by Kate Fox
Now that most newspapers have free online editions, many of the snooty broadsheet readers, who sneer at the low-class tabloids, secretly read these tabloids online. In public, they may still signal their class and education by only ever reading the ‘quality’ papers, but a history-search on their computers would reveal sneaky visits to the tabloids’ websites. Even without performing such searches, I know that many upper-middle-class people lie about the newspapers they read. They may get away with this in survey responses, but in conversation it is easy to trip them up: I have smoked out quite a few closet online tabloid readers just by dropping in a casual reference to a story covered only in that day’s tabloids. My victims’ familiarity with the details of the Daily Mail and Daily Express exclusives in question proved to be quite remarkable for people who ‘would never read that rubbish’.
As a paid-up member of the broadsheet-reading classes, I will probably be regarded as a traitor for saying anything nice about the tabloids, but I think that in some respects they are unfairly maligned. Yes, I get fed up with their sensationalism and scaremongering, but the so-called ‘quality’ press is often just as guilty of these sins. We have no less than eight main national daily papers – four tabloids, four broadsheets – in cut-throat competition with each other, and all of them sometimes feel obliged to mislead or exaggerate in their efforts to attract our attention. But leaving the moral issues to one side, the quality of the writing on both broadsheets and tabloids is generally excellent. There is a difference in style between the ‘popular’ and the ‘quality’ press, but the skill of the writers is equally outstanding. This is not surprising as they are often the same writers: journalists move back and forth between tabloids and broadsheets, or even write regularly for both.
It seems to me that the English love of words – and particularly the universal nature of this passion, which transcends all class barriers – is most perfectly demonstrated not by the erudite wit of the broadsheet columnists, brilliant though they are, but by the journalists and sub-editors who write the headlines in the tabloids. Take a random selection of English tabloids and flip through them: you will soon notice that almost every other headline involves some kind of play on words – a pun, a double meaning, a deliberate jokey misspelling, a literary or historical reference, a clever neologism, an ironic put-down, a cunning rhyme or amusing alliteration, and so on.
Yes, many of the puns are dreadful; much of the humour is laboured, vulgar or childish; the sexual innuendo is overdone; and the relentlessness of the wordplay can become tiresome after a while. You may find yourself longing for a headline that simply gives you the gist of the story, without trying to be funny or clever. But the sheer ingenuity and linguistic playfulness must be admired, and all this compulsive punning, rhyming and joking is uniquely and gloriously English. Other countries may have ‘quality’ newspapers at least as learned and well written as ours, but no other national press can rival the manic wordplay of English tabloid headlines. So there we are: something to be proud of.
Cyberspace Rules
In recent times, the English have found a new and perfect excuse to stay at home, pull up the imaginary drawbridge and avoid the traumas of face-to-face social interaction: the internet. Email, chatrooms, forums, social networking sites, surfing, blogging, messaging – the whole thing could have been invented for the insular, socially handicapped, word-loving English.
In cyberspace, we are in our element: a world of disembodied words. No need to worry about what to wear, whether to make eye contact, whether to shake hands or kiss cheeks or just smile. No awkward pauses or embarrassing false starts; no need to fill uncomfortable silences with weather-speak; no polite procrastinating or tea-making or other displacement activity; no need for the usual prolonged goodbyes. Nothing physical, no actual corporeal human beings to deal with at all. Just written words. Our favourite thing.
And, best of all, cyberspace is a disinhibitor. The disinhibiting effect of cyberspace is a universal phenomenon, not peculiar to the English. People from many cultures find that online they are more open and chatty, less reticent than they are face to face or even on the telephone. But this disinhibiting effect is particularly important to the English, who have a greater need for such social facilitators than other cultures.
In my discussion groups and interviews with English internet users, the disinhibiting effect of online communication is a constantly recurring theme. Without exception, participants say that they express themselves more freely, with less reserve, in cyberspace than in what they invariably call ‘real life’ encounters: ‘I say things on Facebook that I would never dare to say in real life’; ‘That’s right, you lose your inhibitions when you’re online – it’s almost like being a bit drunk.’
It seems particularly significant to me that so many of my informants contrast their online communication style with what they would (or would not) say in ‘real life’. This curious slip provides a clue to the nature of the disinhibiting effects of online communication. It seems that William Gibson, who coined the term ‘cyberspace’, was right when he said that ‘It’s not really a place, it’s not really space.’ We regard cyberspace as somehow separate from the real world: our behaviour there is different from our conduct ‘in real life’ (or ‘IRL’, as it is now called in webspeak).
In this sense, cyberspace can be seen as what anthropologists would call a ‘liminal’ place – a marginal, borderline state, segregated from everyday existence, in which normal rules and social constructions are suspended, allowing brief exploration of alternative ways of being. Just as we abandon the conventional rules of spelling and grammar in our emails and other cyber-talk, so we ignore many of the social inhibitions and restrictions that normally govern our behaviour. The English behave in remarkably un-English ways. In cyberspace social media sites, chatrooms and forums, for example, unlike most ‘real-space’ public environments in England, striking up conversations with complete strangers is normal behaviour, indeed actively encouraged. We then go on to reveal personal details that we would never disclose in ‘real life’. This may explain why studies regularly find that cyberspace friendships form more easily and develop more rapidly than traditional ‘real-space’ relationships.
