My cousin has repeatedly teased me over the years saying that, as a child, I was obsessed with washing machines.  He himself was equally if not more obsessed with cars and knew every detail of design of a Ford Zephyr.  We were children in the UK in the 1970s and my defence then as now was that washing machines were interesting things.  They are a good deal less interesting now – as are cars he would say – for their design has become a lot more uniform.  Back then though the variety was immense – twin tubs, separate tubs, semi-automatic front loaders, fully automatic front loaders, automated top loaders and weirdest of all a slimline top loading thing that had the drum on its side so you opened its jaws like a crocodile to get your laundry in it.  And all these machines came in a variety of styles and colours.  Hotpoint in particular released a purple coordinating range where your clothes became a very funny colour behind lavender glass.

Some twin tub machines spun the washing round in kind of paddle wheel tank whilst others did that jiggle dance let’s twist again with an agitator.  And all of these things made different sounds from gentle gurglings to the aeroplane style racket of spin cycles.  I stand by my fascination at aged 9 or 10, or 12, or 50.  Yet my argument here is that this perhaps certifiable obsession also has a sociological significance for what the 1970s represented was a feast of design, of searching for the ultimate solution, of prototypes struggling to become ideal types.  And driving those designs was the need to solve the problems of the time – women working, less time, the small kitchen, new house building with partially then fully equipped spaces for machines, and a new aesthetics.  These things not only had to function they had to look right, to fit in, and to give off that aura of desire.  This was the apple before Eve and Adam made it Mac.

Back then my maternal grandmother had a large but loosely equipped kitchen.  She had, as many did, her laundry days for which she used separates – dragged out across the kitchen floor to be attached to taps and sink.  Whilst these machines were housed in cabinets, they barely consisted of more than tubs in tanks that did things to get your clothes clean and dry.  I remember she used to have to try and hold the spinning machine down for it would otherwise shimmy like mad across the floor as it spun at high speed with a deafening racket.  My paternal grandmother had one of the early Hoover twin tubs installed in a tiny kitchen space that would fill with steam and noise and her cussings of trying to control the thing – water in, water out, slosh, suds, pull clothes from one side to the other then clamp the lid down as the thing took off like the Concorde Aeroplane we saw on TV.  It had that dazzling deep blue spinner lid that operated the spinner with hinges alone and consequently terrified as much as it fascinated.

My mother otherwise had this bizarre semi-automatic Hoover front loader which she still had to drag out across the floor.  It had this pale-yellow colouring with a lot of blue levers on the control panel.  We’d recently moved to a new build house complete with fitted kitchen – ours in a teak effect, the neighbours in a kind of teal green.  These clumsy machines were clearly not up to the same level of efficiency, or aesthetics.  Freezers were also coming in, often shoved in garages due to lack of room – and the chest freezer with a lid on the top was often so large you could fall in it and freeze yourself alive.  My mother, who had a bad back, avoided those and crammed in the upright version.  None of the men of course knew what they were doing with any of it besides writing the cheques or signing the agreements on “HP”.  Things needed to change.

Like many living in the shire counties, we took our family trip to the annual Ideal Home Exhibition, a giant jamboree of gadgets, mock houses and rooms, and stands with washing machines on them by the thousand.  I was in some kind of exhausted wide-eyed child heaven, staring at all these things.  Particularly exciting were the “demonstrations” for these machines would not just stand in rows but actually get hooked up to the mains and pipes to be shown to work swirling and whirring sometimes with glass cut outs so you could see parts moving.  As I have already stated, my parents had a brand-new house with a fully fitted out kitchen with limited spaces in it to put these things.   They chose a Servis model because it was slimline and narrow and would fit in the gap under worktop.  It had fashionably brown controls to suit the 1970s.  They also bought the dryer to match.  Common back then was the stacking system where you put on one on top of the other to save room.  There was much household excitement around their delivery that then turned to horror and disappointment.  The machine – for ten-year-old me – had a strange plastic smell and curious plastic colour bits in the long sliding dispenser and such.  I did not trust it.  As it turned out, I was right.  It was not “plumbed in” and so whilst fitting under the worktop still had to be pulled out.  The machine was so slimline the slightest imbalance in the load would send it toppling and banging across the room.  It was clearly designed to be held in place by the cubby hole itself or otherwise became frankly terrifying.

Interestingly, decades later when I had my first job and my first furnished flat to myself, it came with an updated version of the same machine that, as I remember, worked fine though was rather noisy in such a small space.  My parents returned the offending model and sold the dryer deemed to be far too expensive on the electric and stuck to the “whirligig” line.  They then acquired a slighter bigger Hoover “matchbox” automatic.

Half the country seemed to have the same model and our neighbours did too only my mother deliberately wanted the hot and cold fill, not cold fill only, version again to save on time and the electric.  Of course, now they are all cold fill as this is part of how they maintain their “A” rated wash standard – by taking forever to heat it up and do it.  The complaint from all was that whilst it was fun to set the programme – involving ratcheting round a loudly clicking knob on the right that you then pulled to turn on, in itself quite exciting – the whole damn thing took forever.  Whilst twin tubs and similar did your washing in minutes these automated machines took hours on end (and you were not given timed displays back then either).  Our house was one of many though varied on a small and leafy estate by the river.  Other neighbours wrestled differently with problems posed by the new machines.  One had the top loading crocodile sort that my mother declared noisy and inefficient as well as a bit unsafe.  Others with whole utility rooms that opened onto communal garden space invested in the coordinating purple Hotpoint Liberator range that you could watch as a child from the grass or had that other Hotpoint, the Automatic 1600, that was wide and smart with controls on the top.  Friends’ mothers had the Hotpoint top loader that, like its twin tub equivalent, had this cowboy style hat on top of the twisting agitator that you put your powder in the brim and then as the water poured in it shook the whole lot over your bubbling wash.  However, the shops were still of full of twin tubs for the luddite though these were becoming far more aesthetic – Hoover had its hinged lids and orange and black trims, whilst Hotpoint went for a prescient 80s look of charcoal and chrome – and worktop style covers were also not uncommon in an attempt to get them to coordinate with your swanky new kitchen.

