The Sunday Times - UK (2022-02-13

The Sunday Times February 13, 2022 23

NEWS REVIEW

Kurt Zouma was

filmed kicking his

Bengal cat. Mary

Bale, below, was

caught on CCTV

McWhorter

says racism

is no longer

the obstacle

it once was

I

n the new Netflix series The

Woman in the House Across

the Street from the Girl in

the Window, there’s a sex

scene so graphic and

lengthy that Kristen Bell, the

actress involved, ended up

apologising to a viewer.

The coitus uninterruptus

begins at the end of the fifth

episode. Bell’s character, a

lonely alcoholic called Anna,

kisses the mysterious “bad

boy” Rex on her doorstep.

This leads to a sexual

smorgasbord — in the shower,

on the stairs, in the window

seat, on the kitchen table —

prompting a fan to tweet:

“Just watched Kristen Bell get

absolutely RAILED with my

girlfriend and my mom in the

room.” Bell, 41, replied:

“Hahahahaha sorry dude.”

This seems to be a growing

danger on Netflix. The

comedy-drama Sex Education,

a fourth series of which is in

the works, began with a

ceiling-shaking bang and an

explicit sex scene just 30

seconds in.

Since then the teenagers of

Moordale Secondary School

have come together for faked

A study by pathologists at the Royal

Veterinary College confirmed Usborne’s

theory in December. By which point the

now defenestrated Cressida Dick’s Met

had wasted £500,000 and three years.

But Usborne is a rare example of some-

one having the last laugh after getting on

the wrong side of the cat-owning commu-

nity. A 2019 Netflix documentary focused

on an extreme example of cat-crossing.

Don’t F**k with Cats tells the tale of Luka

Rocco Magnotta, a Canadian who, as a

teenager in 2010, started posting clips of

him torturing and killing kittens. The

videos set off an international manhunt,

with amateur online cat sleuths helping

the police track down Magnotta — but not

before he had murdered and dismem-

bered Jun Lin, a 33-year-old student

living in Montreal. The suggestion is the

sleuths might not have bothered if

for you. And even if they don’t, Britain’s

rabid army of cat-lovers will. And they

take no prisoners.

It has never been fully explained why,

in 2010, Mary Bale, a 45-year-old bank

worker from Coventry, decided to throw

a stranger’s cat in a wheelie bin, only to

be captured on CCTV. After Lola the four-

year-old tabby was freed from her

15-hour incarceration, Bale was fined

£250, but that was the least of her

worries. “Moment of madness ruined my

life, says wheelie-bin cat woman,”

reported The Coventry Telegraph seven

months after the event. Her mother’s

house was besieged by journalists. A

Facebook group was set up called Death

To Mary Bale. She had to resign from her

job with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The

Independent asked: “Is Mary Bale the

most evil woman in Britain?” Another

question was never satisfactorily

answered: who has a CCTV camera

trained on their bins?

And consider the moral panic that

gripped the nation when the so-killed

Croydon Cat Killer was on the loose,

allegedly massacring 500 cats over a

four-year period. When the journalist

Simon Usborne suggested in The Guard-

ian in 2018 that this cat-killer might be

just, you know, some foxes, the reaction

was intense.

“I’ve occasionally tackled contentious

stuff as a journalist, but the only time I’ve

been called an ‘absolute f***ing wanker’,

‘scum’ and ‘everything that is wrong with

this world’ was when I dared to question

the theory that a lone killer was driving

up and down the country picking off

moggies,” says Usborne. “At one point

the cat-loving couple leading the investi-

gation suggested that the killer could be a

journalist.”

Never

mess

with a

moggie

The footballer Kurt Zouma is finding out the

hard way. Cross a cat and they — or the

nation’s mewling mob of cat-lovers — will

have their revenge, writes Martin Hemming

O

n Tuesday night at the Lon-

don Stadium, the West Ham

defender Kurt Zouma sank

to the turf after a heavy chal-

lenge. The Watford fans at

the away end didn’t miss a

beat. They responded with a

chant unlikely to have been

heard before on even the

roughest of Britain’s ter-

races: “That’s how your cat feels.”