Much of this sociable disinhibition is based on an illusion. Because of the liminality effect, chatting online feels more ephemeral and less binding than ‘putting something in writing’ on paper, or talking face to face, but it is in fact, if anything, more permanent and considerably less discreet. So although many English people find the alternative reality of online communication a liberating experience, it can have adverse consequences. Just as we may sometimes regret things we have said or done while under the influence of alcohol, we may also sometimes regret our unrestrained behaviour in cyberspace. The problem is that cyberspace is not separate from the ‘real’ world, any more than the office Christmas party takes place in a parallel universe. Excessively uninhibited emails, posts or tweets, like office-party misdemeanours, may come back to haunt us. But I would still argue that the benefits of the cyberspace liminality effect in overcoming English social dis-ease far outweigh these disadvantages.
As I pointed out in the Introduction, the term ‘national character’ is a metaphor and should not be taken literally: English inhibitions are cultural, a matter of obedience to unwritten cultural rules and norms. These rules may be deeply ingrained, and our obedience to them largely unconscious, but they are not personality traits. In contexts where the unspoken rules permit a degree of ‘cultural remisswion’ (such as pubs, racecourses, festive queues, etc., etc.), we shed some of our inhibitions. ‘Cyberspaces’ such as social media sites, forums, etc. have their own sets of social rules (both official and unwritten), and we English adapt our behaviour, and relax our inhibitions, in accordance with the rules of the sites and forums we frequent. Many of these social sites and forums are international, and in in these contexts, apart from a few obvious linguistic indicators, it can be hard to distinguish English partic
ipants from other nationalities. We do not suddenly or entirely ‘shed’ all of our cultural quirks along with our inhibitions, but when our social dis-ease symptoms are ‘in remission’ to the extent permitted in cyberspace, we become far less distinctively English.
I am not the slightest bit surprised to learn that chatting online and surfing the internet are now considerably more popular pastimes among children and teenagers in this country than watching television. Neither am I inclined to share the hand-wringing concern that many parents and pundits seem to feel about this trend. Instead of staring passively at a television screen, our children and teenagers are spending their time actively interacting with what used to be called pen-pals, including pen-pals in foreign countries, or Googling and internet-surfing to read about subjects that interest them. They are, much of the time at least, reading and writing. What is so terrible about that? The subjects they choose to read and write about may not be to our taste, but surely ’twas ever thus.
And, incidentally, it is perhaps no accident that our young people’s increasing obsession with online social media has coincided with a substantial decline in public vandalism. Who needs to smash up bus shelters, spray graffiti on buildings or scribble angry messages on the walls of public lavatories when you can express your teenage angst, get attention, win friends and influence people on Facebook, Twitter, forums, chatrooms and blogs?97
The Rules of Shopping
It may seem strange to include shopping in this section on ‘private and domestic’ pursuits, as, despite the rise of online shopping, this activity mostly does not take place in the home but in shops, which are public places. We are talking about the English, however, which means that ‘public’ activities can be almost as ‘private’ as domestic ones. Shopping is not, for most English people, a particularly social pastime. Indeed, for most people, most of the time, it is not a ‘pastime’ at all, but a domestic chore – and should really have been covered in the chapter on work, not here.
But you would probably have found it odd to see a section on shopping under the heading of ‘work’. Shopping is not generally regarded as ‘work’. There is a curious mismatch between shopping as a concept, and shopping as a real-life activity, between the way we talk in the abstract about shopping, and the realities of our actual experience of it.98 Discussions about shopping – in the media, among researchers and social commentators, and often in ordinary conversation – tend to focus on the hedonistic, materialistic, individualistic view of shopping: we talk about shopaholics, about ‘retail therapy’, about the power of advertising, about people spending lots of money they don’t have on lots of things they don’t need, about the ‘sex and shopping’ novel, about shopping as self-indulgence, shopping as pleasure, shopping as leisure.
Shopping may indeed sometimes be all of these things. But apart from the very rich and the very young, most people’s day-to-day experience of shopping bears little resemblance to this image of mindless hedonism. Most of the shopping we do is ‘provisioning’ – buying the mundane necessities of life such as food, drink, washing powder, loo paper, light-bulbs, toothpaste and so on, and my survey on shopping showed that 87 per cent of us do this kind of routine provisioning at least once a week. This is no more an act of materialistic self-indulgence than the gathering and foraging of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Shopping is not work in the sense of ‘production’, it is a form of ‘consumption’, and the people who do it are ‘consumers’, but for many shoppers it is work in the sense of ‘providing a service’, albeit an unpaid service.