From the 1980s onwards things got a lot duller and student life does not do much for the laundry.  Launderettes held a vague fascination due to their sheer gargantuan-ness that also rendered them utterly lethal (Dryer Killer anyone?) whilst I once shared a house with two guys where the lock had broken so watching your tighty-whities whizz round at 800 rpm with the door wide open was a source of shared hilarity.  I also had an American partner whose mother thought we should have a US style top loader.  As the one actually doing the washing – not him – I flatly refused.  Once finally living alone, I could then decide (with much glee) on the model of my dreams.  A re-emergence of an old problem reared its head here, however, as I have never had space for a separate dryer.  The development of a condenser (hence no snorkel pipe to play with) and larger capacities rendered the combo approach a goer but not unproblematic.  I went for a Hotpoint to tone in with the beiges of my kitchen yet whilst it was pretty to look at it was also pretty hopeless as the pump packed up in under four years due to the tendency of dryers to produce enough fluff to stuff a pillow.  Its Zanussi successor was chosen for its removable pump filter and whilst it did not match anything with its yellow and turquoise buttons it was quiet and efficient until the day the door catch broke and it stubbornly refused to accept that it was actually closed for business – so no watching of the spinning tighty-whities with that one.   Built-in obsolescence became a factor with such machines as I next bought a Hoover with a bedazzling array of programmes, but felt it was built like a car with bolts loose and not to be trusted.  It spun exceedingly fast – the final super whizz was akin to the excitement of putting your foot down in a Ferrari on the motorway at 3 a.m. – but made an aircraft level of racket while it was at it and had to go.  Dull though machines have become, I must admit there was some rekindling of excitement about buying my Samsung washer dryer a few years back in graphite grey with the most enormous deep blue porthole door.

I would not buy the “add wash” version with the kangaroo pouch in which to drop in your forgotten socks, however, for fear of my beloved and curious cat getting caught in it instead.  Functionality is not entirely triumphant, though, as it also plays a tune on completion.  Despite the high-tech, these machines can still be let down by utter basics – it’s loud banging when spinning was subsequently revealed by a repair man with a bum to die for to be the result of nothing more than loose concrete.  I ask you, what next, a computer driven machine that forgets to let in the water maybe?  And I’d still like one that actually does the ironing too…

My point, following this overly personal preamble, however, is that this amounts to not mere whimsy and nostalgia rather sociological questions concerning technology and design, aesthetics and economics, and gender and cultural appropriation.  None of these machines is yet much good at getting dinner stains out of your T-shirt first time without a shelf-load of stain removers and do men, indeed, do much more of the drudgery than they ever used to?  And why do North Americans still insist on jumbo size everything – even to do their washing – whilst the question in the UK remains one of just how stupendously big can one drum get in the same sized box that, simultaneously, no-one even remotely fills to capacity unless their dog, or cat in my case, threw up over the duvet.  These factors perhaps coalesce into five key themes: first, the interplay of functionality and aesthetics in design; second, the history of technology in this or of how tub becomes drum; third, questions of cultural variation – thus whiter than white marketing does not work with Muslims; fourth, the links to class, gender and consumption as technology meets drudgery – for women, primarily; and fifth, the shifts between advertising and appropriation as the use of all of these things is far removed their streamlined and modern ideals from sweltering steam to watching those tighty-whities.  There are of course other factors – architecture, questions of how cultures live individually or collectively, and not least the technologies of detergents and the stuff you put in them from suds and crystals, to pods and caps, and those relentlessly pink stain removers…

 

This is intended as a thought-provoking piece, taking my thirty years of sociological research and insight as its starting point. The reader is trusted, and given the credit, to google the references and that which they do not understand. Regarding any demands for data and “evidence” this is clearly changing all the time and what is presented here is as up to date, expert and valid as any other presented in the media – no more, and no less. For an antidote to the dominant discourses of the BBC, I recommend consulting the work of Lord Sumption, Spiked Online, The New Culture Forum and The Spectator.

“Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.” (Karl Augustus Menninger)

“The enemy is fear.  We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”  (Ghandi)

In the wake of the Covid-19 (aka corona virus) pandemic, I said to a friend recently “where’s a good sociologist when you need one?” for sociology would have much to say here.  Whilst neither I nor anyone can deny the biological reality of this or any other virus, there is much to question concerning the UK’s, or indeed world’s, response.  My point here is that, like the last true pandemic the AIDS and HIV crisis, Covid-19 is as much if not more a moral and political problem as it is a medical or scientific one.  First and foremost, there is much uncertainty and far more that is unknown than known. In simple terms the nature of the problem presented by Covid-19 is as follows.  It is a contagious viral illness that is transmitted in ways not dissimilar to the common cold or influenza, and – when reported in the Wuhan Province of China at New Year 2020 – was also quickly demonstrated to be fatal for those who were elderly and or with underlying health conditions relating to the lungs and breathing, and or other related problems in immune function, given its tendency in these cases to develop into a severe form of pneumonia.  Other cases where no such conditions appear do exist, yet they are rare at well under 10% of the total and likely explained due to lack of prior diagnosis and or links to other inherent conditions as yet unknown.  Other correlating factors such as obesity and diabetes are now emerging as are, as yet inexplicable, ethnic and gender variations in mortality rates as BAME groups and men appear more at risk.  There is also as it stands no cure and no vaccine.  Early evidence from the Wuhan Province suggested death counts were low, possibly as low as less than one per cent of those affected and recovered from easily in at least eighty per cent of cases.  The difficulty here is not, though, the death count, rather the scale of the population at risk as – unlike influenza – there is, as yet, little or at least wholly unknown immunity in the wider population.  If, for example, merely fifty per cent of the UK’s current population contracted the virus and only one per cent died that would still equate to well over 300,000 deaths though the vast majority of these would be elderly and vulnerable to begin with.  The severity of the virus itself also varies according to whether it spreads to the lungs, when the potential to cause lasting injury is much greater, or not yet data and government policy alike fail to distinguish such crucial differences.

