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* The Holdovers by Lauren Maclaren (8)
* Our Future: Pay-as-you-go Oxygen by William Caldwell (9)
* Dark Academia: Trench Coats and Tories by Coralee Holder (10)
* And the Clock Strikes Doom? by Eve Connor (11)
* The Advent Wreath by Shay Fallon (12-13)
* Was it the tofu that made me leftist? by Evie McCabe (14)
* Marika Hackman: Big Sigh (Chrysalis) by Lucy Craig (15)
* In Conversation with Jo Bowman by Grace Murray (16-17)
* Only Fans: the modern-day pimp by Sienna Shetty (18)
* Tea Party by Leah Hart (19)
* The Cinema of Tragedy: The Zone of Interest
by Daniel Strathdee (20-21)
* Desiring Insanity by Sophie Taylor-Davies (22-23)
* The Capitalist Propagation of New Year’s Resolutions by Heather Wilson (24-25)
* APACS (or when your new girlfriend crashes the car) by Zoe Skoti (26-27)
* William Doyle: Springs Eternal by Toyah Jane Stoker (28-29)
* Yes, I do know the offside rule by Tilly Holt (30)
* When the Border Closes will you Finally be Fucking Happy by Jenny Higgins (32-33)
* On Embracing Platonic Love by Beatrice Crawford (34-35)
Review by Lauren Maclaren (She/her)
Every once in a while, I come across a new film that elicits such unplaceable nostalgia that I almost wonder if I used to watch it on DVD with my parents years ago. The Holdovers is exactly that: a perfectly bittersweet, festive miracle and a mug of hot chocolate in movie form. Directed by Alexander Payne, it is a love letter to the simplicity and warmth of classic cinema, and truly feels like a rediscovered flick of the 70s.
The story takes place at a snow-heaped boarding school in New England, where sour old Ancient Civilisations teacher, Mr Hunham (Paul Giamatti), is left in charge of the spoilt but unfortunate kids left behind by their families over the Christmas break. As the other boys get whisked away early on, Hunham is left with Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa)—the last straggler holding over, a sharp and angsty smart-arse with a distinct 70s coolness. Along with Mary, the cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a mismatched trio is formed and reluctantly stuck together in the echoing, lonely halls of Barton Academy. A tale of unlikely friendship ensues, as the crotchety teacher softens, and they all gradually let themselves enjoy one another’s company.
Sessa’s on-screen debut is a triumph, effortlessly moving between deep poignancy and genuinely hilarious moments. Da’Vine Joy Randolph also shines in her role as grieving mother trying her best to persevere. We feel as though we are watching the very real lives of ordinary, complicated people, who have been hurt but seem to not display everything openly. Payne allows his characters to share some things and keep others private from us and each other, making the emotion feel that bit more sincere. The Holdovers is a movie about loss, loneliness, and family. With visuals that seamlessly knit together icy bleakness and homey warmth, it captures that profound melancholy that many of us feel during the festive period. Payne expertly cocoons us in this wintery corner of Massachusetts and tells a story that is earnestly heart-breaking but never cloying. Wrapped in a cosy soundtrack of folksy acoustic and church-choir Christmas carols, the film left me feeling a little weepy but also with a yearning to jump right back into that world of never-ending snowfall and gentle humour. So, while that old complaint that “they don’t make them like that anymore” gets thrown around a lot these days, The Holdovers shows us that they do— you just have to know where to look.
The instinct to mask brutal realities in euphemism has always been prevalent in politics. If I was to give you an old example, from the early 2000s, I don’t think any member of the British administration would dare to use the phrase “collateral damage” to describe what it does – civilian casualty. Well, the tradition of giving pretty names to ugly truth is as old as politics. In any ordinary context, such a blatant lacquer to cover egregious action would entail a severe blow to the government in question and political death to the individual who spoke it. However, the current state of the Conservative party is far from typical. We are discussing a bitter administration, on its knees, pursuing scorched Earth policies to claw back some vestiges of political authority by salting its enemy’s fields. So, when Rishi Sunak claims that “banning everything is not the solution to climate change”, he must feel that this fatuous waffle provides him with a right to further attack the ecosystem.
Some of you reading will be aware of, for example, the chemical weapons employed by the US during the Vietnam War and the euphemistic names like the ironic “Agent Green”. I mention it because, in addition to its weighty crimes against civilians, it was also a war of unparalleled environmental damage. Let me put it this way - it is perhaps the only worthy point of comparison in recent memory to the destruction we can envisage for ourselves in the future. The burned trees and scarred landscapes were bad, but what was far worse was the noxious impact these weapons had on the following generation; the children born with transparent yellow skin and lolling heads; the deafness, the dumbness, the blindness, the twisted limbs, and emaciated frames. Bodies bent and broken like old men. I was not alive then, but I have seen it recorded in articles from the time and in the horrific photographs taken by journalists working in that country. Those images are enough to poison anyone’s sleep, but this is the future we must envisage for ourselves if we do not alter the otherwise inevitable.
Nor do I need to remind you of the scientific evidence regarding the biosphere question – I imagine you are keenly aware of the general human effects which are utterly devastating to our climate, the effects of brutal farming methods, of metal manufacture, of the extraction and usage of fossil fuels – we all know what will be the inevitable result of the oil licences that the Conservative Party granted last year. It’s nearly universally understood that we need to be lowering our emissions (as we have been told by every scientist of merit), and I would add that any excuses pointing the metaphorical finger at the sins of other countries is not sufficient to justify our own moral bankruptcy.
I’m not naivë; I’m aware that without China and America and India and Russia and Japan, and indeed every other country on the planet pulling their weight, any national efforts we make will not make the slightest bit of difference. But my line on this is, that we should act as though we can and we will. In Jonathan Schell’s book on the nuclear question, The Fate of the Earth, he succinctly puts it as: “we don’t have another planet on which to run the experiment.” There is only one way to find out the limits our planet can tolerate; and just as we can’t risk an experiment in nuclear exchange on this planet, nor can we risk an experiment in warming it either.
The full inventory of this future atrocity is still being compiled; and those who have the power to act are sufficiently disoriented by their vast personal wealth to see the patently obvious. Granted, whilst many billionaires may have the financial capacity to outlive the majority of us and to support their own children when the biosphere at last collapses, the environmental issue is ultimately not a question of economic dimension – never mistake it for that – because we’ll all be in the same boat here. The euphemisms that politicians use will not shield us from the consequences of their decisions. There’s no amount of money in the world that can avoid the realities of climate change, and the current Prime Minister would benefit from being reminded of that.
