Welcome to Britain

Despite a month of April to despair the most hardened of us, we are currently being served a fresh instalment of the “stay in Britain for the holidays” advertising campaign.

In it you will understand beyond the shadow of a doubt that the giant causeway is better than any rocks to be found around the Mediterranean, that the Tate Liverpool trumps any other museum in the world, that the waves of Bridlington are so much better than those of any other surf resort thanks to the most unobjectionable of reasoning.  These wonders are better wonders indeed because they are wonders FROM HERE!

Ah, proximity, this most over-powering of value-scale.

Why try to encounter new worlds, why face the diversity of the human mind, why stretch your brain with a different language and a different way of thinking? Who would want to see art made by other cultures, who would want to find a different landscape awaiting them in the morning? In the words of Stephen Fry, it is “just not worth it”.

Foreigners are nothing but troublesome. They don’t speak English properly and they use those pesky euros (whose existence was no doubt brought forward by an obvious wish to annoy the British). They require effort. They may even challenge your cushioned view of yourself and your culture. Why bother? It is simply not worth it.

When one of the twelve-year olds I teach puts his hand up and asks “why bother learning French miss, what’s the point?” I put the lack of enthusiasm down to laziness and a rather obtuse vision of the world, one that does not see beyond the white cliffs of Dover or, (and they are much the same country), the treacherous balconies of Magaluf.

When an advertising campaign validated by the government takes up very much the same view, it actually makes me cry.

As a foreigner who has made the effort to dedicate many years of my life to learn the language, read the books, see the paintings, learn the history, watch the films, follow the TV shows, understand the jokes, practise the variety of accents of Great Britain, it makes me sad to have to accept that Great Britain simply is not a willing to extend the same courtesy to me.

the art of always being right

There are many disagreeable things in this imperfect world, and one of the most grating is probably to find yourself to be wrong. However, no matter how great such an evil can be, it does not even start to compare with the horror of being proved wrong in front of other people: O, to feel oneself swallowed into contemptuous silence, to feel the sniggering smiles raise the hair on the nape of your neck and the slow mortification of blushing spread over your guilty face!  Unspeakable agony of ridicule, how thou hast been under-rated!

Faced with the risk of collapse of all society, Man found a very neat solution to this problem. Stereotypes. Because the undying beauty of stereotypes stems from the fact that they are NEVER proved wrong. Not that they are true either, they don’t need to be: truth and stereotypes are simply unrelated.

JEUNE-HOMME: Toujours farceur. Doit l’être. S’étonner s’il ne l’est pas.[1]

Now this is the true genius of stereotypes, the cleanest trick your brain can pull on yourself to earn you a permanent feeling of self-righteousness. Don’t you see the mastery of the interconnecting clogs? The recipe is quite simple:

1.      Take a group of people (it is important you don’t belong to the chosen group, otherwise this becomes a different kettle of fish altogether)

2.      Pick a sweeping statement about said group. You can use your own experience, but it is not at all necessary, any statement you have heard before will do just as well.

3.      Offer your statement as a universal truth. Job done.

Of course, some disagreeable people may take you for any novice stereotype-wielder and challenge your universal truth with a counter-example (this may stem from a lack of conviction on your part by the way; you need to BELIEVE in what you say, otherwise, look what happens!). But fear not, there is no need for you to feel like you have been proven wrong in any way. You have your conviction for yourself. Simply raise an eyebrow, tilt your head to the side, and say : “Really? Such an original character!”

Even if someone undertook to painstakingly prove you wrong with a detailed census of all young men comparing their average practical-jokerness (having found, somehow a way of measuring it), you could still answer, in good faith, that this is not as you found. It’s not your fault. Your brain works like that. It is specially geared to make concepts, and when you make a concept, you discard the details in order to recognise what fits in.

As a result, no amount of truth can destroy a stereotype, and as they can live on, challenged but unabashed, their long and righteous life of pre-conceived ideas. Until one sad day, when they are replaced by a new one, and whimsical young men turn into drunken sex-addicts.

I have to admit, I am a little sad that such a jolly image of young men is no longer the currency of the day. We should probably bring it back.

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[1] Flaubert, Gustave, Dictionnaire des idées recues, Paris : Librairie générale française, 1997

Young man: always a practical joker. He has to be. Show your wonder if he isn’t. (my translation)

blondes and brunettes

To Flaubert, to whom I owe everything, and to M. Le Quintrec, to whom I owe Flaubert.

Studying stereotypes is mostly about dispelling myths. One of the most enduring ones, and possibly most damaging, is the idea that stereotypes are a truth universally acknowledged. They are not. They are certainly not the truth, and they are not often acknowledged. Nor are they universal. Or logical.

“BLONDES: plus chaudes que les brunes (v.brunes)

(…)

BRUNES: plus chaudes que les blondes (v.blondes)”[1]

You can just picture it, even if your mind’s eye requires a couple of top-hats in order to imagine two men of Flaubert’s time. Man-in-a-top-hat A will mention a woman Man-in-a-top-hat B doesn’t know, explaining she is blond/ brown-haired. Man-in-a-top-hat B by way of response will make a sniggering sexual comment, because it is easy, because it is expected, because he doesn’t bloody know the first thing about the woman, apart from the fact that she has a gender, a sex. From having a sex to having sex, this is the kind of connection your brain barely needs a synapse for.

There are all sorts of advantages to using such a stereotype for M-I-A-T-H B:

a)      It maintains the conversation on a very well-trodden path where it is unlikely he will say anything new or surprising (and unusual opinions are extremely dangerous things in conversation, they force you to take a side without knowing if your co-conversationalist is going to agree with you, they expose you to the risk of being rebuked and called ignorant, all sorts of nasty things).

b)     It gives the impression that our hero is talking with the authority of a man who has extensive and detailed knowledge of LOTS of women, he studied them all throughout his extensive sex-life (men in top hats love having an extensive sex-life), he has done scientific measurements and he can now reveal to M-I-A-T-H A the secret link between a woman’s hair-colour and her sexual appetite. He is a man of the world. He knows these things. In the conversation, he is winning.

And all this at the expense of barely half a thought! In brain economy terms, this is excellent value for money.

Of course MIATH B is not explicitly thinking all of this when he makes his comment, but safety and the appearance of knowledge is what he is looking for. However, as he is speaking, MIATH B is probably thinking of one or two specific examples of blond/brown haired women who were particularly saucy (not that he necessarily met them, but, someone told him…): as far as he is concerned, he is telling the truth. And he will be telling the truth as well, two weeks later, when he makes the same comment about a woman from the opposite end of the hair-colour spectrum.

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[1] Flaubert, Gustave, Dictionnaire des idées recues, Paris : Librairie générale française, 1997