Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Page Three and the Un-erotic Bosoms Rule

  Then, if possible, move on to bosoms, which we also find highly amusing. Paxman claims that ‘English men are obsessed by breasts’, citing the daily parade of page-three bosoms in the tabloid newspapers as proof of this fixation. I am not so sure. Breasts are a secondary sexual characteristic, and men in many parts of the world like to look at them – in magazines and so on, as well as in the flesh. I am not convinced that English men are any more obsessed with breasts than, say, American, Australian, Scandinavian, Japanese or German men. The daily breast-display on page three of the Sun, and in other tabloid papers, is, however, an interesting English phenomenon, and worth looking at a bit more closely.

  In a national MORI survey, only 21 per cent of us expressed moral disapproval of the page-three breast parade. Of all the representations of sex in the media, topless page-three girls attracted the least condemnation, by a long way. Even among women, only 24 per cent had moral objections to page three, whereas nearly twice that number, 46 per cent, objected to soft-porn magazines in newsagents (such as Playboy, with similar images), and 54 per cent thought cinema pornography was immoral. Now, this does not, of course, mean that the other 76 per cent of women actively enjoy looking at page three, but it does suggest that many do not regard it as ‘pornography’ – perhaps seeing it as something more innocuous, even though the pictures are much the same as those in soft-porn magazines.

  When I read these statistics, I was intrigued, and started asking my own questions, trying to find out why both men and women seemed to regard page three as somehow different from other soft-porn images. In terms of numbers, although my ‘sample’ was much smaller, I got much the same results as the MORI poll – only about a fifth of my informants objected to page three. I was surprised to find that even some of my more feminist-minded informants could not work up much indignation about page three. Why was this?

  ‘Because, well, page-three girls – I mean, they’re just a bit of a joke,’ said one woman. ‘You can’t really take it seriously.’

  ‘Oh – I suppose we’re just used to it,’ explained another.

  ‘Page three is more like those saucy seaside postcards,’ said a particularly astute informant. ‘It’s just daft, with the silly captions full of awful puns. You can’t really feel offended by it.’

  A teenage girl was equally dismissive: ‘Compared to what people download off the internet, or even what you see on the telly – well, page three is so innocent, it’s sort of quaint and old-fashioned.’

  I noticed that almost all of the people I asked about page three, even a few of those who expressed disapproval, tended to laugh or at least smile as they responded. They would roll their eyes or shake their heads, but in a resigned, tolerant way, much as people do when they are talking about the minor misdemeanours of a naughty child or pet. Page three is a tradition, an institution, somehow reassuringly familiar, like The Archers or rainy bank holidays. George Orwell described the English working class as ‘devoted to bawdy jokes’ and talked about the ‘overpowering vulgarity’ of rude comic postcards. The ludicrous puns, wordplay and double-entendres in the page-three captions are as much a part of this tradition as the naked breasts, reminding us that sex is a bit of a joke, not to be taken too seriously. It is hard to see the ‘tits and puns’ on page three as pornography, any more than the bosoms and puns in a jokey seaside postcard or a Carry On film are pornography. They are not even really sexy. Page three is somehow just too daft, too cartoonishly ridiculous, too English to be sexy.

  ‘England may be a copulating country, but it is not an erotic country,’ said George Mikes in 1977. This was an improvement on his original claim, in 1946, that ‘Continental people have a sex-life; the English have hot-water bottles’, but still not exactly flattering. He does have a point, though, which is borne out by my page-three findings: only the English could manage to make pictures of luscious, half-naked women into something quite as un-erotic as page three.

  SEX RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

  What does all this tell us about Englishness? The characteristics revealed here are mostly the ‘usual suspects’ – humour, social dis-ease, hypocrisy, fair play, class-consciousness, courtesy and so on. But what is becoming increasingly clear to me is that these defining characteristics of Englishness cannot be seen (pace Orwell, Priestley, Betjeman, Bryson, Paxman, Julian Barnes and all the other list-makers) just as a list of discrete, unconnected qualities or principles: they must be understood as a system of some sort.

  Looking closely at the rules and behaviour patterns in this chapter, I see that most of them are products of a combination or interaction of at least two ‘defining characteristics’. The knee-jerk humour rule is an example of the use of humour (a defining characteristic in its own right) to alleviate the symptoms of our social dis-ease (another defining characteristic).

  Many of the flirting zones identified by the SAS Test also reveal interactions between defining characteristics. Our problems with singles’ events and dating agencies – our need to pretend that we are gathering for some non-social purpose, and our squeamishness about the concept of ‘dating’ – seem to involve a combination of social dis-ease (again), hypocrisy and anti-earnestness (a subset of humour).

  The EDM clubbers’ ‘no sex please, we’re too cool’ rule is mainly just about hypocrisy, but worth mentioning here as it seems to confirm something I have been suspecting for a while, which is that English hypocrisy really is a special kind of hypocrisy, involving collusion in a sort of unspoken agreement to delude ourselves, more than any deliberate deception of others.

