitious character in the film I don’t know how she does it.

I suspect we’ll read many a harsh critique of the super-woman film, but I wasn’t quite prepared to read this in the Guardian. I’m not saying that this Hollywood plot doesn’t need some ripping apart – the have-it-all approach to life indeed deserves questioning – but your way of criticising something says a lot about your outlook on life. And I guess, somehow, I keep forgetting that even the most liberal publications in the UK look at parenting as a one-woman job.

Many would agree – and I’m sure I will too if I ever see the film – that the plot is nothing but a boring cliché. My idea of the real world, however, differs quite a bit from Cox’s. He answers the question of how she does it with the accusation that Kate uses her poor husband, a man who wishes to focus on furthering his own career but is forced to bring their injured son to the hospital when selfish mammy is at work. He explains her success by pointing the finger at the way she expects of her employer to be flexible, thereby, he suggests, somehow undermining the efforts of women who don’t need flexibility at work because they don’t have a family: they’ve had to make a sacrifice, means Cox, so why should we let selfish Kate get away with not making one?

“Motherhood is voluntary,” Cox reminds us. But “fulfilling all other aspirations at the same time may or may not be practicable.”

This is where I lose him completely. We’re supposed to look at Kate as a “scumbag” for wanting it all (but, he insinuates, not doing it well enough), yet her husband is described as a victim. Isn’t fatherhood voluntary as well? What does he mean?

Here’s what I think he means. Fatherhood isn’t that demanding, after all. Most fathers manage very well to combine fatherhood with successful careers, thank you very much. And so no one ever says, ‘I don’t know how he does it’. Why? Because parenting is a mother’s job. It’s a mother’s fault when a child is malnourished; the mother is the one who’s neglected a child who doesn’t learn to talk when other kids do. Laundry, school runs, hospital visits – it’s all done while the father’s at work. That’s how he does it: he’s got a wife.

About mothers, Cox writes that “if they can’t work as hard as their childless colleagues to get a seat on the board, they could manage without one.” But of course, a majority of the board members aren’t childless. They’re fathers. And fathers don’t have to make sacrifices, we all know that. Right, Cox?

[All of the above is of course based on yet another of the patriarchy's great myths: the idea that not getting to spend a lot of time with your kids isn't in itself a sacrifice for fathers. But that's another discussion for another post.]

Is it still worth going to university?, the Guardian asked its readers a few weeks ago. It’s a question worth asking, but one which needs some background information. Why ask it, and why now?
 
Student fees have trebled. Unemployment is on the up, and universities are offering fewer places than they used to. The question, therefore, probably isn’t really about the value of education, but about its value for money and effort evident through future employment.
 
I’ve said it before: you only get answers as good as the questions you ask. And there’s nothing wrong with this question, but if you react to the rise in student fees by asking about the value of higher education, you’re only really going around in circles. The whole reasoning behind the fees increase was based on the idea that degrees should lead to employment, and well-paid employment primarily, and as a result, investing public funds into arts degrees that lead nowhere was deemed a waste of time.
 
Do you need a degree to get a job? Of course not. As Caitlin Moran put it on Twitter: “People who tank their exams today: I don’t even have a GCSE. There are other ways to get on. For instance: lying. And/or being slutty.” Lauren Laverne agreed and retweeted, adding “Yup! No uni for me either.” So two of media’s currently most successful women confirm that the lack of a degree is not a hindrance to a great career, and a friend of mine, also a very successful woman in media, said exactly the same thing: “If you want a job in TV, no one cares whether you’ve got a degree or not – it’s completely irrelevant.”
 
It’s interesting that the one most common question people ask me now that I’m going back to university for a master’s degree is: “What are you hoping to do afterwards?” The assumption is that if you choose to study, you do so in order to improve your chances of getting a certain job.
 
On a personal level, my decision of returning to university is about having the luxury to spend a lot of time studying what I’m passionate about, and meeting like-minded people. At the end of it, it’ll hopefully also improve my chances of working on projects related to that passion – but that’s not the main reason why I want to study.
 
On a societal level, I think it’s worth asking why we’ve decided that education is a thing relevant to public debate and deserving of public funds. It would be easy to think, judging by what some politicians focus on when discussing the matter, that higher education is all about educating enough bankers and business strategy consultants. After all, humanities are a waste of time, we keep hearing – for students and society alike. I doubt, however, that voters would agree.