The 1992 publication of Donna Tarte’s ‘The Secret History’ follows the lives of a group of classics university students, providing insights into the lavish lifestyles of the upper class, narrated from the perspective of a poorer student and how he makes ends meet. The story takes a twist, with the characters showing the true extent of their elitism and classist attitudes towards the lower-class protagonist. The novel is a classic, and years after its publication in 1992, the locked-down TikTok community rediscovered it, spiking a greater interest in the pursuit of higher education and the development of an aesthetic surrounding dark earthy tones, trench coats and miniskirts, as well as a romanticised illusion of university life. The focus on The Secret History and other books of the same theme (such as M.L. Rio’s If we were villains) has created an aesthetic - Dark Academia - rooted in white upper-class visions of education. Even within The Secret History, whilst we see that Richard is from a lower-class family, he is still very much entangled within the Eurocentric ideal that the style embodies - as well as his acceptance into university in the 1980s, something unattainable to many.
The main critique of the Dark Academia brand is a blatant lack of diversity. The wholly white aesthetic that is depicted in the social media representation reached an all-time peak in the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Just by scrolling through Pinterest and TikTok, we see that the most prolific content depicts stereotypically attractive white women donning turtlenecks, plaid skirts and loafers, and skinny white boys lounging in poets shirts and blazers. Whilst this is, unfortunately, a common theme in most Pinterest boards, dark academia lends itself to criticism with the ideals that surround the aesthetic as a whole. The focus on higher education immediately excludes demographics that are disadvantaged by the education system, especially with the idealisation of more ‘prestigious’ universities such as Oxford and Cambridge.
Within the UK, the racial discrepancy in entrance rates to Russell group universities is significant. For example, from 2010 – 2013 54.7% of white candidates received offers to a Russell Group, in comparison to 29.6% of Black Caribbean students, 21.9% of Black African students, 30.3% of Pakistani students and 31.2% of Bangladeshi students. Racialized economic inequalities also means that prejudice within these institutions is rife.
Social status and wealth also play a large role in the issues surrounding the dark academia aesthetic. As the ideal is structured around prestigious universities with high fees and engrained elitism, its lack of representation excludes the less privileged who cannot afford the unattainable lifestyle that dark academia so freely propagates. The notion of class disparity is a theme within Secret History, and we can take some moral appeal from it, but the basis is still very much uneven in terms of status.
However, we must acknowledge attempts to diversify the genre and aesthetic, particularly within media. For example, the book Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé which follows two black students in a prestigious American school and dissects the deep-rooted institutional racism in education. This shift within the genre is essential for its longevity; diversifying dark academia may lead to change in the aesthetics’ ideals – altering the presentation of higher education, thus making the pursuit of knowledge more obtainable and accessible for all.
In 1947, Martyl Landsdorf was asked to design the cover of the June issue of The Atomic Bulletin of Scientists. Her husband, Alexander Landsdorf, was a physicist and had assisted in The Manhattan Project but had regardless been an opponent to the use of nuclear weapons. As a result, Martyl’s cover design was simple and elegant, but also a stark warning: a clock. The conceit of a metaphorical timepiece was adopted by The Bulletin to gauge how close humanity was to its own extinction. Until his death in 1973, editor Eugene Rabinowitch decided the time. Now, twice a year, a group of eminent scientists, nuclear and climate experts, meet to discuss the state of world affairs—and every January, they review the placement of the hands of the Doomsdays Clock. If ever it strikes midnight, we’re done for.
At its conception, the Doomsday Clock was primarily a measure of cold war hostilities. Initially set at 7 minutes to midnight, 1949 saw the start of the arms race between the US and Soviet Russia, and the clock dropped to 3 minutes to midnight. By 1991, the cold war had defrosted and the clock was reset to 17 minutes; and yet, the bells of obsolescence did not chime for the Doomsday Clock. In the last thirty years, the clock has continually inched towards midnight. Further threats of nuclear attack, 9/11, the worsening climate crisis, war—all these factors and more led us to 2023. Last year the Doomsday Clock struck 90 seconds to midnight—closer than ever before, closer than 1953, when both the US and the Soviet Union had developed and tested hydrogen bombs. And just last month, we had confirmation that the forecast for 2024 remains just as bleak.
Staying at 90 seconds to midnight does not mean we have reached a plateau, or found stability. It is terrifying. It means we are failing to heed the warnings of the international scientific community. The Bulletin highlighted four major risks in their 2024 statement. The first, the nuclear risk posed by Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s expanding nuclear arsenal. The second, the climate crisis that saw wildfires, flooding, and extreme temperatures during the last year. The third, the biological threat A.I. poses and the effect of deforestation and climate change on the spread of infectious diseases. Finally, the rapid nature of technological development including the failures of social media to stop the spread of misinformation, as well as potential military applications of A.I.
The attitudes of The Bulletin are chilling, their warning severe:
“Leaders and citizens around the world should take this statement as a stark warning and respond urgently, as if today were the most dangerous moment in modern history. Because it may well be.”
All is not without hope, however. It would be wrong to deny that we are teetering on the precipice of disaster, but we have been close (if not this close) before. Positive action is possible. The Atomic Bulletin of Scientist’s message to us remains the same as last year:
“In this time of unprecedented global danger, concerted action is required, and every second counts.” This time global leaders would do well to heed it.
Eve Connor (she/her)
Christmas is around the corridor. A ghost crawling through the walls. This is when the children ache. Like ice, God strikes fast. I can feel it everywhere –tangled in my hair, in the black water, the noise that bees make.
I shower in the morning, and again at night, and at dusk. Scrubbing like a surgeon, and my palms are left with the questions. I take them to the reader, and she tells me to watch the stars. When I do,
art by Linda Demichelis (she/her) @lindoepinto
there are four candles waiting for me. A wreath which cuts my brother’s hands at the chapel. The feeling of gold, wrapped in silver cloth. By January, there will be no more midnight mass. I will have lost my idols. Perhaps, on a beach somewhere up north, I’ll find the Northern lights. I’ll try to pray
and I will remember: when the first snow falls, you are not there. You are not there.
By Shay Fallon (he/him)
When Republican Senator Ted Cruz proclaimed in 2018 that Democrats wanted to make the state of Texas ‘just like California, right down to tofu and silicone and dyed hair’, it was not a standalone event. Instead, it formed part of a larger conspiracy that snowflake lefties are trying to corrupt our robust rednecks through the feminising agent of tofu, turning them into ‘soy boys’ and eroding America’s strength as a nation. Although Cruz himself didn’t use this term, it has been used by many others, mostly online by influencers and bodybuilders claiming that vegan diets are lacking in protein, contributing to an inability to build muscle and a widespread effeminacy. The term, and the wider narrative surrounding vegan diets and soy products, derives from concerns surrounding these foods’ high amounts of phytoestrogens which are structurally similar to the major female sex hormone, and can be active around estrogen receptors. However, there is no evidence that eating soy products affects male hormone levels, and there is far more evidence to support the inclusion of soy products like tofu in any diet as providing protein and other health benefits. Instead of being evidence-based, the ‘soy boy’ used as a pejorative has been a vehicle to drive misogynistic, queerphobic, and racist right-wing narratives around food.