  The courtesy-flirting rule combines hypocrisy with another defining characteristic, courtesy. These two seem to go together a lot – ‘polite egalitarianism’ is another product of hypocrisy and courtesy, combined with class-consciousness.

  The uncertainty principle is not a sign of repressed homosexuality, but an interaction of three defining characteristics of Englishness: social dis-ease + courtesy + fair play. The rules of banter are a product of social dis-ease + humour; the girl-watching rules involve both of these, with the addition of our special collective-delusion brand of hypocrisy. The marrying-up rule combines class-consciousness and hypocrisy; the sex-talk rules are social dis-ease symptoms treated with humour again, as is the funny-bottoms rule.

  This is all rather crude at the moment – I’m sure the equations involved are more complex than these simple additions – but at least we’re moving towards something that looks more like a diagram than a list. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I’m still hoping that by the end of the book I will have found some graphic way of illustrating the connections and interactions between the elements that make up our national character.

  Finally, the ‘punography’ of page three, where the silly wordplay (which seems to be contagious, sorry) somehow cancels out the sexiness of the pictures, is another example of the English use of humour to neutralise potential embarrassment or offence – a ‘social dis-ease + humour + courtesy’ combo. Some cultures celebrate sex and the erotic; others (religious ones, mainly) neutralise sex by censorship; others (the US, parts of Scandinavia) neutralise it with po-faced, earnest political correctness. The English do it with humour.

  110. B. L. de Muralt in Lettres sur les Anglais.

  111. Harry Mount puts this down to ‘schools that were largely segregated until the twentieth century’ and the long-standing English male tradition of spending their evenings drinking in pubs with other men instead of going home to their wives and families. Trouble is, the gender-segregated schools argument would apply equally to almost all other European countries, and the Englishman’s preference for male-bonding sessions in the pub over wife and family is a choice, which makes this argument somewhat circular.

  112. Some observers have puzzled over the fact that English males have nonetheless managed to produce some of the finest love poetry in the world. I see no contradiction: fine love poetry tends to be written when the ob
ject of one’s affections is at a safe distance; also it often reflects a love of words more than a love of women, and the Englishman’s love of words has never been in question.

  113. It took them a while, but the online matchmakers finally grasped that human mate-seekers are by nature socially ‘endogamous’, tending to marry people from the same sociocultural background, and created these specialist sites. I predicted/recommended this in a privately commissioned and therefore unpublished research report many years ago, but as I have no business acumen whatsoever, it didn’t even occur to me to set up any such sites myself. Typical.

  114. I hope it is clear that I mean no disrespect to Jeremy Paxman with all these quibbles. Quite the opposite: it is because his book is so good that it is worth quibbling with.

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  I’ve called this chapter Rites of Passage, rather than Religion, because religion as such is largely irrelevant to the lives of most English people nowadays, but the rituals to which Church of England vicars irreverently refer as ‘hatchings, matchings and dispatchings’, and other less momentous transitions, are still important. Most honest Anglican clerics will readily admit that the rites de passage of marriage, death, and to a lesser extent birth, are now their only point of contact with the majority of their parishioners. Some of us might attend a service at Christmas, and an even smaller number at Easter, but for most, church attendance is limited to weddings, funerals, and perhaps christenings.

  THE DEFAULT-RELIGION RULE

  The Elizabethan courtier John Lyly claimed that the English were God’s ‘chosen and peculiar people’. Well, if we are, this was certainly a rather peculiar choice on the Almighty’s part, as we are probably the least religious people on Earth. In surveys, about 45 per cent of English people tick the box saying that they ‘belong’ to one or another of the Christian denominations115 – usually the Church of England – but when asked, ‘Are you religious?’ only about 30 per cent say yes. Only 14 per cent of these ‘Christians’ say that they go to church on a regular basis, and when they say ‘regular’, only about eight per cent mean weekly. The vast majority of us attend church only for the aforementioned ‘rites of passage’, and for many of us, our only contact with religion is at the last of these rites – at funerals. Most of us (88 per cent at the last count) are not christened nowadays, and only about a third get married in church, but about 40 per cent of us have a Christian funeral of some sort, and most of us have probably attended one. This is not because death suddenly inspires the English to become religious, but because it has until recently been the automatic ‘default’ option: not having a Christian funeral required a determined effort, a clear notion of exactly what one wanted to do instead, and a lot of embarrassing fuss and bother. Now that other options have become more easily accessible, even the number of Christian funerals is declining. This lack of religious enthusiasm is not just a recent trend. In 1941, George Orwell wrote that ‘the common people are without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply the preserve of the landed gentry, and the nonconformist sects only influenced minorities.’ I suspect that churchgoing, for the English, has long been more of a social activity than a religious one.

  In any case, the Church of England is the least religious church on Earth. It is notoriously woolly-minded, tolerant to a fault and amiably non-prescriptive. To put yourself down as ‘C of E’ (we prefer to use this abbreviation whenever possible, in speech as well as on forms, as the word ‘church’ sounds a bit religious, and ‘England’ might seem a bit patriotic) on a census or application form, as is customary, does not imply any religious observance or beliefs whatsoever – not even a belief in the existence of God. Alan Bennett once observed, in a speech to the Prayer Book Society, that in the Anglican Church ‘whether or not one believes in God tends to be sidestepped. It’s not quite in good taste. Someone said that the Church of England is so constituted that its members can really believe anything at all, but of course almost none of them do.’