However, comparisons with other leading causes of death provides food for thought here.  The leading cause of death in the UK now is dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease – a key reflection of an aging population – and death rates are increasing here to nearing 300,000 per annum with very few remedies or controls.  In addition, in the UK, over a quarter of a million people are diagnosed with variant forms of heart disease every year of which well over 100,000 will die and, whilst falling in recent years, annual rates are increasing once again.  Similarly, whilst the death rate for strokes is decreasing, the number of strokes themselves in increasing leading to the now well-known FAST campaign developed to aid early detection.  Significantly, whilst treatments for many forms have improved, the figures for cancer are worse still at nearer 200,000 deaths per annum.  As it stands, at present Covid-19 with a bad case projection of say 50-100,000 deaths in one year only has some way to go to match any of these.  The added difficulty is that the pandemic causes a neglect of health in other ways with sometimes mortal consequences such as failed or missed appointments for screenings, delays in treatments for serious illnesses, and the as yet unknown impact of GPs social distancing from patients.  The overall death rate in the UK is already escalating to its highest level in decades of which one in three deaths is not due to Covid-19.   And this is at the supposed “peak” of the pandemic.  The problem posed here is that whilst statistics for other forms of death have themselves passed the test of time, not one piece of peer-reviewed empirical research exists in relation to Covid-19 as it is simply too soon.  Without on-going and far more reliable testing plus epidemiological analysis we simply cannot fully know the spread of the virus nor its mortality.

What we do know with statistical conviction derived from death counts is the groups it disproportionately affects – the elderly and those with underlying conditions relating to immunity and or the lungs plus increasing evidence that obesity and diabetes play a part.  Peculiarities in the over-representation of men in certain age groups and BAME has yet to be explained in more causal terms.  Thus, we can say with certainty that Covid-19 does not affect people equally and that only a minority of the population is mortally at risk.  In statistical terms, and as defined by the NHS in the UK, this amounts to around 12 million people being classed as “vulnerable” due to these correlates but comes down to nearer 2 million when defined in terms of clinical vulnerability out of a population of 67 million.  The catch here – and admittedly a significant one – is that Covid-19 is contagious whilst other forms of death are now, following decades of research, heavily related to, or perhaps more accurately reconstructed as, lifestyle “choices”.  This is worthy of some consideration in itself, however, for cancer in particular remains something of a genetic, postcode or other “lottery” not under anyone’s control.  Similarly, dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease are also to all intents and purposes difficult to diagnose and impossible to treat.  I will explore this more later yet the idea of contagion shifts understanding and response immeasurably here.

Rather erratic – to say the least – testing does exist for those recently infected yet does not exist for those who were infected previously and who may have recovered from very minor symptoms (otherwise known as the antibody test).   As previously mentioned, it also spreads quickly leading to potentially exponential rates of infection in very short spaces of time.  It is perhaps this factor more than anything else that drives the concern, for this coincides with rapidly ageing populations across the western world and struggles in health services to cope with rising demand.  A common-sense response would seem to lead to a need for either massively increased investment in health services, testing and epidemiological analysis and or quarantining of the most vulnerable groups.  Despite this most, yet not all, cultures have applied a more blanket policy of lock-down, or more accurately restriction of freedom of movement of all citizens, centred on the construction of an epidemiological “curve” where cases are seen to rise exponentially unless spread is somehow interfered with and human transmission reduced.  Given the inconsistent, if not next to non-existent let alone varying, levels of testing in many countries and the centring of sampling upon hospitalised or other institutionalised cases these curve models are of such limited use as to end up a scientific nonsense.  Lockdowns are otherwise justified as mechanisms of control and delay so as not to overwhelm health systems, themselves perceived as unprepared for viral pandemics.  However, as restrictions gradually ease in many places, lockdowns are now increasingly used as both threats to coerce populations’ behaviours and are reconstructed to be longer term “solutions” in the guise of “social distancing”.   Social distancing measures centre almost entirely on staying two metres apart from those with whom you are not already living.  The “two metre rule” itself varies from culture to culture and is arguably rather arbitrary based on both the distance travelled by droplets passed by sneezing or coughing into the atmosphere, which can clearly vary, combined with wholly vague and unproven notions of airborne transmission.  The other main means of transmission, as with the common cold, is through touch as the virus may last varying lengths of time on differing surfaces.  Thus, masks and gloves – if handled appropriately without touching and with frequent hand washing – may also help limit the transmission.  Social distancing and the wider inequalities in vulnerability to Covid-19 clearly also interact as those who routinely do not associate with vulnerable groups clearly need to adopt such measures far less than those who are (say, those living or working with or regularly visiting, the elderly).  Nonetheless, social distancing is applied with the same “one size fits all” policy as the lockdown and “self-isolating” remains the one, and only, more targeted measure.  This, in itself, is worthy of some consideration.  Protection works in two directions not one – protecting oneself and protecting others – yet these interact as protecting oneself is also a mechanism in protecting others.  The difficulty – as I have already alluded to – is that Covid-19 does not affect people equally and the population is not at risk to the same degree.  Thus, the current concern around reopening universities reflects this – the students themselves are not at much risk of mortality yet they may spread it to others who are yet is control of this achieved by limiting the freedoms of students or, more accurately, restricting the movements of their more vulnerable tutors or family members?  An obvious solution is that students interact differently with each other from how they relate with their grandmothers for example.  This is, however, seen as overly reliant on the individual or group in question yet in so doing – and in constantly assessing risk in such ways – responsibility is shifted wholly from persons to nation states who then dictate “the rules”.  Citizens are then rendered childlike in their inability to take responsibility for themselves and others seriously.  Similarly, other solutions that may satisfy these varying needs for protection such as providing set shopping hours or transport for highly “at risk” groups are not even considered as the population is seen as simply too stupid to follow such policies.

As many have pointed out, the rates of infection are likely to be extreme underestimates yet the far greater part of this is the under representation of those who are well and thereby never get to hospital and tested or registered in the first place.  Estimates are now emerging that the virus may have already spread much more widely with and or earlier with many recovering yet testing itself currently lacks the sophistication to detect those who have it from those who have had it or those who have developed antibody resistance to it and whilst the population at risk (just plain everyone we are told) is known, there are no samples, no control groups, and few scientifically valid analyses actually going on here rather an attempt to extrapolate what might happen here on the basis of what happened there.  Thus, until far improved evidence exists, it is not hard science that is at stake here rather the politics of public policy and morality.  Given the speciousness of the data, it is quite clear that we are dealing with a problem that is far more ideological and political than it is medical and scientific as governments across the globe can, and do, pick and choose which hopelessly unproven and untested studies they wish use to form their policies or health-related agendas.