Claiming that vegan diets make you effeminate is deeply rooted in misogynistic, gendered assumptions around food, perpetuating the idea that caring about what you eat makes you weak. It also contributes to fears around veganism, particularly that it is time-consuming and difficult to follow. Then, of course, it makes complete sense that only women are vegan, because they spend all their time in the kitchen and so can prepare complicated dishes full of effeminate soy. Proponents of the soy boy rhetoric are known to associate veganism in men with homosexuality, often levelling the insult against vegan men that they are gay. Fellas, is it gay to want to lower your carbon footprint by eating a vegan diet? Apparently.
Masculinity and meat-eating are so closely linked in the eyes of many men, that theysee incorporating plantbased foods into their diet as some kind of sacrifice of their masculinity and see meals which don’t include meat as not being ‘a real meal’. This undoubtedly has links to the male breadwinner image, but today’s reality is that most of the men who cling onto old meat-eating habits as some semblance of masculinity could not kill the animals themselves. In reality, the pseudo-science around how soy increases estrogen levels is pretty transparently transphobic, implying that men with low testosterone are not ‘real men’. Many cis women, including cis vegan women, have no issue building muscle – take the example of Jehina Malik, a bodybuilder who has competed three times as an IFBB Pro Physique competitor and has been vegan since birth. Maybe cis men who are struggling to build muscle should take a look at their own habits and routines rather than allowing their masculinity to be destabilised by the thought of a fermented legume.
Soybeans have been a crucial crop in East Asia since before records began, and since being introduced to the rest of the world through colonisation processes, the beans and products made from them have become staples. Soy milk is often seen as the ‘original’ plant-based milk, as it was widely available in the west when vegan diets were first becoming popular and viable. Combine the Western ‘discovery’ of soy-based products with racist stereotypes of Asian men as effeminate, and you get the fallacy that ‘overconsumption’ of these products leads white men down a path of effeminacy. It also plays into white supremicist ideas –that non-Western cultures are weak and need the West to ‘civilise’ or strengthen them through colonisation processes. Studies have shown that both Asian men and women are stereotyped to be more feminine than white men and women, which decreases the perceived attractiveness of men, but heightens it for women, linking to the fetishisation of Asian women particularly in the porn industry.
Some may think this analysis of the soy boy to be too much; is this supposedly harmless internet phenomenon really a site of colonial, misogynistic and queerphobic violence? Well, something seemingly as insignificant as the food we eat actually has a lot to say about societal attitudes. Food habits have been an area of focus for sociologists for a long time as social environments play a large part in the production and consumption of food. The soy boy narrative demonstrates how our society is still misogynistic, racist, and queerphobic in many silently insidious ways. So, if you’re a meat-eater, the next time you’re jokingly calling your vegan friend a soy boy, maybe do some self-reflection and think about what that has to say about you rather than them.
Weeks after its release, Marika Hackman’s comeback album Big Sigh is one I have been unable to get out of my head. Hackman’s sombre tonality and piercing lyrical insight is reminiscent of her earlier albums, yet is by no means a retreat to old haunts. Rather, the release encapsulates a darker, headier space in her discography, born out of creative block and personal conflict in the COVID purgatory that followed her acclaimed 2019 album Any Human Friend. Big Sigh releases a long-held breath that pays off in deep grunge catharsis.
The rising instrumental that builds through inaugural song “The Ground” slowly ascends into a cerebral mindscape, firmly placing the listener in an ironic space of impermanence with the repeating motif of transience, ‘Gold is on the ground / I was happy for a while’. Through these lyrics, the multi-instrumentalist embeds melancholia into the track as the perfect introduction to the rawness of the album as a whole, welcoming us into “The Lonely House”.
The regimental mantras and contrarian advice delivered in “No Caffeine” plug a grim narrative of hangovers and regret. drilled in through the drum’s rhythm. ‘Don’t forget to wash / Don’t become a write-off’, she urges. displaying the punishment of recovery that slips into dejection in the skull-tingling nihilism of “Vitamins”. This confessionality, and the embodied nature of Hackman’s lyricism, has always held a powerful grasp on her work’s cutting efficacy. The heaving of lungs implied in the album’s title, hold physical weight in the sensory field crafted by the strumming bass in the titular track, pulling us in towards a rich, beating instrumental chorus that does not disappoint.
Similarly, the quickened pace of acoustic guitar in “Blood” evokes a heartbeat that deepens into submerged suffocation, ‘I can’t feel, my fate is sealed’, an echo recurrent in the entrapment of “Hanging”. The eeriness of heartbreak holds court in the main body of the work, threaded throughout “The Yellow Mile” and “Please Don’t Be So Kind”, which convey the flood of grief through an underwater fluidity that indulgently speaks of purification. “Slime”’s sensuality is indulgent and explorative, and it pulses with desire and movement. Alternating dynamics mimic the push and pull of attraction, naturalised through vegetal allusion, ‘Climb me like a peach tree / Feel free’, to invoke both Edenic and postlapsarian sexuality with sapphic undertones.
In closing, Big Sigh is an industrially organic blend of bodied, emotional, and anxiety-driven experiences beautifully mapped out and arranged through Hackman’s driven song-writing, enveloping the tattoo pulses of percussion and the physicality of strings and vocals in the urban aura of swelling synth. The result is breathtaking. Big Sigh is out now via Chrysalis Records.
Marika Hackman will also be touring the album starting here in Glasgow, performing at Òran Mór on the 12th of March 2024.
Online editor Grace Murray interviews theatre director Jo Bowman. They discuss Bowman’s latest project—the Scottish Premiere of Caryl Churchill’s ‘Escaped Alone’—the role of the director, and the political importance of theatre. Here is a snippet:
Murray: I was doing a little bit of research, and I read that you like to make theatre that is messy and loud,a statement that I really enjoyed.d I was just wondering how that plays into your work kind of generally, but also specifically how it works with this play and Caryl Churchill’s writing?
Bowman: I suppose the first thing I’d say is that this play might be loud but it won’t be messy, because it’s so precisely written. I suppose by messy what I normally mean is that the plays I make, make a mess. I’m quite interested in physical mess onstage and how you might change a space from clean to messy or messy to clean over the course of a production, generally. And loud. For me the real joy of theatre is that it’s people sitting in the same room together, and that, actually, if you play a loud noise or surprise people in some way, they’re suddenly made aware of the fact that they’re sitting in a room with you watching a play. And so I’m interested in how sound sort of heightens or changes the way that we might interact with a play. I don’t think you should ever be able to come see one of my plays and sit back, and be, like, well I just watched this nice square of stuff happening. I’m interested in plays which sort of implicate or complicate what it is to sit and watch a play.
Murray: Yeah, I’ve always really liked that element of theatre. There’s always the opportunity to kind of break the line between audience and the actors onstage in a way you can’t necessarily in film, or not in the same way.
Bowman: Yeah, it really matters to me that people have given up their Tuesday evening to come and spend it with us, and I think you have to take seriously the fact that people are choosing to come and share the same literal space with the art or the thing that’s been made. And to sort of take that seriously, and then say, well how can I make sure that my work has an implication or an impact on the audience beyond just sitting back and watching a nice story. Although it’s good if you can tell a good story—or share a good story. Telling is not very interesting to me, but sharing is.