I think that there are two great reasons why higher education should be funded by the state. Firstly, because education shouldn’t be something available only to the well-off, and the fact that the UK is at the very bottom of the developed world’s social mobility league says a lot about how we’re doing on that point. Secondly, because not everything can be measured by individual salaries; not everything in politics is about individual gain. In a parliament where a large amount of MPs claimed they couldn’t actually understand the reasoning behind the Alternative Vote, it should be clear that education strengthens democracy.

Or, as Camila Vallejo, Chilean student rebel leader and face of the populist uprising, said: “We want [...] to stop seeing education as a consumer good, to see education as a right where the state provides a guarantee. Why do we need education? To make profits? To make a business? Or to develop the country and have social integration and development?”

I think these are the questions we should be asking ourselves. Then we can ponder whether it’s still worth going to university.

A quick thought on Kenneth Clarke’s take on last month’s riots:

What did he say? Our problem, and one of the key reasons behind the riots, is a “broken penal system”.

How did he come to this conclusion? A majority of the offenders during the riots belong to what Clarke calls the “criminal classes”, meaning people with prior convictions. Therefore, if we had locked up these “hardcore offenders”, these people from “a feral underclass”, we’d never have ended up in this situation.

And his ideological explanation? Clarke means that the “general recipe for a productive member of society” is about “having a job, a strong family, a decent education and beneath it all, an attitude that shares in the values of mainstream society”. At the moment, he says, our problem is that there is “a growing minority of people who have substituted an inflated sense of expectations for a commitment to hard graft.”

My analysis? It’s not a very open-minded, all-encompassing idea he has of the ideal citizen. Choosing to refer to them as a “productive member of society” is in itself quite a statement. His attitude towards people who, for whatever reason, don’t have a job isn’t exactly one of empathy and understanding. Clarke doesn’t seem to like the sound of outsiders at all; in fact, he’d probably worry if he saw signs that citizens were thinking for themselves too much, because who knows how long it’ll take before they start questioning society’s mainstream values.

But more than being judgemental, the justice minister’s reasoning speaks of a very small-minded view on criminality. To him, the state of affairs is constant: there are people who commit crimes and there are people who don’t, and it’s not society’s fault that some people are selfish criminals, somehow hopelessly born into this way of life, into a miserable existence with no moral awareness. It is, however, the state’s responsibility to protect its citizens, and hence to keep an eye on the, to use an old favourite, “mindless scum”.

But what is criminality if not a reaction to one’s surroundings, a reaction, perhaps, to a society which only has room for hard-grafting family men with strong academic backgrounds and some unquestionable mainstream values? Where do these “feral underclasses” come from, and how does it make them feel if they’re constantly being watched to ensure that the “hardcore offenders” are caught before it’s too late? Isn’t this exactly the sort of logic that caused the tension which became the backdrop to the riots?

I’m starting to wonder how long, using Clarke’s criteria, it’ll take before I stop being the ideal citizen and cross the border to criminality land.

“In this society, if a man is called a woman, that’s the biggest insult he could get.” The words are Andrej Pejic’s, and he sure has a point. But his life story turns this idea upside down, and then back around again: he has not only been dubbed the prettiest boy in the world – but also, to quote his mother, “the most beautiful girl I’ll ever see in a wedding dress.”

It’s a heart-warming story, the one about Bosnian Andrej who as an 8-year-old moved with his mother and siblings to Melbourne in Australia via Serbia, discovering hair dye and make-up along the way, eventually returning to the more androgyny-friendly Europe to realise his dream of becoming a professional model.

He is the boy who left his “gender open to artistic interpretation” and denied the need for a strong gender identity: “I identify as what I am.” Mixing appearances on men’s catwalks with jobs showcasing women’s collections, Andrej allows fashion gurus to, as New York Magazine puts it, “feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm.”

It’s probably the progressiveness without challenge that rubs me up the wrong way. While Andrej is free to be who he really wants to be – and I salute that whole-heartedly – it’s difficult not to feel like the fashion world is jumping on a very tempting bandwagon that is really only opportunism in disguise. New York Magazine hits the nail on the head over and over again without even realising it, writing that “he is six-foot-one, thin as the stroke of a paintbrush”, that in Melbourne “he was too beautiful to be an obvious choice for men’s campaigns”, and that “spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: if he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh”.