If we consider other possible policy responses this becomes clearer.  One could, on the basis of what appears to be a relatively low risk of mortality for the population as a whole, simply allow the virus to spread without population controls and with as much investment in health care as possible.  The inevitable consequence of this is that a low percentage (though we do not actually know with much precision) of the population would die of whom the vast majority would be those who are already weaker, older or more infirm.  This is in a Darwinian sense the law of the survival of the fittest or what is sometimes called the “herd immunity” model.  The difficulty, as many point out, is that the number of deaths could rise sharply.  However, many vaccines are found in this way.  They are not, like your packet of pills or bottle of syrup, ingredients thrown at symptoms but developed on the basis of research into pre-existing human immunity – and, importantly, developing herd immunity is ultimately the only way any pandemic can properly come to an end.  It is also pretty impossible for any virus to kill absolutely everybody because someone somewhere is going to develop a resistance to it.  Thus, what frightens and destabilises here is not how deadly the virus may be rather how unmanageable it becomes.  Historically this is, more to the point, the only policy that would have applied.

However, with the advent of modern medicine throughout the twentieth century we now live in a world where mortality itself and the idea that one cannot “cure”, “solve”, or “control” per se are increasingly and morally unpalatable.  Like celebrities in Los Angeles, we refuse to accept that death is part of life and we anthropomorphise the NHS itself so that it is imperative it finds a way to cope as we simply cannot accept that it may fail, for if it does then somehow so do we.  There are significant sociological and historical inquiries that demonstrate emphatically that this is not a matter of instinct rather one of cultural change (see the work of Ernest Becker, Norbert Elias, and others).  More to the point, the extremities of the response to the virus are a measure of the precariousness of health systems across the world that are predicated on assuming their respective populations will mostly die degeneratively so the NHS – for example – is now proven to only cope with a tiny percentage of mortal illness across the population at any one time.  Paradoxically, Covid-19 is not so much a reflection of how mortal we are, rather how well we have become.

Underlying this, as Lord Sumption has pointed out, are our values concerning life and death itself.  Whilst saving lives is one value it is not the only one and nor is it applied unequivocally – we routinely drive cars knowing they cause accidents and deaths yet value the convenience and freedom more, the world has gone to war more than once terminating the lives of millions in the process, and many will engage in downright dangerous sports and activities simply “for the thrill of it” yet no-one stops them or says the Nazis should not have been fought at almost immeasurable human cost.  A second more controlled approach as taken in Sweden is to quarantine the vulnerable and limit overly large gatherings whilst otherwise attempting to keep things operating as normal.  The continued need in either case for controlled testing and epidemiological analysis remains and its sloppy implementation tends to reflect a tendency to resource the economy before citizens in any given capitalist society whatever its welfare state and politics.  Increasing Left wing outrage concerning governmental incompetence, whilst understandable, belies an inability to accept this basic premise underlying most advanced societies.

Moreover, this also pivots on our feelings towards our fellow citizens – we do not morally want to isolate granny unless she has already voluntarily given up full citizenship rights (aka gone into a home) while we go wandering.  Again this emerges culturally and historically as attitudes towards the elderly and the vulnerable have become more bound up with ideas of a welfare whilst at the same time the growing dependency of one part of the population, primarily the older one, on the income generating of the other one, primarily a younger to middle aged one, pressurises the capitalist system.  Laissez-faire models of policy then challenge universality – thus health services increasingly lurch towards pick and choose models where those with “unhealthy” lifestyles become seen as “disreputable” and morally dubious – fat people, smokers, drinkers, and so on.  Connections between mortality and morbidity rates and social class are well-documented and it is the figure of council estate “cheap white trash” that is both the figure of opprobrium and lack of state support.  One suspects that if these groups were the most vulnerable to Covid-19 the policy would be different.

Our attitudes towards the primary risk group here, namely the elderly, as those who have paid their dues, those who are “victims” of age and disease, or as those that already risked their lives in the second world war, or known “what it like to live in hard times”, flip these views over to teeter on the sanctimonious and sentimental.  Yet, as is commonly the case and well-known, we are faced with an apparent contradiction as the protection offered to the elderly in care homes is scant with many effectively left to die.  This is, however, not as contradictory as it seems, as the figure of the doddering geriatric in care has long evoked ridicule – we despise their uselessness, particularly if they are dependent upon the state.  Thus, it is not all of the elderly we revere, rather the ones with money and independence who still care for us – and, more cynically, who vote – yet it remains the case, and to invoke Lord Sumption once again, that the entire world of the younger, more able, and fit to work is being held to ransom in sacrificing its liberties to save the lives the older, less able and (cough…) unproductive.  The visceral discomfort of acknowledging this is, of itself, telling.  Part of the difficulty, as is also well known from sociology, is that we infantilise the elderly and return them to childlike and innocent status whereby they cannot be left to take responsibility for themselves.  As ever, and as with children, it is the inability and anxiety of the middle aged and parental that is at stake – that granny cannot be allowed to take her risks and die should she wish to – protection is paramount yet what exactly are we protecting?  Them or ourselves?  Those in care homes have also ceased to look after us and so we have given up on protecting them whilst those outside who continue to do so are preserved at all cost.  It is also interesting to think that if HIV were still unstoppable, governments might be a good deal keener to let those sufferers get on with it if the response to the last true pandemic, the AIDS crisis, is anything to go by.  In short, if Covid-19 affected the same groups as AIDS and HIV, a worldwide lockdown would be next to inconceivable.

