I was busy thinking about boys
Eliza Clark tells us how her novel Boy Parts was inspired by Charli XCX's Boys and reveals the toxic masculinity she faced working in Brewdog
I’m back! Apologies for the absence - I injured my Achilles’ Heel which meant I couldn’t work for a week causing a backlog of writing projects, including this piece on British-Asian pubs. Since lockdown has eased and Friday nights could, for most, even involve fun I’ve changed the email time to Monday mornings. And having asked a few people what they liked most about my newsletter the consensus was more voices.
So today I interviewed someone I’ve wanted to speak to for months: Eliza Clark, writer of the excellent novel Boy Parts. This is a conversation with a twist as this is how one music video inspired her to create the book’s protagonist, Irina. The catalyst — Charli XCX’s Boys — might seem a bit of fun (or even fluff) but its skewering of the male gaze is an interesting satire on masculinity and our perceptions of maleness. Irina is a photographer who takes pictures of average-looking men and, like in the Boys video, subverts the process so the male plays the ‘submissive female’. Unlike the playful satire of Charli XCX’s video, Irina is very violent, takes a lot of drugs and has been compared to Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman. (I think she’s a bit more charismatic than that and is more like Mark in Trainspotting but Clark told me last year she hadn’t read the Irvine Welsh book until very recently. But it’s definitely not a female version of American Psycho…)
Clark grew up in Newcastle and the interviews she gave promoting the book about a year ago focussed on her “working class” background and the north/south divide, despite the fact that her mother was a civil servant. The novel isn’t really concerned with northern life and this publishing obsession says more about the interviewers than the interviewee. Clark studied and worked in London and the book’s main focus is the art world and how one character can carve their way through it despite (or because of) their violent impulses. Instead the more interesting interview to have is about how Clark, aged 27, is inspired by music videos, comedy sketches and ultra-violent films (like Benny’s Video).
I’ll also be delving into my experiences of toxic masculinity and how they’re still a live issue despite no longer working in an office and spending a lot of time with my two kids.
“The video came before I wrote the book ,” says Clark about Boys which was co-directed by Charli Aitchison (AKA Charli XCX) and photographer Sarah McColgan. “I really liked the aesthetic of it and the vibe. I thought it was an interesting, fun idea. Even though it doesn’t seem that revolutionary, I could connect it to some films that I like and photographers in terms of the way that it looked like men.”
At the moment I’m, ironically, being gazed at by Clark because our Zoom call has video from my end but only sound from hers. I’ve had many Zoom interviews during lockdown but being seen and not being able to watch the other person is very unnerving and takes me out of my comfort zone. As an interviewer I’m used to taking visual cues and instead I’m the one wondering if my expressions are befitting the revealing answers I’m obtaining.
It’s also very apt that I should be the one who is feeling vulnerable as this is how her male characters feel in Boy Parts when they are photographed by the misanthropic Irina and it’s also the theme of Charli XCX’s Boys. The video includes numerous sexualised images of men which are ridiculous because we’re so used to seeing women perform this way.
“It's just very clearly highlighted when you see a bunch of men doing the same stuff,” Clark says.
“I remember thinking ‘I want to make something like this’. And this was genuinely how the idea for Boy Parts came round. The way a lot of women behave, or are made to behave, in film and television, that kind of male gaze is ridiculous. It's really silly. When you see pillow fights and cavorting around you never really say: ‘That's an adult woman! What the fuck is she doing?’”
In the behind the scenes filming of Boys, you see how the men, from Joey Badass to Stormzy, break into fits of giggles after takes. You also get a chance to see Charli XCX lampoon one of the most notorious male gaze pop videos — Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction (which I won’t post a link to as it's simply pornography and has zero artistic merit). Whether or not this is a wholly serious endeavour is debatable — are music videos themselves a sincere genre? — but having two female directors make a pop video is a game-changer. Clark, luckily, has a clear view on this.
“The Boys video hangs a lampshade on how silly [an average pop video] looks. We don’t really get to like purely decorative images of me to like in this way. You rarely see men framed in a cute way.”