Murray: I wanted to ask you anyway more about your process as a director, taking things from page to stage, and how you like to work with actors and with the material.
Bowman: I love it. The reason I do this job is because I think theatre is the best medium to think about big ideas in, and I think part of that is the rehearsal room and the other part is how you communicate what you’ve thought about to the audience. There’s that sort of two-ness which I love about the job. I will say the way I work is interrogative and iterative, and the image that I use is sort of like a series of sieves. So in week one you’re using like, a fucking colander, and then by week four—you know those panning for gold things you get at Legoland?—you’ve gone from colander to panning for gold over weeks, and you might not notice. I’m interested in the work you don’t notice happening, the sort of—oh, that thing’s just fallen into place! And with a play like this, it’s about clarity. It’s about the actors understanding what they’re saying because it’s so fragmented and elliptical, and then using that understanding to very slightly put pressure on lines to convey very slight, small things which hopefully altogether add up to make something that makes some sort of cohesive or coherent sense.
And, you know, I think the way that I work is really collaborative but really specific. The play tells you, the play tells me, how it should sound and what it should feel like and be like, and my job is to sort of shepherd that feeling from page to actor to audience, and that’s through creative team, and design work, and sound design work, and lighting and stage management, you know, there are lots and lots of people who can inspire together to make the thing, but my job is to sort of shepherd loads of brilliant ideas and decide which ones are worth sticking on this production and which are worth saving for a future thing.
Bowman: I suppose any play I direct, I hope I’m always bringing myself to it, and not in a grand, I’m gonna stamp all over the play and put a big fucking concept on top of it, but—I only directed this play because on some level it resonates with me, and it’s interested in needling into something that interests me. So I think it’s about choosing—you know, of course the material reality of a theatre director means you don’t always get to choose—but, when you do get a choice, and I had a choice of what I wanted to direct at the Tron, choosing something that really resonates with you, and from that a version that could only be yours will naturally emerge.
I really enjoy doing productions of plays that have already happened once, because you know it’s happened, and you know the writer’s been really involved in that first production, so it gives a little bit of critical space, but the plays are often still contemporary and relevant and politically interesting in a way that feels essential for all of the work that I want to make. But you’re also not trying to make anything that’s necessarily definitive, or singular, or getting it right for a writer. I do lots of new writing as well, and the focus there is a bit different; it’s about showcasing the play in the best possible way, and it not being the first production means there’s slightly more space to interrogate the play, and test where the play’s boundaries are, and what pressure you can, and what pressure you really can’t, put on it. But I’m also not that worried about it being singular or original because, you know, there’s that line in Sunday in the Park with George about “let it come from you, then it will be new” — that’s enough, if it’s a sincere and an artistic response from you, it will be a new version. I think… I hope. It was very good, the first version. I saw it; it was a brilliant production; brilliantly precise, brilliantly well done production. James MacDonald, who did it, is one of my favourite directors, so I know it’s been done really well once, which sort of takes the pressure off, as well. It’s not about doing it really well, it’s about finding how it might resonate differently in Scotland in 2024 with a different director and with a different company.
Murray: The title is a reference to the Book of Job in the Bible—I’m not super familiar with the Bible—but I know it’s about why suffering happens. And I was wondering what you think the play’s relationship to suffering is? Because I know there’s this character [in the play] who describes these very apocalyptic events.
Bowman: I mean spot on, [referring to a wall of the rehearsal space] there’s the Book of Job; there’s Moby Dick, which is used as an epilogue…
Suffering, I don’t know about. The title [Escaped Alone] is about someone living through something horrendous, and then telling a story about something horrendous—for me, for us, for this production, and I think there is something in the need to tell stories. The I survived, or I went through this thing, and therefore I have a story to tell, and that actually there is something, likenarrativising or narrating events that allows us to process them, and allows us space and time to think about things that might happen. This feels a bit like a dress rehearsal—the events that Mrs. Jarrett, the character who does these monologues, talks about haven’t happened to us, the audience, but they have happened to her, so there’s a weird time thing going on there, and she exists to tell us that story. It’s not a Cassandra-ish sort of warning, but it has to ring a bell, either a far away alarm bell or a close alarm bell.
(Note: as Bowman said this, a clocktower bell began to ring outside)
Bowman: Yeah, I don’t know what the play says about suffering. I think there is something in surviving and then telling.
You can read the rest of the interview at www.qmunicatemagazine.co.uk
‘Escaped Alone’ is playing at the Tron Theatre from 22nd February – 9th March 2024
Grace Murray (they/them) @gracefrom._space
Porn, as we know it, is one of the most widely consumed forms of media. It can be easily stumbled upon in both unlikely and likely contexts , from sites like Twitter and Reddit to your classic Pornhub. Currently, porn intrinsically connects eroticism with pain and violence, equating femininity with submission, degradation and humiliation. In porn you cannot exist without being a fetish, and no one is off-limits: the ‘teen’ or any racial stereotype, but also lesbian, stepdaughter, mother, child. As a fetish you are at the leisure of thousands of voyeurs. As we consume, we are desensitised; our dopamine only being triggered by increasing levels of relentless sexual violence. Can it be a coincidence that the first generation to grow up with unsupervised access to porn has facilitated an incel culture, propagating harmful, misogynistic views?
Whilst it is common knowledge that PornHub frequently platforms illegal footage, the OnlyFans model is not far behind in terms of exploitation. OnlyFans skyrocketed to new heights in the Covid Pandemic, a time of economic devastation and unemployment, and the wave of abuse wasn’t confined to this time. . OnlyFans policies increasingly protect consumers over creators, with many creators reporting doxing, stalking and threats. With models receiving heightened demand for increasingly explicit and dangerous content, they simultaneously report the harmful toll it has taken both physically and mentally.
The integration of porn into culture demonstrates the inherent issue with the industry. Content is created on the back of sexual pain, fostering rife misogyny in all spheres of life, and enabling predators. With predators now confident in exploiting vulnerability, we can see them interacting with younger women, with freshly-18-year-old Tik Tok stars receiving a flood of requests for OnlyFans images. This has sparked a sinister trend of demand for ‘barely legal’ content, coaxing younger and younger women into the porn industry. This cultural phenomenom is now reframed as liberation, rather than exploitation, with the harmful ramifications of sex work ignored.
Whilst these platforms are hailed as the moral way to consume porn, many porn addicts find pleasure in their ability to abuse and control from behind a screen: content leaks or fake AI pictures flooding platforms such as reddit and discord constitute a virtual form of sexual abuse OnlyFans chants for women’s empowerment, whilst allowing an elevated volume of illegal content, high instances of Child Sexual Abuse Material and monetisation of rape footage. One of the most prolific misogynists of our generation, Andrew Tate, is on trial for trafficking and monetising off OnlyFans content. Pimps are no longer caricatures in fur coats and gold chains, but rather just anyone who has access to the internet.