The parallels and differences with the AIDS crisis are telling here, a topic well-informed through social science and sociology.  Western governments were then well-known, and are now proven, to have dragged their heels in response due to the stigma and attitudes surrounding the first known groups – the four Hs of Haitians, homosexuals, hookers, and heroin users.  The fifth H that then emerged, namely haemophiliacs, was key in shifting sympathies – and resources – to retrovirology, at the time an underdeveloped area of scientific research.  Once the morally respectable and “innocent” could be seen to suffer HIV, policy intervened.  This is of course contrasts with Covid-19 where it is the innocent who are seen to be at risk and therefore policy steps in even when it has little known evidence to guide it.  This is significant as for many years, in fact decades, the risk of mortality from HIV was far, far higher than Covid-19.  More ominously, there are also other parallels.  The UK government was not only accused of arriving late to the party in the 1980s it also did so with a campaign that many now see as doing more damage than good.  The notorious Don’t Die of Ignorance campaign – an apocalyptic TV advert of pickaxes and icebergs plus its accompanying leaflet – was widely criticised for its lack of clarity and stirring up of “them” and “us” within a Bond style cocktail of sex=death, confusion and fear.  Simon Watney’s acerbic dismantling of the response to the AIDS crisis in Policing Desire could be well applied here – it was not a case of “promiscuity” or “who you slept with” rather an issue of what you did when you did have sex with them that mattered, a message that, given AIDS inception in 1981 or even earlier, took nearing a decade to get anywhere near clear.  AIDS was far less contagious but infinitely more deadly, yet a similarly confused carpet style policy response emerges – then it was “don’t have sex” (or at least only with the person you are already having it with) and now it is “don’t go out”.  The popular response remains the same in either case – confusion and fear – a struggle to have sex becomes a struggle to go out as if “going out” is the risk itself.

In such situations, logic is lost as sitting in the park with a friend is somehow permitted yet not in the garden or driving in one’s car is just dangerous per se even if one does not stop and adopts the same social distancing at one’s destination. The list of anomalies and confusions concerning “social distancing” is unending here – one can drive in a car to deliver groceries to one’s elderly granny thus exposing her to infection from the supermarket’s product packaging yet not sit two metres from her and drink a cup of tea from one’s own cup; or visit one’s local yet over-populated park yet not drive to the open country; or visit the overrun supermarket yet not the sparsely populated department store.  These policies are neither science nor sense, they are moral and political.  Delivering to one’s granny is seen as do-gooding, having tea with her is not; wandering the countryside is “out of control” yet the park is somehow civic; and whilst supermarkets are full not only of inessentials but rather health risks like sugar, saturated fat and alcohol it is the luxury store that is frivolous and decadent.  Underpinning all of this is the idea that “they” do not trust “us” hence the government dependent BBC broadcasts a couple having a barbeque on a near empty beach to reinforce the moral boundary.  Again, the parallels with the AIDS crisis emerge here as sex education and the “safe sex” message were repeatedly blocked for fear of people then doing it and enjoying themselves.  Moreover, if social distancing is to continue, we risk returning to a zone where sex is a no-go unless with someone you know, or more to point, already have sex with and downright daft legislation now exists to prove it.  The utter inefficacy of these policies is not the point rather the moral and political lines they attempt to draw.  The legacies of puritanism, Calvinism and Victorian repression remain in evidence in the UK in 2020 – you will enjoy finding new ways of playing with your children, of finding inner reflection, and in helping others – this is your redemption for your suffering and giving up of hedonistic sins.

Sociology and its sister subject social policy have long demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that legislation is no more value free and neutral than it is equal.  Current policy on the Corona Virus can then be summed up in one word: fear.  When people are afraid, they are easier to control which therefore raises the question as to control of who or what by whom or what.  In any governmental and media drama such as this one also needs to consider the likely winners and losers.  Despite the clarion call to save the health services, perhaps the discourse that no-one will ever forget is that you cannot rely on them to save your skin so the already prescient message that we all need to lead healthier lifestyles, to look after ourselves, to take out private insurance, is underlined.  Thus, when this pandemic ends it is tempting to think that the cost of saving industry and the inefficacy of public services themselves will get used to legitimate more cuts.  One can rest assured also that when this policy starts to implode, the policy itself will not be blamed rather those miscreant individuals who continued to struggle to get to work on crowded trains, or who took to the countryside to stop themselves going mad, or who made their own decisions on the risks attendant with seeing their nearest and dearest.  The middle classes are, as ever, inured from understanding – let alone experiencing – such assessments of risk.  This is, without even considering the ramifications of the raft of legislations rushed through parliament that effectively allow the government to quarantine you regardless of the reason or Covid-19, the biggest threat to civil liberties since wartime.

We are of course less in the dark as to the bleak economic consequences of all of this for small businesses, for the self-employed, for those on tenuous contracts along with the already tottering on ice in the hospitality and high street industries.  Only the strongest will survive.  Social Darwinianism here meets capitalism.  What we are shielded from are the winners in this situation – the high-tech giants, the internet providers, those multinationals already well-equipped to function online – amazon, google, telecommunications conglomerates, and so on.  Concerns for inequality are increasing as equally the middle-class professions such as the law and accountancy have far greater capacity to survive – literally – the storm than the delivery drivers, warehouse staff, caterers and public health workers who are pushed to their visceral physical limits.  There could be an interesting twist here though as the increasing advance of information technology undermines most, but not all, servile industries – dentistry, hair dressing, and other “hands on” areas whilst hit hard in the short term are likely survivors as skill sets.  It is far too soon to know the full economic impact here, yet the signs do not augur well at all.  And to be clear, the consequences of any downtown – short or long term, deep or shallow – will be mortal.

The other allied and informed area of analysis here is media studies.  At least fifty years of exhaustive media analysis of public broadcasts and news have proven beyond all question that there is no such thing as neutrality in the media industries.  And yes, that includes the BBC.  Instead, following the ideas of the influential French philosopher Michel Foucault, they create discourses or socially created “truths” of events that mask and shape response.  Stan Cohen’s analysis of how a seaside scrap on the street was turned into “gang warfare” of mods versus rockers that threatened to overwhelm the entire country was explored in his now legendary work Folk Devils and Moral Panics in the 1950s.  Underpinning this was the idea of deviancy amplification or how the media exaggerates and “amplifies” the sense of threat.  I have already called this into question in the opening of this piece.  In addition, it sets up scapegoats and folk devils to target in a way not dissimilar to witch trials.  What also happens though is the wider setting up of moral barricades – those disgusting party-goers and lockdown rule breakers, sunbathers, barbeque beach goers, and groups of youths (“well, they don’t look like they come from the same household do they”), and the perhaps more justified pariah status of the named and shamed ministers and health representatives  who flouted the “rules” themselves.  The media sits in sanctimonious glee as it demonises such people and invokes the narcissism and aggrandising of “experts” or what Foucault calls “normalising judgement” makers, those who from lofty heights seek to define good from the bad, the right from the wrong, and the well from the sick.  He applied this mental health, to crime, to sexuality – and medicine.

