Arch Angelism

It would be easier to slip into conspiracy thinking than to try to work out how The Arches ended up getting shut down. The conspiracies are knocking about - a vendetta by the police, G1 passing brown envelopes to the Council - but none of this helps. If the council are corrupt, if the police decided that they didn't like the kind of person who went clubbing/made Live Art under Glasgow Central, there is little that can be done, other than feeling even more alienated in a world of capital and back-room dealings.

The announcement that the Scottish Parliament intends to act is hardly encouraging: it was only yesterday that Patrick Harvey was asking his fellow Glasgow MSP why he was the singular voice shouting on behalf of the venue. And the emphasis on The Arches as an arts venue and not a club suggests that the division between clubbers and artists is going to be the path along which the space returns to existence.

The debate in Holyrood revealed a concern for the people who are losing their jobs - which is very important - but called upon the very people who have precipitated the closure (the police, Glasgow City Council) to get around a table and sort it all out. Like the petition aiming to reverse the original decision to remove the late licence, this offers a slim hope that an organisation which has already made a decision might be persuaded to change.

The Arches was a victim: of an attitude towards drug use that stresses criminality over health-care, and a council that hasn't yet seen the connection between an ecosystem of venues and Glasgow's viability as a home of culture. But as an isolated event within a continuum of policies, approaches and conflicts, it is going to be difficult to work out a resolution without discovering a new paradigm.

At the same time, it is important to remember what the fight is about: ultimately, is is a battle to ensure that a business remains open. The business has a model that is about more than just the money - although it is about making cash - and this kind of business is rare in today's post-consumer (or whatever it is called) society. 

Its philanthropic concerns - giving loot to artists - might not be on the level of those Victorians who built housing estates for their workers, or swimming pools (Govanhill Baths, anyone), but it is still a rare example of a capitalist enterprise that thinks beyond the bottom line.

Ban This Filth: A Male Feminist Writes

To be sure, the feminist movement is a pluralistic entity, full of competing strands that share only a concern with the status of women and a sense that things aren't quite right. There's the Dworkin/MacKinnon school, which identifies pornography with sexual assault; there's the followers of Camille Paglia with their sex-positive emphasis; Third Wave Feminists; post-feminists, body essentialists, lesbian separatists...

In all of this, only the male feminists have a single, simple role. They need to shut the fuck up and listen.

By this standard, Ban This Filth is an abject failure. Not only does it provide an example of a male artist parading his wounds at the hands of patriarchy, it picks out one writer (Dworkin) and makes her the epitome of feminist wisdom. Never mind that her work is problematic - for all her talk of male violence, her work is full of brutal imagery and aggression, or that her anti-pornography laws led to an urban myth that her own writings were banned by them - Dworkin is only a single voice, and is a divisive figure.

Her final years were marred by a controversy that is tragic and depressing: when Bissett calls her an Old Testament-style prophet, he could add that these prophets were, generally, unpopular during their lives. Her later exile may be seen as part of a failure on the part of society to accommodate her opinions.

Although the episodes from Bissett's life are familiar and funny, they work to marginalise the voices he supposedly supports. He makes a point of how women have supported him in his career, before writing and performing a one-man show that is all about him. Sure, he challenges himself, noting that his passion for Dworkin can be seen as a simplistic response to liberal guilt. Sure, he admits that he is climbing on the backs of women, but he makes that fundamental liberal mistake.

Expressing an opinion is not the same thing as working on strategies towards liberation.

Bissett can bang on about how bad he feels for looking at naughty videos - he can even offer to strip off on stage (thereby experiencing vulnerability). He can champion Dworkin, an extreme voice who lived an oppression far worse than getting shouted at for dancing funny in a Falkirk nightclub. He can ignore the serious critique of Dworkin by Nussbaum, allowing her a philosophical free pass (and making her sound like a radical feminist beat poet when he reads from her writings).

None of these things actually change the systematic oppression of women, or do anything about the pornographic industry.

(Note: this does not reflect my complete opinions on Ban This Filth).