Fighting for our Country
- by Mark Greene
I have been in four fights in my life.If you can dignify my rage-blind flailings of arms with a word like ‘fight.’
Recently I nearly got into a fifth.
A young man of about 18 threatened to knock me sideways. I said, “Are you threatening me?”
“No,” he said, “I’m telling you.”
He’d obviously been watching The Bill.
I hadn’t, so I didn’t instantly seize his jugular with my left hand, ram him up against the phone booth and press both barrels of a sawn-off shot gun to his temple and then ask him whether he was feeling lucky.
Whence this furore?
Well, I work just off the one of the busiest shopping streets in the world. And down my street there are four phone-booths and every day, several times a day, pairs of young men go round these phone booths and plaster them with postcards of near naked women advertising a variety of sexual services. It’s called ‘tom-carding’, it’s a civil offence and you can be fined up to £60 per card. At that rate, these guys could be subject to a fine of up to £6,000 a day. I’d decided that one of these phone booths was mine – in a definitive, Clint Eastwood kind of way. So on the day in question, I was cleaning out my phone booth and up he pops.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“I’m taking down these cards. It’s illegal to put them up,” I said.
“You’re taking down my work,” he retorted.
Put like that, you might be tempted to feel sorry for him. He probably needed the job.
“It’s an offence,” I said.
“No it isn’t,” he replied.
“Shall we go and ask a policeman?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
Well, of course, I thought to myself, you’d have to find one.
Then he started to threaten me with violence. It didn’t go that way. Which was lucky because, as I’ve said, I’m not good at it. I walked off. He and his friend put up the cards and later I took them down.
The following week I was walking past my phone booth before I’d cleaned it up and a boy of about nine walked into it and said ‘yuk.’ And walked out of it. His mother and his circa eleven year old sister accompanied him to one just a tad less ‘decorated.’ And then it hit me. Just like the Sophie Dahl ad hit me. This is public space. Kids walk up and down Oxford Street and go into phone booths. Kids pass ads for a perfume like Opium on their way to school and cannot but see in 48 sheet full colour side-on shot of a prone naked Sophie Dahl, back arched, neck thrown back, legs splayed in a pose that at best might be masturbatory but was clearly intended to be coital.
This is public space.
And we are losing it on not just to the commercial but to the pornographic.
The much criticised Sophie Dahl poster which graced our highways and byways was, of course, taken down after an unprecedented volume of protest. And for the next two years the brand has to submit its ads for approval but the damage had been done as far as most people were concerned. You couldn’t miss it. And in terms of the brand’s image, the negative PR was undoubtedly hugely beneficial. One way to swell the impact of your ad budget is to get the newspapers to run stories about your ad for free. Game, set, match and huge profits to Yves St Laurent, the makers of Opium. They should be fined not simply reprimanded.
Of course, they are without excuse. And the creative team who came up with this campaign must have known the impact it would have – and wanted it to have. They are probably quite chuffed with themselves. After all, the campaign is famous. They might even win an ad industry award. None of this is new. The ad campaign for the film Disclosure looked like chair assisted sex and caused road accidents. It had to be taken down – it was a road safety hazard. Many ad agencies want to cause offence and the decision to do so shows utter contempt for children, for teenagers and older people and, in my view, for the dignity of every human being who might be exposed to it. This material degrades women and it exploits the male gaze.
More recently the poster campaign of a minor soft-porn film called The Escort. I only saw it on London Underground posters. It’s a picture of naked man having sex with a naked woman – of course you can’t see anything except torsos and thighs and one of their heads but it’s a sex act. One of these particular posters stood at the top of the exit stairway in my home station – every man, woman and child could not fail to see it. This is public space. But what hit me was how long it took me to be outraged by this. How I hardly noticed it. I’m so used to the sexualised imagery in so much public material that I hardly notice when someone goes further over the line than usual. Familiarity breeds blindness.
There have been other campaigns of this sort. And some of them have got away with it – Vogue’s nipple poster – bare except for the most diaphanous of veils. And a whole host of campaigns that make blue jokes that are a mite more explicit than your average pantomime innuendo.
Public space is not like the inside of a magazine – everyone can see everything in public space. Public space is not subject to a nine o’clock watershed, you can’t put public space on the top shelf or programme kids not be able to look at it. Not of course that the top-shelf is very far away from the middle shelf. And not that the middle shelf is actually that salubrious. A recent issue of GQ contained an article explicitly recommending young men to use prostitutes because it’s a much more reliable and often cheaper way of getting good sex than taking a woman to dinner. And they even provide the names and addresses of ‘good international brothels’. Any twelve year old can buy GQ.
So we need to fight for public space, for public spaces that are ad-free, and for ads that are free from exploitative, prurient material that we don’t want to look at ourselves and certainly don’t want our kids to look at.
Now here’s the rub. We will only protect our public space if we are prepared to fight for it.
If we don’t complain to the advertising standards authority by letter or on the web, then nothing will happen. (Advertising Standards Authority,2 Torrington Place, London, WCE1 7HW)
If we don’t complain to London Transport, then nothing will change.
If we don’t go into the shop and say to the store manager that their window display or posters are out of order, then worse will appear next year.
If we don’t tell the newsagent that putting copies of Loaded right next to the sweetie stand in a suburban station ain’t helpful to kids, it will stay there. Interestingly, there is some anecdotal evidence that in Muslim areas there’s been a reduction of soft-porn material in Muslim newsagents – I suspect that the communities have made it unacceptable.
If we don’t clean up the phone boxes, no one will, except BT – to their credit, once a day. Actually, what the police want is to make tom-carding an arrestable offence. And that won’t happen unless we write to our MPs, so write. They actually don’t get many letters. (House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA) In the meantime, if you’re an urban worker, why not adopt a phone-box. You probably won’t get into a fight. But if it gets nasty, don’t try to lock the tom-carders in the phone booth til the police arrive – you’ll probably be committing a worse offence than they are. Similarly, I’ve been informed that it is not a great idea to press both barrels of a sawn-off shotgun against their temples.
This article originally appeared in Christianity and Renewal Magazine.
Advertising Standards Authority
2 Torrington Place
London
WCE1 7HW
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