This link is telling.  An equally long history from the sociology of medicine demonstrates this conflation – that the GP you see does not only offer care and treatment rather he or she defines your moral worth.  Thus, when you present your doctor with your dodgy whatever, questions – and eyebrows – are raised.  Meantime, an array of media health professionals and medical scientists float (by transport unknown) from TV studio to TV studio on a daily basis, with impeccable coiffures and make-up managed by persons unknown, to dispense their “expertise” and “advice” to those in a multitude of positions far less privileged than theirs and who ask in vain for “permission” to see their loved ones or just “go out”.  Whilst suspicion is raised as to quite how these presenters maintain social distancing when travelling and looking immaculate themselves, they have three agendas – one is the aggrandisement of their own PR profiles, a second is their maintenance of the dominant narrative of the importance of compliance with the rules of governance, and the third is of limiting costs to the NHS that they guard like politely smiling wolves.  As such, they are at the forefront of the discursive media reconstruction of the NHS from a failing, bureaucratic, and problematised service beset by financial waste and rising expectations into an object of worship beyond reproach.

This process – along with the sanctimony that now surrounds hazily defined “key workers” – is worthy of some deconstruction, or to put it another way, analysis.  Just how did the lumbering dinosaur become the sacred cow, clapped and applauded across the land on every Thursday evening at 8pm?  Mao Tse Tung would be proud but the UK, supposedly, is still a democracy.  The first thing to say here is that it is not new.  Whilst junior doctors are well-known to be overworked and general practice is haemorrhaging recruitment, medicine has a centuries long history of God-like status.  This is not surprising given its roots in the transition from religious to secular controls of health.  Thus, the magic of the apothecary becomes the wonderment of the surgery via the confessional.  Foucault’s influential analysis of the history of both mental illness and medicine is key here in showing the constant infiltration of the medical with the moral, as is Sontag’s pathbreaking essay Illness as Metaphor where the human body becomes seen as some kind of machine at war.  She was referring here to cancer but later updated her analysis to consider AIDS and the mentality of the plague and contagion.  Again, we are on near religious ground as viruses become seen as modern-day biblical stories of battle and judgement rather than just rather difficult social problems we need to deal with somehow.

Perhaps most prescient though, is the question of risk.  Sociologists such as Beck and Giddens have illustrated quite vividly how we increasingly have to negotiate this terrain – from the threat of nuclear war to the tingling in our palms when the plane turns down the runway, we are increasingly sensitised to the chances we take.  What is key here, however, is not that we are at more risk rather that we are more aware of it – our increased life expectancy is proof of this as is health and safety at the work place, the protection of children, and even technologies of travel as planes are in fact far less deadly than horses and carts.  The paradox here is the safer we become more vulnerable we feel – our intolerance of uncertainty escalates – we are a society of control freaks.  Covid-19 drives its own convoy of horses and carts straight into this – we do not know, we cannot know, and we will not know until it is potentially way too late.  Yet it is essential we start to live with this as yet another risk.  As Frank Furedi has stated, we are already in danger of raising our children as hermetically sealed innocents who are then released unprepared into the world of adulthood and we can hardly do this with another entire – and productive – part of the population.

Covid-19 also assaults us with the risks and mortality of capitalism itself for we cannot survive living like self-sufficient pensioners content to stay in and water their own roses.  Many of those living such quiet lives do not want lockdown to end for it threatens their very way of life yet that is not a mode of living that capitalism can sustain.  Yet what it must sustain is the lives of those who are younger whom it must also prepare and protect not cut its costs.  An alternative (though one suspects currently unpalatable) is to continue lockdown and social distancing for vulnerable groups only – thus granny cannot go to the cinema but those below a certain age or with proof of health can.  This is not just about taking risks but about taking responsibility for ourselves and others and, more to the point, being allowed to – if granny still wishes to see her see her rave attending grandson then maybe we should let her.  It is not that the state is a nanny rather that it needs to guide and raise its children not absolve them of personal logic and responsibility to a point of acquiescent stupidity.

There is perhaps another even more telling factor here, namely the extent to which lockdowns and social distancing are themselves socially divisive and not experienced equally.  For those who are isolated, for those with insecure incomes, for those who are abused at home, for those whose homes are small, uncomfortable or claustrophobic and only tolerable for short times, and for those – often young – who have no real homes at all other than the cities in which they live and the communities with which they co-exist, lockdowns and social distancing become unbearable, unfathomable, and impossible states of being that pose far greater risks to their mental, physical and mortal well-being that Covid-19 ever could.  Thus, those home-schooling Guardian readers with stable incomes, spacious homes, and loved ones in the room next door – despite their liberal pleas for improved protection – have no clue how the other, and greater, half live.  These are perhaps privileges, moreover, they should learn to do without if indeed we were ever in this “together” at all.

Thus, maybe it is the sadness of this situation that is most unspeakable and unspoken.  A sense of society divided and broken where singing and waving hands to Vera Lynn is even emptier than it sounds.  At what point, if ever, will one witness the euphoria of a large group of people, primarily if not exclusively young, lost in the experience of dancing and music – at a rave or festival for example?  And yet this also infuriates for the vast majority would not suffer from Covid-19.  And more to the point like the drugs they may also consume it remains their choice to take that risk (assuming they take measures not to spread the infection to vulnerable others for a few weeks after).  It is this shift in liberties which is most worrying aspect of this gruesome situation along with the compliance of a population that, once scared enough by higher powers, gave them up without question.  Boris Johnson’s rebranding campaign to “stay alert” rather than “stay safe” importantly, and disturbingly, silences Lord Sumption’s more libertarian points not by answering its questions but by erasing them from debate altogether.  Thus, civil liberties become something those crazy cow Trump supporting nutters in the US do, not us over here just them over there; whilst on the Left, Chakrabati’s high profile fronting of the Liberty pressure group in the wake of terrorism legislation is now just gone from media attention – like the woman herself into the mists of governance – and with it, liberty itself.  The failure of governance across the globe in preparing for a viral pandemic is now increasingly known, if not yet fully accepted, and will likely reach a point of consensus under the weight of mounting evidence.  We are presented daily with the threat of second waves and “spikes” in mythic curves of transmission and made up “R” numbers, this in turn now potentially blamed on Black Lives Matter and other protestors rather than the already well-evidenced lack of governmental provision.  Opposition is growing, even in the mainstream, as journalist Beverley Turner was recently seen tackling an increasingly flustered Sarah Jarvis on Jeremy Vine, though the tendency to render any resistance as “loony left” conspiracy theories remains.  Returning to where I started, we are not equally at risk.  We need equipment, testing, tracking and tracing plus differing protections for those at less and greater risk as well as an increased tolerance of risk itself.  These are complex though not such difficult policies to achieve yet the failings – and other agendas – of governance are increasingly writ large for all of us.  Thus, these remain interesting – if terrifying – times in terms of addressing the failings of neoliberal economics, just in time policies and strategies, and the (mis)handling of human freedoms in which, perhaps paradoxically, controlling a not quite so deadly virus is the least of our more sociological concerns.

