Let's talk about Vice Magazine

To rewind back to the argt I was having with Momus up-thread (legalising arrows etc.) - Momus is saying that hate-words are dependent on context. I agree. This is why I think 'reclaiming' them is totally useless against people who like using them hurtfully.

Well (this to Tom's point) it seems to me that conservatives have a choice. They can either go along with the dilution of their homophobic words in ever-increasing quantities of irony (which may allow them, as you say, to use them more, but makes each use less and less satisfying) or they can pose as liberals and object to their victims taking control of language on the grounds of taste, decency, and sensitivity.

What Momus is suggesting here with his first option is that the context of hate-speech itself changes when words are reclaimed. But it doesn't. The context of a guy yelling "Hey faggot!" hatefully at someone does not change no matter how many times that someone's cool mates say it every day: it's still intended to provoke fear, rage, humiliation and depending on circumstances still will provoke those things simply because of the tone of voice. So I just don't see what good 'reclamation' does for anyone other than the reclaimer who gets to feel transgressive.

There's also a difference between using the words and playing with the attitudes behind the words, and this is another effect of reclamation. The affectionate on-'scene' use of the word by transgressives takes away some of its sting in wider society, sez Momus. I don't agree (see above) but I see the argument. But what Momus is leaving out is that the on-'scene' use also removes its transgression-status and so the transgressives look for something more transgressive, and this seems to be what's happening with the interview at least. (I'm making no pretence of discussing Vice itself here). A shift from "we can detoxify racist words by using racist words ourselves" to "we can detoxify racism by being racist ourselves" (and get even bigger props from Momus too!).

1. What a pack of reactionary twunts. It's like they've stepped from the campus of a small liberal arts college, where as the few heterosexual males there, they have had their pick of really boring girls called Jen, made less boring by their trust funds. Dare someone to ask if they go in for fart-lighting. And they associate with Williamsburg, which is for middle-class people keen to maintain their college experience (last time I was in NYC I decided it was one giant alterna-mall).

2. The assumed liberal bias of counterculture is only that: assumed. Most people who run magazines (not the people who write for them or take the pics) are faux-liberal/zen-capitalist breadheads (hint - you have to like, or learn to like, advertising assholes if you want to do this business). These are no different and seem to enjoy selling others' difference for them, so their methods and motivations are not like big corporations HOW, exactly?

3. Nick seems to be doing a Voltaire and defending someone's right to free speech, whatever. While this is commendable as a principle (mostly because it's harder to play Find The Asshole when people don't have freedom of expression) I get the feeling the Vice founders would not be as keen to put in a defense of anyone else's rights of expression. I'm also extremely sceptical about the possibility of turning 'hate' words into 'love' words; I think people who try to do this are affecting toughness without actually having to be as tough as the people who've had to endure the hate attached to the words for their whole lives. And the Vice people sound like they get off too much on the naughtiness of their words to ever want the meanings to change properly.

4. Nick, the 'some of my best friends are retards and homos' song will be a) bad, b) will annoy tedious Birkenstock wearers who whine about that sort of thing and c) is soooooooo 1992.

Tom, you're trying to reduce context to the intention of the speaker. But context is much more than that. It's what street you're on when you get yelled at, what city, what time of day or night, it's the age and gender and race of the caller, it's whether you have a loaded Walther PPK in your pocket at the time, it's whether you just had a drink, it's whether it's rag week or Wigstock, it's whether your friends call you 'faggot' affectionately, it's whether you say of yourself quite unapologetically 'I'm a faggot...' The list is potentially infinite.

Trend-makers (and I think we can agree that Vice is some sort of trend-making magazine) can help shift context, if only by introducing a tad more ambivalence into our reaction to that yell. Ambivalence in itself may be enough to stop our adrenal glands squirting in a Pavlovian way at the word, and prevent our fingers from squeezing the trigger of the hidden Walther PPK we've been saving for the hundredth homophobe.

momus: thanx for entertaining me.

Re context: I'm not sure how that changes what I'm saying. I'm saying that a reaction isnt a reaction to a specific word as much as it is a reaction to a gesture of hate. Obviously anyone's reaction to a gesture of hate is contextual i.e. it depends on who they are and what they're feeling/doing at that point but I don't see how reclamation of words affects that.

As a writer for many of the magazines covering the same territory as Vice, but without resorting to name-calling vast quantities of the (possibly self-loathing; most 'trendy' people having an element of this beneath the surface, like an engine) readership to do so, I write because a) I'm genuinely interested in the people/things I cover b) my editor has asked me nicely to interview some flavour of the monther and she knows I will give them a chance to speak and will react in an interesting way and c) sometimes the title might be the only place I can place a feature about something contentious (like being an atheist). But even bearing those things in mind, the culture of magazines since, ohh, 1995, when 'alterna' became a more urgent, capitalist concern, dictates that any transgression is okay as long as nobody at an ad agency is the "victim" of my transgressive opinion. And even then it's far easier to cover some fashion designer instead.

This is why, when I want/need to cover something cool for a magazine like the Venice Biennale, I almost always have to pay to get there, and sort out my own accomodation. However when ten people from the fashion department of the same magazine want/need to cover the collections, they get to go over, paid for by the company. The reckoning for this, as explained to me by my editor (who has to keep all of us happy somehow and had the ulcer to prove it) is that the fashion contacts generate advertising, so it's a legitimate expense.

