Philip Sidney

Grayson Perry has a pitiably phalloscopic perspective

Calm down, dears: the strange coughing noise that was heard across Britain at around 8.30 yesterday morning was not the last gasp of an exhausted Mother Earth, nor was it the harbinger of a country-wide Ebola outbreak. No, it was simply the sound of nation’s middle-aged, middle-class men choking on their cornflakes while listening to Grayson Perry being rude about them on the Today programme.

Perry was appearing to promote his guest edition of the New Statesman, proudly entitled the ‘Great White Male Issue’. That issue is the subject of Perry’s lead article, which tackles the Default Man – a shorthand term for the straight white middle-aged males who oppress the rest of us from office towers ‘in various phallic shapes’, their uniformly grey suits enlivened only by the ‘colourful textile phalluses hanging around their necks’.

Such a phalloscopic perspective is more deserving of pity than of outrage. The problems faced by women today are great enough without them having to stress about converting a collection of perpendicular objects into a bristling gallimaufry of members. The skyscrapers of, say, the City of London are the product of cramped city real estate, not male hegemony; to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a Gherkin is just a gherkin.

Perry’s being provocative, of course, adopting the position of playful inquisitor-naïf more usually occupied by his fellow Staggers guest-editor, Russell Brand. At the end of his Today interview he was audibly chortling at his own suggestion that those who objected to positive discrimination did so because ‘their privilege was being ripped out of their claws’. The breezily anthropological tone with which he taxonomises Default Man, with his ‘grey, western, two-piece business suit’, his ‘snobbery, emotional constipation and [his] overdeveloped sense of entitlement’, confidently anticipates the species’ decline, if not its outright extinction.

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