The DVD release of the twenty fourth Bond movie is the fastest selling this year yet Spectre still has a lot to live up to.  It’s predecessor Skyfall became not only the best selling Bond movie of all time but also the highest grossing film ever at the UK box office.  It’s a record that is on course to be broken by Stars Wars not by Bond and rather like the would-be battle between theme songsters Sam Smith and Adele you sense you already know the outcome.

Broccoli and co – now recruiting Andrew Scott and Christoph Waltz to join Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes, Naomi Harris and Ben Whishaw – throw everything they can at the challenge.  From resurrecting classic cars to that cat it’s all there – chases, shootings, punch ups, and of course an attempt at world domination.  The idea here also could neither be more apposite nor – if one pauses for thought – controversial.  Nutty dictator spends his time destabilising (i.e. blowing up) world cities and colludes with a megalomaniac seizing the opportunity to create a surveillance system to end all others – and indeed democracy – in the name of (inter)national security.  Sound familiar?  This is only matched by the scale and number of sites – Mexico City, London, Rome, Tangier – this is global Bond.  Or location location location.  Meantime M loses his job, Q cracks computer codes, and C – well, C is another story.

For well over half of its two and a quarter hour length Spectre watches as series of lavish set pieces – a car chase around Rome and a sex scene with the still stunning at 50 Monica Bellucci thrown in for an aperitif is one.  Yet one is shaken not stirred.  As a narrative it relies heavily on its final forty odd minutes to pull itself together.  It is at its weakest here – the misogynist dinosaur of the Dench era comes under attack from his new love interest Madeleine Swann played by a ballsy Lea Seydoux but the construction of heroes hasn’t actually changed much as he’s caught up in avenging M’s death, keeping his word, and of course saving the world from what appears to be his own “sibling by circumstance” in a story that never quite makes sense.  Same old manly stuff.

Prior to the film’s release rumour was rife that this would be Craig’s last outing as Bond despite matching if not outstripping Connery’s legacy as Mr Sexy and not even remotely hitting 50.  Contrary to the rumours, however, Craig has never looked so comfortable in the role with his deadpan disdain for authority and panther like physique.  He exudes the rough meets smooth sex appeal of a man-cat – all legs, shoulders and piercing eyes – in suits designed once again by Tom Ford and now so tight they could be gabardine cling film.  Yet he also infuses the role with world weary knowingness, well delivered lines, and wit.  If there is anything that holds together this bombastic (in every sense) mishmash of a movie it is him.

Despite Seydoux’s efforts, the love interest fails to convince and most of the galactic cast are cruelly underused not least Waltz as Bond’s nemesis.  Only Whishaw as the nerdy Q is actually given something to do whilst the normally solid Andrew Scott seems hopelessly misdirected here as he (literally) shuffles along as C.  In Sherlock he is scary.  Here he is just smug.  The same might be said of the film.  Skyfall had far less glamour (its cast ending up stuck in a derelict mansion in the Scottish highlands) but it had heart and soul plus Xavier Bardem’s psychotic pseudo-Freudian antihero.  By contrast, and despite its brilliance and style (and it has both in spades), Spectre never really grips – it’s all just a bit too transparent, too obvious – perhaps less would have been more.  Ultimately, as its title implies, Spectre ends up devoid of substance, a considerable spectacle that soon evaporates like glitzy mist.

Peter Gabriel recently won the Classic Pop magazine’s “best vinyl” award for the re-mastered re-release of his first four albums.  No I haven’t heard of the award either but the legacy of the ex-Genesis frontman is not in dispute.  Whilst his opening hit Solsbury Hill and first album are largely read in semi-autobiographical terms, they paved the way more accurately for the game changers that were his third and fourth albums.  Before the 1980s caught up with drum patterns and synthesisers there was Gabriel.  Before the bandwagon that was world music and Live Aid there was Gabriel.  And before Massive Attack got creepy there was Peter Gabriel 3, otherwise known as “melt” given its lack of title and gooey faced cover.  Gabriel always was a drama queen famed for his outrageous outfits and antics when fronting Genesis but here the drama became the music.  PG3 is primarily a spooky, on occasions scary, and above all claustrophobic listening event.  Thundering and smacking drumbeats stripped of high-hat and percussion yet layered with added Linn and Fairlight programming accompany a series of songs about criminality, mental breakdown, and confinement (Intruder – burglary and stalking, I Don’t Remember – interrogation, and most powerfully Family Snapshot – a portrait of an unhappy little boy with some big, bad ideas).  All of this is then layered with psychological paranoia remarkably akin to a teenage horror movie (No Self Control – domestic violence, Not One Of Us – the playground bully) before our antihero enters the lunatic asylum “playing silly games” (Games Without Frontiers – the album’s one commercial hit), “eating with a spoon, they don’t give you knives” (Lead A Normal Life) and awaiting – as it were – execution (Biko – the album’s climactic closer, an elegy and homage and a half to anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko who died in police custody in 1977).

The influence of all of this was, at the time in 1980, unknown – the album was a hit but not a huge one and jostled alongside the likes of Abba, Blondie and Olivia Newton-John.  Yet just about anyone who is anyone in the music business now will quickly cite Gabriel’s influence over the Africa meets pop phenomenon and or the new studio technologies of synthesisers and drums that would come to define an entire decade of popular music.  Most particular among these was that other bastion of British weirdness her highness Kate Bush who publicly thanked Gabriel for “opening the windows” on her own self-penned number one album Never For Ever the same year.  The parallels in their careers are no less spooky – a path breaking third album that began to earn “serious artistic credibility”, an inevitable wobble with an uncommercial fourth album, and then critical and commercial acclaim with number five (So, Hounds of Love), let alone the snogging on the video for that duet (Don’t Give Up).