The autonomy of sex workers is a contested issue, but as we have seen time and time again, consumers often find the idea of free will ‘unsexy’: just look at the rise of non-consensual AI porn. Only last month did an AI deepfake twitter post of Taylor Swift go viral. The post used Swift’s likeness to enact a violent gang-rape scenario. There is clearly a market for such continuous degrading, misogynistic content, so pervasive that even Taylor Swift isn’t safe. The normalisation of sexist content in porn has very real and dangerous consequences for women and young girls. We see sexual humiliation being levied against young girls, with 14-year-old Mia Janin committing suicide after deepfakes of her were circulated around by her bullies. Whilst women are dying from the effects of porn culture and misogyny, men are pleading ‘kinky sex gone wrong’ for lesser sentences in murder trials. Porn is being used as a weapon against women.
Ultimately the power lies with the consumer, with many turning to written erotic content as so-called ‘spicy books’ start to enjoy their moment in the sun. Kinky audios are also on the rise as a potentially ethical alternative, with creators such as AudioBoob by Smile Makers, who make short erotic audio stories. There appear to be some viable options out there, seemingly more dedicated to protecting vulnerable groups, but the power lies with us, the consumer, to make and enforce this change.
The city of Glasgow was a smo-ky place, di-rty with a suspended r, where women jumped in the Clyde thereafter to be revived, brain-transplanted, smell weed in the park and brave the bad wind slamming bin boxes open and shut.
Sometime between St. Mungo, the park-babies playing professional ball and the tappy-toed terriers running after the marathon men, three plant buds were born in a crescent like the one on Argyle Street. Under cover of unlit darkness, a man had engineered their beginning with a set of leather gloves. The man wore a sticky moustache curling in on itself like a wandering node, soon to be immobilised on posters around the grove for reckless growing. Acquired perfectly legally from a slippery salesman and without a private bed of soil, the garden of the West End became their home, shrouded in damp evernight.
As if discovering they were adopted, the plants were alerted to their toxic potential when the park seemed to list around them. The black bulbs of the Belladonna reflected back at visitors, striking fear in their hearts, and the hissing spray of the Foxglove bloomed red on every man, woman and animal. Merely its mediaeval name was a deterrent from the Henbane. After very little shifting, the council happily sold off the unholy trinity to the respectable Parks and Gardens of the Glasgow Corporation. Now sleeping in a lushly adorned bed, the visitors of the Botanics drew their noses right up to the incriminating information placards warning off curious fingers and toes.
Fortunately, the three herbaceous fairies were snug in their glass-paned chamber, the picture of a tea party. No wandering hens or hands to ruin their company, the Belladonna and the Bane turned their poison on the Foxglove. Unaware of their familial ties, their noxious pollen hit its purple bells like a slap in the face, suddenly excluded from the party and a foreigner to the conversation. Only from a nightshade would it tolerate such rudeness.
From this insult or perhaps because of the weather, its flowering body withered into a dull carcass under the shade, while the evil step-siblings growing ugly, slowly died of old age.
Not since Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria have I seen a film so resistant to its residence within the medium which allows it to exist.
When discussing The Zone of Interest, most seem to note the film’s primary dialectic: the apparently normal routine of a family in their quotidian life while incomprehensible horrors take place on the other side of the wall of their dioramic serenity. There’s an effective separation of the film into two; the one that plays out beyond of the camp wall, and the one which plays out inside the camp - only one of which we see. Glazer himself highlighted this bifurcation in talking of The Zone of Interest as two distinct films, the one we see, and the one we hear. This is an astute exegesis of the film, but I think there’s a more interesting one under the layers of perfunctory presentation.
There’s an obvious horror to the blatant juxtaposition of the mundane and the incomprehensible - an analogous image to a modern day freedom enjoyed at the expense of violence fought in national interest. This is perhaps the film’s most obvious dynamic - it’s an interesting one, but also one which the film seems to labour a considerable amount of time to emphasise.
A single, upward-facing shot of Höss as he is engulfed by the smoke of combustion chambers, the screen becoming completely white as visceral screams and mechanical cacophony become the singular presence in the room is the closest that the film allows us to the other side of the wall. While it’s evident why many would find the film’s sparse moments of (predominantly) auditory violence and terror as indicative of its main thesis on evil and violence in complicity, I think the main thesis is less direct. Its primary, and more urgent, thesis is rooted in deeper hermeneutics.
The Zone of Interest is not a bifurcated film, but a stratified one. Its final moments drive home that this is not about that which simply appears on the screen. The credits at the beginning and end of the film are separated, in each instance, by several minutes of black screen as Mica Levi’s score punctures a horrible silence. The events of the film itself never overlap with these credits. There’s a clear distinction between the events which we see on screen and our awareness that they occur within the filmic medium. The final few cuts of the film extricate the film entirely from its narrative conventions and established ascetic sensibilities. It is these short moments which bring attention to not just ‘the film’, but ‘film’ itself.
Pinpointing the ‘banality of evil’ as the most pressing idea here misses the point; there’s nothing banal about listening to Nazi officers routinely and bureaucratically discuss the most efficient ways to murder millions upon millions of people. That The Zone of Interest refuses to move its camera, and by extension the audience, beyond the wall is less a commentary on banality and more one of cinematic depiction. What is it that film can and cannot depict? What can cinematic narrative capture? More importantly, what should it? The deconstruction of the cinematically familiar gradually gives way to an indictment of cinematic language. In a medium which is often predicated on enticing audience pleasure; stripping reality of the real in the service of tension and release, conflict, and resolution, rendering the audience passive spectators, how do you reconcile such conventions with incomprehensible horror? How do you depict historical tragedy without resorting to conventions which seem manufactured to entertain on their first basis and only invite reflection on their second? Glazer’s film seems to offer its own answer. The most questionable fact then becomes why these self-reflexive excursions are so infrequent. There’s still a notable allure to the voyeurism of observing the daily routine of the Höss family, the ever-present contrast of interior and exterior, but there’s a clinical quality to it. The insouciance likens its presentation to a Nazi film about Nazism; most intriguing when held against the film’s contrastingly outré elements - distinctly anti-fascist in nature. Brief interludes shot in high-contrast, infrared photography depict a young Polish girl hiding food for camp workers at night.
These moments pierce an otherwise immaculate artifice and, almost insistently, pose a question of semiotics. In line with the film’s outward motif, these moments would seem to offer a moral inversion of what we see portrayed via the daily life of the Höss family. But within the context of cinematic language they carry greater charge. These sparse moments offer a distinctly anti-fascist cinematic grammar to what we see depicted in the film’s otherwise staid and dispassionate presentation. These scenes form a counter-language to the hegemonic rhetoric of cinema. One which places artistic significance in tradition, one which rejects the aesthetically complex, and one which requires that art be easily understandable.
But by spending so much time in self-conscious observation only to so pointedly break its own cinematic and narrative sensibilities, the film seems primed to lull viewers into a false sense of understanding. Yet, is this not an exercise of its own cinematic manipulations? Does Glazer’s film not align with the filmic language and grammar which it seeks to avoid? It is here where the film’s main conflict resides.
