Really, we should be grateful. It’s always easier when people spell out their allegiances and biases, rather than sweeping them under the carpet, leaving those around them to wonder if they’re imagining things. So when the radio station Xfm announced recently that it was reinventing itself as Radio X, and that it would be “for men”, it was a straightforward and helpful move. Xfm had always been a male-dominated station with a few female presenters; now, they were actively saying that they didn’t want women, they wanted banter for blokes, delivered by blokes, with rock music made by blokes, to an audience of blokes. “The first radio station with a truly male-focused output,” they added, making me wonder at the existence of organisations such as Sound Women, formed to support women in radio, who are seriously underrepresented. Still. At least we knew where we stood.
Then I saw the list of new DJs. Vernon Kay, Johnny Vaughan, and Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson. I have nothing against any of these people individually. It’s just that I then saw their big star, Chris Moyles, and my heart really sank. I emailed Moyles once, as a much younger listener, and fan, when he was still a big star on Radio 1. Stephen Gately from Boyzone had just come out and Moyles kept saying what great news it was, how they were all so pleased for him – and every time he said it, he’d play a snippet of a camp show tune, from a musical, and all his radio mates would burst out laughing. To subtly show that, actually, the lads all thought it was hilarious news and that Stephen was just some stupid poof now. Girly and effeminate; in other words, crap.
I got more and more upset, wondering if any teenagers were listening who’d considered coming out and now had even more reason not to bother. So I emailed Moyles at his BBC address and said he was being homophobic. To my surprise, he replied – with a curt “I thought it was funny, and that’s all that matters”. I didn’t really listen to his show again. Later, I heard he’d invited a fellow Radio 1 DJ on, and sat there, live on air, asking her about her weight, her legs and their hairiness, gauging if he found her attractive, while she squirmed. It’s easy to do if you’re the leader of the gang and the lads all laugh with you.
Obviously, you might be thinking, well, there are plenty of organisations that now exist only for women. And there are – it’s just that most of them exist to try to counteract the problems created by a culture dominated by groups of men. Organisations like the Women’s Equality party (a new political party: do look them up) are necessary because even Jeremy Corbyn, a great believer in equality, is still giving the top jobs to the boys.
Ta-Nehisi Coates recently published Between The World And Me, a memoir written as a letter to his teenage son about what it is to be a black man in America. He describes how the history of the United States led to various disparate identities – Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish – coming together under the invented banner of whiteness, “the elevation of the belief in being white”, as if they were all one thing, and those with darker skins were all another.
It’s a deeply interesting point. Without wishing to make a trivial comparison, I look at something like Radio X and wonder if this is a home for people who are trying to be men, who want to feel that they have a shared masculine identity in this gang of banter merchants. It’s the “why isn’t there an international men’s day?” of radio stations. It’s part of a world that likes what it likes, and doesn’t need women messing it up. And just as I thought the dull thud of gender was something we might actually be about to move away from. Gah.