For Gabriel the wobble was PG4, entitled “Security” in the US, which brought his African sympathies both lyrically and musically to the fore.  Still exciting sometimes (The Rhythm Of The Heat, Lay Your Hands On Me) and still creepy (particularly the cinematic Family & The Fishing Net) but also a bit soggy and sentimental in places (Wallflower was no Biko).  Despite the disco funk of lead singles Shock The Money and I Have The Touch, PG4 was a far lesser commercial hit.  Of course, as with Bush, the blip was temporary as all this drum banging psychodrama and political questioning became welded to a more commercial whole on So.  It could not last.  Subsequent albums have not had the same impact, sometimes tipped into solipsism (Gabriel’s Us and Bush’s The Red Shoes equally), or just dried up as Gabriel increasingly put his efforts into “real” world music period.   Like his younger sister Kate he can still do it when he really wants to though.  2002’s Up was deeply impressive if flagrantly un-chart friendly, not unlike Kate’s twelve-years-in-the-waiting Aerial that cemented her greatness once and for all.  It is timely, then, in an era of the horrors of X Factor, sound byte compression, and the collapse of “world” and “black” music into rap, to be reminded just how provocative, intelligent, or downright scary popular music can be.

Madonna is on tour and no-one know when or if Kate Bush will again.  It is perhaps one of pop’s lesser known facts that Kate and Madonna are the same age, born a matter of days if many miles apart.  What’s also curious here are the ways in which their careers coincide and diverge.  Madonna is, in commercial terms, far more successful and has no parallel in the realms of popular music in female form.  Her commercial success is only matched or bettered by the likes of Elvis Presley and the Beatles.  Bush meantime has barely broken the U.S. market at all and relies heavily on a small but near religious following in the UK and other parts of Europe.

If statistics are taken out of the equation though things get more intriguing – both have defined themselves in terms of their ability to control their own destiny, a point that marks them out as important whatever they do given the historic tendency to render women in music as little more than the glamorous icing on the cake.  Both self pen their work, collaborate with others but in different ways, make hefty use of visual media and performance, and don’t like being told what to do very much.  More to the point, they are also loosely contemporaries though Bush being a child prodigy had a head start (including starting the now ubiquitous dance as you sing thing inventing a mic on a coat hanger to do so in 1979).  For the most part they also earned their stripes in the 1980s when Bush’s acclaimed Hounds of Love album battled Madonna’s Like A Virgin for the number one spot (and, for the record, won).

From hereon, however, things begin to differ.  Bush does not break sales records but she does set precedents – the first female artist to have a self-penned number one single (Wuthering Heights), a self-penned number one album (Never For Ever in 1980), and – more recently – only bettered by Elvis and the Beatles herself for having 8 albums in the top 40 at the same time during her recent sell out tour Before The Dawn in 2014.  But as the pair of them edge towards picking up their bus passes (somehow one thinks Bush might just use hers whereas Madonna, well…) and while the Queen of Pop outsells Bush globally by an x-factor to one she’s also become tiresomely predictable.  We all know what we’ll get – more attempts at outrage involving breasts, babies, or crucifixes, yet another disco pop record and yet another tour extravaganza.  Yet Bush remains (for her fans, maddeningly so) wholly idiosyncratic.  She plays live once then not again for over 35 years, takes twelve years to complete an album (Aerial), and then releases two in the same year (Director’s Cut and 50 Words For Snow in 2011).  Then disappears.  Again.

No one knows what Katie will do next – more tours, a record, a DVD, all three, or none of the above and when – well God only, and maybe she, knows.  Her mystique is her greatest triumph whilst appearing to otherwise make cups of tea and do laundry.  Madonna, once the mother of reinvention, now seems in danger of damaging her colossus of a legacy with every move – the albums no longer sell, the tours no longer shock, and few care who she fucks or what she has for breakfast as, frankly, we’ve heard it all before.  Of late all that has been memorable are her near attacking a fan in her onstage antics and falling over.  She can still sing, still dance, still pen a tune even…  yet she would do well to take a leaf from Catherine’s book and just do less.  Kate Bush CBE has become a sacred goddess for doing next to nothing most of the time it seems.   One suspects, however, that Bush intended none of this whereas of course Madonna is the most driven woman on the planet – fundamentally Katie just does not care what anyone thinks which could, and should, register with her ever so slightly younger sister.

It would seem Lana Del Rey is primarily a persona.  A red party dress wearing socialite that variously moves through the Hamptons, waves her hanky at her high school girl friends, or gets trashed in California as some sort of cinematic imagining from David Lynch movies – at once the weepy eyed starlet and the crack snorting bad girl who comes undone when mixing with the mafia, daddy, bad boys, or all three.  Four LPs in and one is still uncertain as to whether she is entirely a fictive piece of Elizabeth Grant’s song writing fantasies or embedded in something far more real.  Keeping us guessing is what Lana Del Rey is all about.

Honeymoon does little to answer the question (and why would it when all this wondering sells so well) but does come across as increasingly authentic – as if Lizzie Grant is finally giving, and given, voice –stripped of the trip hop beats of Born To Die and the guitar riffs of Auerbach on Ultraviolence, Del Rey suddenly stands alone and sounds great.  Side One of the double album showcases this most strongly – there is barely a drum in earshot just an auditorium of strings, various tinklings, and vocals at full frontal in the mix.  It’s a shame in many ways then that she feels it necessary to stick the somnambulistic beats back in again during the album’s rather soggy middle (typified by the lead single High By The Beach and the nonsensical Art Deco – rhymes with ghetto don’t you know) but thankfully by the end of Side Three onwards we are headed back to where we began.  The Italian inflected Salvatore has all the weary symphonic grace of a funeral scene from the Godfather and by the time of The Blackest Day and 24 she stops sounding plain depressed and just bawls the place down, wonderfully as it happens.  The oddity here is the closer, a dark cover of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (again, like The Other Woman on Ultraviolence, originally done by Nina Simone) which might cock-a-snook at either her detractors or indeed her own persona.   Honeymoon may not mark the wedding of Lana Del Rey with her progenitor Elizabeth Grant but it does show an engagement and is all the better for it.