One of the most toxically masculine environments I’ve worked in was a pub in Uxbridge. It was frequented by the kind of people who would vote for whichever political party that took the most extreme steps to reduce “immigration”. It was a draining experience because I see immigration as a false narrative — how could my parents immigrate to the UK when they were already British citizens, educated in British schools and paying British taxes? But the most startling aspect of this pub was the way the male drinkers talked about women.
It was the kind of place that men who put too many coins into fruit machines boasted about the amount of sexual partners they had. These same people would also fantasise about the female bar staff and then go on monologues about how they were “posh” or “entitled” when they were rebuffed despite the huge age gaps.
The racism in the pub’s air was mingled with this misogyny and I exhaled it on a daily basis. I would only challenge them if they were drunk because my landlord was “one of them”. He bullied his wife and really I should’ve done more or left the job. Why I didn’t was because I desperately needed the money and it was a job I could walk to which was handy for my studies. But it’s no excuse.
Clark is also used to these environments from working in pubs in London and Newcastle. The most toxic workplace, for her, was Brewdog in the north-east city.
“Even though that Brewdog job was better paid,” she says. “It should have been a better job than the cocktail bars that I worked at. I had a really unpleasant manager, who was a woman, but she was very hostile toward the women that she managed. So if there was a guy who'd come in and started harassing one of us, she wouldn't throw them out because they were paying customers.”
Having a post-industrial town as my birthplace, in my case Luton, I know what it’s like to see this predominant type of masculinity and I ask Clark if Newcastle is the same.
“There’s a kind of monoculture,” Clark says. “Whereas in London, there’s a lot of men coming from different cultures with different modes of masculinity. I feel like there’s a typical Geordie man in the way there’s not really a typical London man.
“I’d remember blokes coming up to me and being ‘Do you have any men's cocktails?’ or ‘Can I have a masculine cocktail? It’s embarrassing and almost a weirdly vulnerable thing to say: ‘I need to have a drink that reaffirms my identity’”.
My school had this kind of culture and it’s in me even if I hate it. It used to require a lot of checking in with myself to see if what I was thinking and saying didn’t have a misogynist bent. And up to my early 20s — I was very slow to mature, I think — I did willingly hang around with men who objectified women.
Because of this I now find witnessing this type of masculinity makes me feel quite angry. I can’t tolerate it like I once did when working in a pub but I still don’t quite have the tools yet to challenge it. I’m a work in progress but I want to change. That’s why I’ve signed up to the charity Beyond Equality which seeks to redress the issue of gender stereotyping at a young age by holding workshops with youngsters.
One of the joys of Clark’s novel Boy Parts is the way it depicts nights out gone wrong and, in particular, tedious house parties. There may be a generation gap between myself and Clark but the universality of being stuck with someone boring on drugs runs deep.
The inspiration for these scenes was this comedy sketch from Scottish comedian Limmy which is beyond cringe. I’ve written a piece to be published very soon on cringe comedy where I was photographed watching Frasier, The Office and Curb but I wouldn’t have been able to be pictured viewing this.
Not because it isn’t a good sketch — it’s brilliant — but because it’s so realistic. Only on several repeat viewings can I laugh at it. It reminds me of the time — 20+ years ago — when I went to an after-club house party. The people there were so dull and so wasted I actually felt euphoric when I left. It was a bigger rush than actually taking drugs.
I’m not the only one who feels like this as male readers, particularly, have empathised with the way the book’s wasted men are depicted as being vacuous and dull. In one chapter a character takes drugs on a white vinyl record to impress Irina despite the logistics of snorting coke on a cocaine-coloured surface.
“A few people who read the book, particularly blokes, have told me that they found the party bits excruciating, and really, embarrassing to read because they like they had been that guy at the party.”
Hopefully this doesn't remind you of you!
‘How’s your night going, then?’ I ask. I can’t bear the silence. Finch has gone quiet, furiously chewing gum, and Flo is creased; she’s absolutely pissing herself back there, stuffing her fingers into her mouth to try and stop herself from laughing. Boy Parts (p. 53).
In the future I think I will go back to my journalistic roots and interview people who have had an impact on my life even though they could be very local. It’s time I spoke to the record shop owner who always cheers me up or the poet that lets me write in his basement when my house is full of kids.
It may mean I move the email to fortnightly but let’s see how this goes. Stay safe.