On the other hand, shopping can be a pleasurable leisure activity, even for those who mainly experience it as a tedious chore. In my survey, 81 per cent said that they go shopping for pleasure or leisure items at least once a month. In my informal fieldwork interviews with shoppers, most of the people I spoke to made a distinction between ‘routine’ shopping and ‘fun’ shopping, provisioning and pleasure, work and play. In fact, if I introduced the topic without qualification, I would often be asked to specify which type of shopping I meant (one woman asked, ‘Do you mean the baked-beans-and-nappies sort of shopping or the girly-day-out sort?’). On other occasions, it would be clear from people’s answers that they assumed I was talking specifically about either one type or the other. This often depended on the location in which the interview took place: people in supermarkets were more likely to assume that I was talking about ‘routine’ shopping, while the same sort of people interviewed in clothes shops, antiques shops and garden centres tended to think I meant ‘fun’ shopping. Age was also a factor: teenagers, students and some twentysomethings mainly tended to assume that ‘shopping’ referred to the play/leisure/fun variety, while older people were much more likely to focus on the chore/provisioning/routine aspects.
Sex and Shopping Rules
There were also significant sex differences: men were less likely than women to distinguish between different types of shopping, and less inclined to admit to enjoying any sort of shopping, even the ‘fun’ type. Among older English males, in particular, there seems to be an unwritten rule prohibiting any enjoyment of shopping, or at least prohibiting the disclosure or acknowledgement of such enjoyment. Taking pleasure in shopping is regarded as effeminate. The correct masculine line is to define any shopping one does, including the purchase of luxuries and inessentials, as something that has to be done, a means to an end, never a pleasure in itself. The majority of women, by contrast, will readily admit to enjoying ‘fun’ shopping, and some even say that they quite like the ‘provisioning’ sort of shopping, or at least take some pride and pleasure in doing it well. There are males and females who do not conform to these rules, but they are seen as deviating from the norm, and they recognise that they are unusual.
The rules regarding attitudes towards shopping are also reflected in the manner in which males and females are expected to shop. I call them the ‘hunter/gatherer rules’: men, if they can be persuaded to shop at all, tend to shop like hunters; women tend to shop like gatherers. Male shopping (or, more accurately, masculine shopping) is teleological: you select your prey, then single-mindedly and purposefully hunt it down. Female (feminine) shopping is more flexible, more opportunistic: you browse, you see what’s available; you know roughly what you’re looking for, but you might spot something better, or a bargain, and change your mind.99
A significant number of English males, however, choose to prove their masculinity by emphasising how hopelessly bad they are at shopping. Shopping is seen as a female skill; being too good at it, even in the approved hunter-like manner, might cast doubt upon your macho credentials, or even raise questions about your sexual orientation. Among anxious heterosexuals, it is tacitly understood that only gay men – and a few ultra-politically-correct, New Man, feminist types – take pride in their shopping skills. The done thing for ‘real men’ is to avoid shopping, to profess to hate it, and to be completely useless at it.
This can be partly just a matter of laziness, the employment of a practice the Americans call ‘klutzing out’ – deliberately making such a poor job of a domestic chore that one is unlikely to be asked to do it again. But among English men, uselessness at shopping is also a significant source of pride. Their female partners often play along with this, helping them to display their manliness by performing elaborate pantomimes of mock-exasperation at their inability to find their way around the supermarket, teasing them constantly and telling stories about their latest doofus mistakes. ‘Oh, he’s hopeless, hasn’t got a clue, have you, love?’ said a woman I interviewed in a supermarket coffee shop, smiling fondly at her husband, who pulled a mock-sheepish face. ‘I sent him out to get tomatoes and he comes back with a bottle of ketchup and he says, “Well, it’s made of tomatoes, isn’t it?” So I go, “Yes, but it’s not much bloody use in a salad!” Men! Typical!’ The man positively glowed with pride, laughing delightedly at this confirmation of his virility.
The ‘Shopping as Saving’ Rule
For many English females,
who still do most (93 per cent at the last count) of the ‘routine’ ‘provisioning’ type of shopping, shopping is a skill, and it is customary, even among the relatively well-off, to take some pride in doing it well, which is understood to mean with a concern for thrift. Not necessarily getting everything as cheaply as possible, but getting value for money, not being extravagant or wasteful. There is a tacit understanding among English shoppers to the effect that shopping is not an act of spending, but an act of saving.100 You do not speak of having ‘spent’ X amount on an item of food or clothing, but of having ‘saved’ X amount on the item. You would certainly never boast about having spent an excessive sum of money on something, but you are allowed to take pride in finding a bargain.
This rule applies across all social classes: the upper echelons would regard boasting about extravagant expenditure as vulgar, while the lower classes would regard it as ‘stuck up’ or showing off. The English will tell you that only brash, crass Americans display their wealth by boasting about how much something cost them. Congratulating yourself on a bargain or saving, however – boasting about how little something cost you – is universally acceptable among English shoppers of all classes. It is one of the very few exceptions to the money-talk taboo. What constitutes a bargain, what counts as cheap or good value, may well differ according to class and income level, but the principle is the same: whatever price you paid, you should if possible claim that it somehow constituted a saving.