Advertisers rule this indusry and it really annoys me when they invest in reactionary goods like Vice, which clearly tap into the barely-concealed derision they feel for freaks, geeks, and the like (which they do - If they didn't they'd be learning the hard way with the real artists and writers and image-makers). If 'the reactionary' sells, the buyer has paid (say) $5000 to appear between contributions which the editor will have paid the contributor roughly $500 to print (that is, if they're getting paid at all. A lot of these magazines run 'free copy', promising exposure to the writer or photographer - and it's usually the kind of exposure, at least for the writers, that wins them the opportunity to do more free/badly paid work for another person).

Also there is always a point when the established middle class pass 'ironic gesture' with whatever it is (laddism being a case in point) and take on the less attractive attributes of the ironic 4 REAL (becoming actual racist/sexist) thus seeping into the conservatising version of the melting pot. I don't think ANYONE is intelligent enough to walk that walk, and everyone who's ever tried becomes the thing that they professed, as a liberal, to be sickened by.

But doesn't that just reaffirm to the skinhead fascists that their style (and by extension way of life) is more than just okay, it's cool and trendy?

No amount of "recontextualization" or "recalamation" is going to make a funny situation out of someone passing around pictures of a semi running over a black man titled "NIGGER-KILLER" a month after your brother dies in a hit-and-run accident. This is the position I am arguing from and this is why your liberal racist bullshit is pissing me off.

So if I were an East End Bangladeshi, [...]

YOU ARE NOT AN EAST END BANGLADESHI, YOU SELF-IMPORTANT TWAT.

I don't really fall into the trap of romanticising or idealising 'difference' (which my esteemed friend in Tokyo seems to be doing). Ninety-five per cent of the time it's fucking awful being 'different' even if you vehemently don't want to be just like everyone else.

So how would the makers of Vice, y'know, DEAL with the world they moved in if all their convenient little labels for people just fell off one day? What content do they have besides 'this is really cool, hur-hur' to fall back upon?

YOU ARE NOT AN EAST END BANGLADESHI, YOU SELF-IMPORTANT TWAT.

Well, I was married to one, you, er, person!
;-)

(I think nevaready and falling-on-a-bruise would liven this discussion up no end.)

From experience, the shortest way out of this for someone to claim that you're a middle class western white male who shouldn't speak for others, and you to huff off. If someone has to start that, I'm game.

Tom's post: I don't see how magazine ad departments are going to affect change that way. It's just not the way they do business. At best they can ask the agency, 'where else are you running it' and the agency may or may not tell the truth. What works is the actual accounts placing provisos with the agency, eg, 'sell to Index and not to Vice, we've had complaints'.

Andrew: it is possible to win the argument without resorting to name-calling, you know ;-p.

(I'm also not swearing at Tom, obv)

Suzy: No, I don't think it is. But I think it's the quickest way to end the argument.

I think 30-somethings are more likely to be reading Vice than teens.

Also if 12-year-olds were reading Vice in any large numbers, they'd lose the booze and cigs adverts.

That I am seriously considering playing "you're in, you can't talk about being out, you can never understand my pain, which you must still respect" is an indication of how much this thread annoys me, as I abhor this attitude. And how glad I am that this thread has avoided this pitfall so far.

Though of course, it's in my advantage to hope that in-ers can understand out-ers: I'm still in on three of the axes :)

Perhaps that's a moral of the thread: outsider status that you can parlay into cool is a very different beast.

And the first time I went to that page the recommended products included mook-tastic Grand Theft Auto, which sums up what they (or at least their advertisers, thx Suzy) think about the nerd population.

("If Vice was based in Moscow & run by self-loathing ex-American nerds, except with the twist of Edward Limonov (& John Dolan, obv); + without the whole advertising thing & oh well I guess it isn't really like Vice at all"?)

Is this boycott thing real? I have never heard of anything like that, ever in publishing. seems like it would just generate publicity for them. "the magazine Maxim tried to BAN!" heh heh.

I wrote a few things for them years ago. Shit pay back then anyway. Suroosh is a very smart guy, Gavin and Shane are coked up tattoo jocks but cunning motherfuckers.

(a lot of people here bitching about Vice have apparently never seen a copy, so their PunkRock 'hate us' publicity campaign is working. why let em suck you in so easily? it's actually pretty fucking harmless, mostly about skateboards, hip hop, and boobs. just yr average larry clark baloney. so what?)

I've totally gone off the idea of the song about retards. Now I think I want to write one called 'The Biographies of Famous Mathematicians', because mathematicians are under-represented in song, and the math of curves is beautiful. Or something about lapdogs...

BTW Dan, I just recorded my Schubert song in German (it didn't sound right in English) and was thinking about you -- affectionately -- when I sang it, because I remembered you'd offered to sing it. I guess that isn't going to happen now...

we won't reap the rewards until oprah derides the latest martha stewart clothing line as being hella gay.

(Vaguely serious post on this thread by me to occur sometime tonight, perhaps.)

in what possible universe is "language" distinct and seperable from "writing"?