In the film’s final moments, Höss appears to gaze through a pinhole into the future, to the preserved remains of the Auschwitz camps. Back in the past we see him retch; a physical response to a buried moral consciousness, maybe? Or perhaps the pinhole invites us to look back to the past. An invitation - or more severely, an accusatory gesture - to identify with a monster, to align our own moral psyche with his. Through the pinhole, the film focuses on the act of cleaning and preservation. We see a combustion chamber being swept. We see shoes, crutches, and pyjamas behind glass casings; the glass being cleaned and wiped down. Another instance of the mundane contrasted with the incomprehensible. And here we are offered another language to examine. One of remembrance. The museum seems a prosaic image of the intangible. The glass screens - no matter how clean - serve as a reassurance that the images behind them remain no more understandable. The film’s images function in the same way.
The Zone of Interest reckons with cinematic image-making. As much as the film tries to depict historical tragedy without manipulating it to fit into cinematic narrative conventions, it can’t. It is, however, a film that makes strange the medium it finds itself in. Because you can’t really make a film about the Holocaust, you can only stare at its violent remains through a screen, which, no matter how much it tries, cannot separate itself from a language of exploitation. It can only draw attention to it.
As a generation, we are fixated on the concept of mental health in the form of consumable images and content. From incessant Girl, Interrupted edits to a recent resurgence of the Tumblr 2010’s aesthetics, we have a long way to go regarding accurate and productive portrayals of mental illness. Whilst opening productive conversations about mental ill health to eradicate stigma around it is vital, there is a dangerous tendency to romanticise mental illness through media presentation.
Stigmatised portrayals of madness in 20th century film, such as the horror film Psycho, can be put down to its dated research and knowledge of mental illness at the time of its production. However, films such as Todd Phillips 2019’s Joker, which has since received critique for its inaccurate portrayal of psychosis, and the 2015 horror film The Visit, which centres sensationalised characters escaped from a farcical mental asylum, cannot use the same excuse.
Netflix have a lot to answer for with their marketable series 13 Reasons Why, a 4 season programme about the suicide of high school student Hannah Baker, and the film To The Bone, where Lilly Collins plays a heavily stereotyped character suffering with anorexia nervosa - complete with the extreme weight loss and graphic rituals- perpetuating the desirable stereotype of a white, anorexic teenage girl and ignoring the actuality that less than 6% of people suffering with this illness are considered medically “underweight”. Both of these examples are especially harmful, considering they are aimed at young, impressionable viewers, and link to a wider, morbid fascination with seeing a ‘legitimised’ and gratified manifestation of mental illness. The paragon of abhorrent eating disorder portrayals in coming of age dramas is surely the British Indie Sleaze series Skins, where Elsey and Brittain’s character Cassie makes a yearly re-appearance as Tumblr or TikTok’s favourite ‘It’ girl. Whilst these characters are fictional, they inadvertently become idolised figures within twisted internet communities , becoming sources of ‘thinspiration’ and stoking the competitive nature of an eating disorder.
Alongside this, neurodivergence is similarly misrepresented in film. The ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope often consists of a protagonist, usually female, who is undiagnosed neurodivergent and thus fetishized and infantilised for being ‘different’ and ‘unique’, often by the male love interest e.g., Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World.
There is a blatant hypocrisy in portrayals of mental illness- the troubled, mentally ill person is only desirable and marketable if they are a person of privilege. This means they are often white, able bodied, upper class, young and suffering with a diluted, palatable mental illness such as mild depression. TikTok cannot latch onto a romantic image of an elderly man hearing voices compared to Effy from Skins, or Lisa Rowde in Girl, Interrupted. The lack of POC conversations around mental health in mainstream industries is both revealing and damaging. Additionally, the levity of mental health discourse and misrepresentation online inevitably detracts from productive conversations around the topic: videos captioned with seemingly harmless jokes such as ‘time for a grippy sock vacation’ invalidate the lived experiences of those within psychiatric inpatient care which can be that of intense trauma, destruction and loss.
Although it may appear as though we have escaped the Tumblr-ridden days of our youth - notwithstanding the still-lingering damage this platform created in its peak- the start of 2024 has seen a return of early 2010s fashion aesthetics. This in itself is not inherently negative; we are all too familiar with the cyclical 10 year rule of the fashion industry. However, the resurrection of flannel shirts, knee- high socks and “505” by the Arctic Monkeys has come alongside harmful content on TikTok, with a new-found teenage obsession with scenes from Girl Interrupted, Thirteen and Skins. Young people tend to gravitate towards online spaces in order to find and form communities, and this has been heightened by the effects of COVID and the underfunding of NHS mental health services in the UK. Whilst the benefits of shared experience and kinship cannot be discredited, and some platforms may provide genuine support, consistently surrounding yourself with those suffering with the same issues can do more harm than good. As with film, on social media, mental illness will only sell if it can be categorised by aesthetics, art or beauty.
Although we have come a long way regarding our attitudes and approaches to mental health, depictions in media and film play a significant part in how we internalise negative stereotypes and perceptions. In order to avoid reliving aspects of the 2010s, we need to shift the way in which we consume and produce media.
Sophie Taylor-Davies (She/ Her) @ sxphie.td
Mental health resources:
BEAT Scotland
SAMARITANS: 116 123
University of Glasgow 24-hour counselling and advice helpline:
0800 028 3766
As January pulls to an excruciating end, I’ve just finished an almost 6-hour binge of doom scrolling on Instagram reels. Unsurprisingly, much of the content around New Year’s resolutions is still tinged with toxic diet culture and consumerism; should we as a society just avoid the obsession with “New Year, New Me”? Or are there constructive aspects that we can take with us into 2024?
When resolutions are made, the most common choices are orientated towards improving physical and dietary choices - under the guise of health. A study carried out at the end of 2023, by Forbes[1], found that 62% of resolutions made have these themes - and there is a clear disparity between genders, as more women lean towards physical health goals. Of course, being healthier is not strictly something to be avoided, but when “healthy” is promoted to us as looking, eating, moving and even thinking a certain way - all with an ultimate profit motive for corporations and platforms - this ultimately cannot be sustainable and often does more harm than health.
Interestingly, another common goal for January 2024 was being more financially sustainable. I can’t help but think of the large number of sales that are blasted in our faces from every shop window, TV commercial and social media brand at the beginning of every year. This goal then is set back by the promise of betterment once we buy more things. January goals offer a promising vision of starting anew that we can too-easily become enticed by. Indeed, companies justify this obsession through the idea that we don’t get many fresh starts in life - and the new year is a great opportunity for transformation. So buy that bullet journal, use that Hello Fresh Subscription, and purchase that gym membership! Even if we get something out of this - and aren’t being bankrupt emotionally and financially by the bombardment of a January makeover - then this success will not be long-lasting - as the majority of people will not stick to their resolutions after a few months.