Everyone’s full of praise for Andrej, but while he himself is talking about moving beyond gender, it seems like his employers do nothing but use him to reinforce unobtainable ideals for both men and women. Despite being thin as the stroke of a paintbrush, Andrej admits that he has had to lose weight to fit into women’s wear; at the same time, he didn’t fit the bill for the “relatively macho Australian market”, and still in the US he says that he tries to be stronger when working with men’s wear – and it was not until the then editor-in-chief of French Vogue put him in women’s wear that he really made it as a model.

There’s nothing new about this, really. I think about Rickard Engfors, the Swedish performer and drag queen who was once voted Sweden’s hottest woman. “I lived up to all the female ideals, but I wasn’t good enough as a man,” he told DN. “I was too thin, too unfit, not well-endowed enough” [my translation].

Andrej talks about how his behaviour wasn’t acceptable for a boy, how he “closed in” for years before eventually letting the platinum blonde out. A moment of freedom for him, of course; but it seems sadly ironic that the fashion industry confirmed that it still isn’t acceptable for a boy – that you don’t make it as a boy with platinum hair, you make it as a boy who is constantly assumed to be a woman. Or, like Rickard, as a drag queen.

What really made me think twice, initially, was probably the fact that I didn’t hesitate for a second when I saw a picture of Andrej on the catwalk, shirt unbuttoned to reveal a flat, hairless chest: to me, Andrej was doubtlessly a woman. Why? Because not even the complete lack of breasts would make me question the catwalk ideals that are so ingrained in my way of thinking. In the world of fashion, voluptuous doesn’t cut it – no womb or ovaries or oestrogen will ever win over “the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes” [sic].

And that’s what I take away from all of this: that women are no longer unfeminine enough to fit the bill in a fashion world that can’t deal with diversity but is still as focused on gender as ever, that still indeed differentiates between men’s and women’s collections, no matter how much they brag that they don’t want to put their models in a box. To me, that’s got nothing to do with “side-stepping the gender issue”. Andrej may be beautiful and flexible enough to work on both sides of the gender divide, but he’s still always forced to act either/or: strong and masculine or brittle and feminine.

Androgyne appears to be the new pinup, but the way we talk about gender tells a tale. The masculine and the feminine are still as defined as ever – most of us are just never quite good enough. And that dissatisfaction, of course, is the secret to the success of the fashion industry.

I took part in some market research a while back, discussing some Transport for London posters advertising a new bus route finder service on their website. The poster included a feature that pissed me off quite a lot, and I ended up giving out about it. TfL, as it turns out, didn’t listen. The other day, I saw this poster on the tube (excuse the bad picture quality – the old iPhone doesn’t exactly do magic):

“Search ‘TfL Travel Tools’,” it ends, and anyone who’s ever used the internet knows what it means. Google it.

There are many sides to SEO, some of which are nicer than others, but one thing can’t be argued with: it’s built on intuition. You want to find a DIY shop in Camden, so you Google “DIY shop Camden”. You need to know how much a certain amount of US dollars is in British pounds, so you Google “currency converter”.

There are two reasons why you find what you’re looking for. Firstly, the website belonging to a DIY shop in Camden is bound to have all of those words on it, more than once, and probably in the headings. Secondy, they’ve had some search optimisers fiddling with their meta tags, adding those same words to the code.

Google is built around intuition, because that’s the only way it can really work, but TfL’s search optimisation agency has either ignored this entirely or completely failed to communicate to TfL what their job is all about. By telling prospective customers what to search for, they’re side-stepping intuition altogether, instead hoping that users will remember the exact phrase they’ve decided to optimise for.

I’ll tell you one thing: if I wanted to check for tube disruptions, I wouldn’t Google “TfL Travel Tools”. Travel tools? Really? What language is that? Who thinks of tools when they want to find out if the Piccadilly Line is running or there are delays on the overground?

The “search for…” trend in marketing is backwards and lazy. Stop telling me what to search for; get your SEO agency to do its job properly, and let my intuition do the rest.

Just a quick insight into the mind of David Cameron’s director of strategy, David Hilton, from a piece in the Guardian yesterday:

“Now look at the man Cameron has actually paid to advise him. Hilton wants to scrap maternity benefits, get rid of jobcentres, abolish consumer rights legislation for nine months and ignore European employment law. All in the name apparently of kick-starting the economy.”

Arguing my case is probably redundant here. Just remember this the next time you go and vote for the Tories.