  I remember eavesdropping on a conversation in my doctor’s waiting room. A schoolgirl of twelve or thirteen was filling in some medical form or other, with intermittent help from her mother. The daughter asked, ‘Religion? What religion am I? We’re not any religion, are we?’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ replied her mother. ‘Just put C of E.’

  ‘What’s C of E?’ asked the daughter.

  ‘Church of England.’

  ‘Is that a religion?’

  ‘Yes, sort of. Well, no, not really – it’s just what you put.’

  ‘C of E’ is a default option. A bit like the ‘neither agree nor disagree’ box on questionnaires – a kind of apathetic, fence-sitting, middling sort of religion for the spiritually ‘neutral’.

  Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye and a self-confessed ‘lukewarm’ Anglican, illustrates this perfectly in his account of a sudden outbreak of religion at his C of E boarding school, caused by two former pupils who returned with a born-again, evangelical message, which somehow temporarily caught the imagination of the boys. ‘It was very, very bizarre,’ Hislop says. ‘People were having prayer meetings in dormitories and the staff were terribly worried.’ It might strike some people as a bit odd that the staff of a Church of England school – by definition a ‘faith school’ – would be so frightfully worried about pupils voluntarily saying prayers together, but as Hislop explains, ‘You know, being sort of Church of England, people want a very quiet and moderate faith.’ Hislop describes his own faith as ‘so vague as to be sort of not really there at all’ – which gives an idea of the degree of quietness and moderation instilled by his C of E education.

  It is hard to find anyone who takes the Church of England seriously – even among its own ranks. In 1991, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, said, ‘I see it as an elderly lady, who mutters away to herself in a corner, ignored most of the time.’ And this typically Eeyorish comment was in an interview immediately following his appointment to the most exalted position in this church. If the Archbishop of Canterbury himself likens his church to an irrelevant senile old biddy, it is hardly surprising that the rest of us feel free to ignore it. Sure enough, in a sermon almost a decade later, he bemoaned the fact that ‘A tacit atheism prevails.’ Well, really – what did he expect?

  More recently, in 2007, Dr Carey’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, described us as ‘a country with a nominally Christian majority’. The key word here is ‘nominally’, and even the nominal Christians are no longer a majority.

  THE BENIGN-INDIFFERENCE RULE

  And the key word in Archbishop Carey’s lament was ‘tacit’. We are not a nation of explicit, unequivocal atheists. Nor are we agnostics. Both of these imply a degree of interest in whether or not there is a deity – enough either to reject or question the notion. Most English people are just not much bothered about it.

  In opinion polls, about 55 to 60 per cent of the population answer ‘yes’ when asked if they believe in God,116 but Dr Carey is right not to take this response at face value. When I asked people about it, I found that many of them answered ‘yes’ because they:

  •are ‘not particularly religious but sort of believe in Something’

  •are vaguely willing to accept that there might be a God, so saying ‘no’ would be a bit too emphatic

  •would quite like to think that there is a God, even though on the whole it seems rather unlikely

  •don’t really know but might as well give Him the benefit of the doubt

  •haven’t really thought about it much, to be honest, but, yeah, sure, whatever.

  One woman told me, ‘Well, I’d ticked “Christian” on the first page, in the sense that I suppose I’m sort of Christian as opposed to Muslim or Hindu or something, so then I thought I’d better tick God as well – otherwise I’d look a bit inconsistent.’

  Others are clearly not so concerned
about consistency, as surveys regularly show that up to 15 per cent of those identifying themselves as Christian freely admit that they do not believe in God. This may seem utterly bizarre, but Alan Bennett wasn’t joking: in the C of E, belief in God is optional, and even raising the issue of belief would be in poor taste. Over half of those who tick ‘Christian’ do not believe in Christ117.

  My own research indicates that many of the unbelievers are ticking the ‘Christian’ box for the same reason as the woman quoted above: they mean ‘Well, I suppose I’m sort of Christian as opposed to Muslim, Hindu, etc.’ – which they see as more of a cultural than a religious identification. I have also interviewed many English people who tick ‘Christian’ on forms and surveys despite holding no religious beliefs whatsoever. The term, for them, represents a rather vague set of moral values and principles, only some of which, on further questioning, are even derived from the Bible, let alone the New Testament. Many of my informants quoted the Golden Rule (‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’), which, although claimed by Christianity, is also espoused in some form by almost every other religion and ethical tradition, and found in many ancient texts from centuries before Christ. Other informants cited a range of non-Biblical moral precepts – almost all about tolerance and fairness – which have not to my knowledge been appropriated by Christianity, such as ‘Live and let live’ or ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right.’ The participants in one of my discussion-groups were even convinced that ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one of Christ’s teachings (I had to Google the quote for them to prove it came from Marx).