Then there is a high level of unsustainability of New Year’s resolutions within our current consumer culture. So, is there any point at all in trying to make a self-improving goal? And what are alternative goals that may be more sustainable?
Rather than compiling a checklist of self-reinvention, I gathered ideas from online research and conversations with friends, in order to produce some alternative resolutions for 2024.
The main formal goals that people listed were reducing stress (which has many benefits for physical and mental health) and lowering social media use. The latter of these may seem a bit simplistic, but I’ve certainly done enough doom-scrolling in January to last me the year.
Other ideas include:
* Spending more time outside - when Glasgow weather allows!
* Practising gratitude + being kinder to yourself! (My personal favourite)
* Moving your body in ways you enjoy (be creative - start dancing around the house, bring out your inner Barry Keogan in Saltburn!)
Finding things to do that don’t necessarily directly involve spending money. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, only if you want to try something budget friendly with friends.
Essentially, New Year’s resolutions can serve as a bombardment of unrealistic expectations for ourselves, especially when permeated with an underlying message to change our bodies. They can act as a tool to curb destructive habits-such as excessive alcohol drinking and smoking - but we should be mindful of creating cycles of destructive self-criticism.
If we all went a bit easier on ourselves within our often-busy schedules, the New Year
‘Maturity’ is always a term to be wary of when it comes to indie artists – when divulged in promo-text and hype-stickers, it often smacks of resignation. When an artist says they’re getting more ‘direct’, ‘earnest’, or ‘intimate’, my hackles are raised further, as the memories of many a lazy late-career record rear their heads. Stripping back a musician’s style to its essence can be an incredibly attractive proposition, as the proliferation of unplugged sets and acoustic albums suggest – but the fear is that some musicians end up revealing, when they lend their hands to more traditional compositions, that their soul and dynamism had been an elaborate façade. All of the scare-quoted, potentially dubious adjectives certainly apply to the latest work of ambient-artist-cum-indie-rocker William Doyle (fka. East India Youth), but thankfully Springs Eternal does not deserve any connotations to a lack of ambition. In fact, for once, it appears that a more direct and straightforward approach to song-writing doesn’t necessitate taking a hacksaw to nuance and maximalism, but allows it to flourish like ivy on a trellis.
Despite having an easily-recognizable voice, both literally and in terms of his sonic signatures, Doyle’s discography is a remarkably varied one. Springs Eternal, as hinted by John Vallance’s sprightly cover, is an urgent and hooky turn from his prior work, the maudlin and overcast Great Spans of Muddy Time, which itself differed vastly from the maximalist chamber chaos of Your Wilderness Revisited. Much of this is likely thanks to his vast array of forward-thinking influences. From Tim Hecker to Cate Le Bon, Brian Eno to Pet Shop Boys, Doyle’s inspirations reveal a deep fixation on innovation, iconoclasm, and heady atmosphere. But surprisingly for such a zeitgeist-embracing record, Springs Eternal showcases a more vintage set of inspirations – while Doyle has always been an acutely pastoral artist (his last record is titled by a Monty Don quote for goodness’ sake!), the fountain of melody here is sensitively laced in equal parts with Woodstock 69’s LSD and the British Invasion’s DNA; “Soft to the Touch” sways like a delirious take on “Norwegian Wood”, while “Cannot Unsee”, perhaps the biggest banger of his career, bears the off-kilter anglo-revisionism of XTC. In a sense it seems that Doyle, much like fellow synth-pop legends MGMT and Deerhunter, has found his own way to neo-psychedelia.
Doyle’s pedigree as an electronic musician plays a huge part in this distinctive new twist. Thanks most likely to a mixture of further progression in his talents, and the enlisting of LUMP’s own Mike Lindsay for extra production support, Springs Eternal is full of intriguing sounds and sleights of the mixing board. This is despite that fact that there is only one ambient instrumental track on the record – what really impresses here is the further erosion of that already fading line between the synthetic and the acoustic. Synths are employed more judiciously than before; the studio wizardry exists primarily to serve a more rockist song-writing approach, most satisfyingly when acting as a force-multiplier for the ebb and flow of tension. The spiky and distorted flares of “Now in Motion”’s barn-burning crescendo create a dizzying swell that could go blowfor-blow with Squid’s most trippy climaxes. Fellow single “Relentless Melt”, true to its name, sees traditional pop instrumentation liquefied into a swirling (yet smartly calculated) morass of buzzes and hums, the song’s core riff submerged in a pond of synth. “Eternal Spring” smacks of Foals’ blissful Total Life Forever (a name which Doyle’s debut East India Youth album is a direct reference to) with its descending droplets of rippling sound. It’s worth noting that these timbres often line up neatly alongside the album’s intermittently aquatic lyrical motif. Speaking of lyrics, Spring Eternal matches our expectations for a distinctively contemporary record – “Now in Motion” wrestles with the revelation of climate disaster (‘Now the heart can be heard from the floorboards’) after decades of cover-ups, while “Surrender Yourself” seems to target our foolishly escapist urge to sink into the mire of digital life, and “Cannot Unsee” targets our voyeuristic drive towards the internet’s benthic depths.
Such explosive examples are all well and good, but Spring Eternal, much like its predecessor, has its fair share of more gradual tracks, which show a continuity of the spirit and, in ‘Garden of Morning’, sound from Spans. But unlike many, when Doyle dips into balladeering, his tongue-in-cheek lyricism and wonderfully tender melodies manage to evade boredom while still managing a surprisingly spartan approach to instrumentation in contrast with other tracks. “A Short Illness” is the most gripping, a charmingly existential work underpinned by barely audible strings and ghostly synths. The bittersweet deathbed elegy at once celebrates the narrator’s accomplishments while lamenting that there is no time for more. Doyle’s quaint, English sensibilities emerge once again, this time in morbid earnestness and a move toward subtle humour and resignation over indulgent melodrama:
I’ve lived a brilliant life
But how will that be described When written in the press Died of a short illness…
The track closes with a church organ hum, which marks a heavenly ascendence and blurs into the pulsating, amniotic ambience of “A Long Life”, which itself leads nicely into closer “Because of a Dream”. It’s rather stark how the mood of the album shifts from quirky, caffeinated observations to a more sullen, modest contemplation – in that sense, it is Doyle’s most varied work, as prior releases tend to focus on a particular approach or mood, and stick to it (as ambient releases so often do). Neither approach is superior to the other, but this shift in craft makes Springs Eternal an incredibly brisk listen, one that urges repeated listens from different emotional states.
Springs Eternal is accessible, yet florid and characterful – an incredibly rare balance in a world where indie acts once renowned for their vibrance and innovation have so often faded away into mediocrity. It’s an excellent entry-point for those not familiar with Doyle’s work, but it also adds a whole new dimension to his discography. Come indulge in a ‘Relentless spring / Followed by endless Summertime’.
In December 2023, England’s goalkeeper Mary Earps took to the stage to accept the annual Sports Personality of the Year award, marking the perfect end to a red-letter year in women’s football. With the game more visible than ever before, there’s possibly no better time to be a female football fan.
But the rigid idea of ‘The Working-Man’s Game’ has yet to disappear, and while we may have moved on somewhat since the days of Lily Parr and at long last have ‘women’s fit’ shirts that sit properly, misogyny is all too often pushing its way through the terrace crowds.
All it takes is one glimpse of social media after a Lionesses match to realise that even after all we’ve achieved, women are still being told they have no place in the game. Take Joey Barton, a famously mediocre player and manager who was sacked from one of his former clubs for betting; Barton took to X after Mary Earps accepted her award, to claim that he’d score ‘100 out of 100’ goals against the woman whose penalty saves got England to the World Cup Final. Barton, and the masses that parroted his opinion, are just several voices in the centuries’ worth of men who have belittled and bullied women out of footballing places for time in memorial. And speaking as a Burnley fan, I’d like to see you try, Joey.
It won’t matter if you’ve captained the team that wins the Finalissima in a sold-out Wembley, or if you’ve held a season ticket for your home team for 30 years, keeping your home-match-rituals even on the rainiest Saturdays, women will still be made to defend and explain their love for football. Perhaps the misogyny isn’t as overt as it was before, but female football fans will always be trapped in the patriarchal paradox of both having masculinity forced onto them for following the game, while also being accused of doing it all for male attention. Why should women have to list the team of ‘66 to prove their knowledge to guys who ‘don’t really follow football’? Why is the only way we’re able to wear football shirts without comment is if they’re paired with fresh sambas, satin ribbons and a ‘clean girl’ look? Why should every female referee, pundit and player have to sift through thousands of death and rape threats to find the thousands of people being inspired by seeing them on the pitch?
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve come a long way. We’ve got the Lionesses taking the game to unimaginable heights, Alex Scott presenting the hallowed Football Focus and this season Rebecca Welch became the first woman to referee a Premier League match. So many of the girls who were laughed at for wearing their team strips for non-uniform days or had to fight to play football on their school playgrounds are women who get to have football as much a part of day-to-day life for them as it is for men. Women have been, and always will be, as much a part of football life as any men and if someone ever disagrees, as the great Jill Scott once said - well, I’ll let you find the GIF.
Tilly Holt (she/her)
art by Ailbhe Ní Mhurchú @ailbhart
When the Channel Tunnel crumbles, and the seas take over when the planes are grounded and the boats stop sailing will you finally be content?
When the quaint little cottage in Nice has been sold for a cosy four bed in Frome (Milton Keynes if you’re feeling like a really big change.) When Cornwall has sunk to the depths, the only accent left is London and only Westminster is still standing When Ireland and Wales are nothing but nature reserves, and Scotland is North-North England, (North England has been wiped from the map) will you finally stop complaining?
When there’s a toll road at each county border, a debt collector at every hospital door no one in, no one out
Bellamy
Photograph by Jemma
When there’s cameras in the voting booth and the ballot reads “Conservative 1, 2, or 3”
When it is up to one hot headed man who lives and who dies, who bombs and who gets bombed.
(No need to imagine this one, we’ve already arranged it for you!) When the only language spoken by people who will never even touch Great British soil is English.
Will you finally take a breath? We’ll give tax brackets an upper limit Great news! Offshore accounts are obsolete! No need to kick a family out of their flat, you can dodge tax directly from your home! You’ll be glad to know we’re bringing back the guillotine! Point a finger, we’ll deal with them for you! Now the poor frontline your wars will you finally be fucking happy?
Jenny Higgins (she/her)Do you remember your first kiss? Your first Valentine, your first time saying “I love you” to a partner? What about that silly gift from your childhood best friend you’ve treasured for years? Or that time you laughed until your stomach ached with a new friend? When someone said exactly the right thing, exactly when you needed to hear it?
In a world that often puts emphasis on romantic love, I think it’s so important to celebrate and appreciate the oft-neglected beauty of platonic relationships. Friendships are some of the most powerful connections we will make in life, providing a unique space for expressing love in various ways, outside the confines of a romantic relationship. And, with all the talk in recent years about the ‘5 Love Languages’ — the ways in which individuals show love in a relationship, through Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Quality Time, Gift Giving and/or Physical Touch — I think it’s about time we reshape our narrow-minded view of ‘love’.
Friends can be the backbones of our lives, the people we turn to for emotional and social support; acknowledging the different ways we show platonic love is essential to understanding the importance of these relationships. One of the unique aspects of expressing love platonically is the added thoughtfulness that comes with it: unlike romantic relationships where certain gestures may be expected or obligated at times, friends showcase their affection voluntarily. The absence of societal norms or expectations can often make these acts of love even more genuine and heartfelt, as they show how they appreciate you as an individual through actions which may risk being eclipsed in a romantic relationship.
Understanding and respecting our own love languages in friendships can enhance the quality of these relationships. Let’s consider one of the 5 Love Languages: quality time. As we all undoubtedly know, spending time with friends is a powerful way to express love: coffee dates after a long day of classes, movie nights, even just spending quiet moments together as you each do your own thing. Spending these simple moments together is the foundation of any relationship. I love going out for dinner or drinks with friends, but some of my favourite moments lie in the mundane: wanders around the city talking about everything and anything, or even the quiet moments waking up in the morning after sleeping over. Just being in a friend’s presence can instantly make
There’s also Acts of Service: small gestures like cooking for a friend when they’re going through a tough time, helping to tidy up after a late night, or helping them plan out something they want to do. When we know friends are stressed out, or processing something difficult, some of us instantly go into protection mode: what can I do? What do you need? Words of Affirmation don’t have to be saved for romantic partners, either: verbalising appreciation and affection is crucial in platonic relationships, just as much as in romantic ones. I usually find compliments or encouragement from a friend even more impactful than from anyone else; someone who has seen you in every sort of state, and still chooses to love you. While gifts are often associated with romantic relationships, thoughtful gestures in friendship can have a significant impact. It’s not about the value but the sentiment behind the gift that matters. Some of my most prized possessions have come from friends: cheap friendship bracelets brought back from holidays abroad, handwritten notes and birthday cards. I even love it when a friend offers to buy me lunch, so the next time it’ll be on me — rather than grand romantic gestures, it’s always these little actions that stick with me, making me feel valued and loved.
Ditto with the final love language, Physical Touch — a well-timed hug, a shoulder to lean on, holding hands as you pull each other through the crowd in a club. Although physical touch isn’t for everyone, I love how small acts of physical touch in a friendship can remind me of my friend’s love, even if they don’t say it aloud. Perhaps more than any other love language, this is the one that people most associate with romance. But I firmly believe a hug from a friend when you really need it is one of life’s little joys, and one that should never be underestimated. Platonic love is an essential part of what makes life worth living: bonds fostered over years of shared experiences and thoughtful gestures. Whatever your individual love language is, I think it’s important to acknowledge it and actively pursue it in all our relationships — not just romantic ones. Now, more than ever, we should embrace the various ways we express love in friendships, and celebrate the joy of platonic love.
Beatrice Crawford (she/her)