Before last week, Zouma was a 27-year-

old French footballer. Now he is Kurt the

Cat Kicker, after a Snapchat video

emerged of him — seemingly for a laugh —

drop-kicking one of his pet Bengal cats

across his kitchen floor.

Let he who hasn’t given his cat a gentle

nudge with a slipper when it is mewling

for its morning Purina One adult chicken

and whole grains, and scratching the

kitchen cupboards, cast the first stone.

But if it wasn’t already self-evident that

booting a cat up the bum is a bad idea —

and especially having your brother film it

and post it on social media — Zouma has

learnt the hard way.

With a ruthlessness, precision and

alacrity that the Metropolitan Police

could only dream of, the RSPCA swooped

to confiscate Zouma’s two pussies. He

was fined the maximum two weeks’

wages by West Ham — said to be

£250,000. At the time of writing, more

than 300,000 people have signed a peti-

tion calling for the footballer to be prose-

cuted, and the RSPCA is weighing up

whether to press charges.

Some believe a black cat crossing your

path means bad luck. But if history, or at

least the front pages of the tabloids, is

anything to go by, it’s safest never to get

on the wrong side of any flavour of feline.

Because, mark my words, they will come

The new

anti-racism

is a danger

to us all

So says the controversial

intellectual John McWhorter,

whose new book is sending

shockwaves through America’s

‘woke’ left, writes Josh Glancy

Magnotta had murdered only a student.

It’s not just footballers, West Midlands

bank workers and psychopaths. The Brit-

ish legal system also throws some serious

shade on Tiddles. Under section 170 of

the Road Traffic Act 1988, if a driver runs

over a dog — or horse, cow, ass, mule,

sheep, pig or goat — they are obliged to

report it to the police. Squash a cat and

you need only give the council a

courtesy call. A petition in 2020 failed to

rectify this canine-biased injustice, with

the government responding that it had

“no current plans to amend the Road

Traffic Act 1988 to grant cats the same

status as dogs”. Miaow! Larry the Down-

ing Street cat was thought to be unim-

pressed. Could he be the one leaking

those party videos to the Daily Mirror?

I’m currently having my own brush

with feline vengeance. We have just

moved to a house without a catflap, so

Tallulah, our little black rescue cat, has

been reduced to doing her business in a

litter tray, in full view of the breakfast

table. When I write “in”, Tallulah has

interpreted this as “near” or “smeared

down the side of ”. I can’t help but think

she knows exactly what she’s doing.

It’s time we gave cats the respect they

deserve. They are not glorified cuddly

toys for our social-media feeds (though,

as any black-cat owner will know, Tallu-

lah photographs terribly). They are

powerful, capricious, vengeful and

slutty. A colleague reports that his cat fre-

quently returns home smelling of some-

one else’s cigarette smoke.

We should stop thinking of cats less as

the cute, benign, slightly dim Mog from

Judith Kerr’s children’s stories, and more

as Behemoth from Mikhail Bulgakov’s

The Master and Margarita, a giant, pistol-

toting, vodka-drinking beast in league

with the devil who is, to borrow Netflix’s

asterisks, a f***ing nutcase that everyone

should be terrified of.

We finally got a high-spec catflap fitted

on Thursday, which involved a whole

new pane of double glazing and me hand-

ing over £400. Is Tallulah grateful? She

just stares at it and continues to crap in-

accurately inside my house, plotting her

next move.

form of anti-racism,” he

writes. The new religion has

its “elect”, he argues, those

enlightened enough to see

this fallen world as it truly is.

It has a clergy: racial theorists

like Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehisi

Coates and the (white) author

of White Fragility, Robin

DiAngelo. And it has an

“original sin”, in this case

white privilege.

This ideology is like

“smallpox”, he says, arguing

that wokeism has “much less

distance to the Nazis, Mao

and Stalin than many of us

think”. It is a “fungus”,

promoted by people with a

“very thin, nasty idea of how

society should be run”.

Kendi, perhaps the most

prominent anti-racism

advocate in America, has

excoriated McWhorter on

Twitter, attacking his writing

for “degrading black people”

and claiming that racism is

“no longer a serious

problem”.

McWhorter, for his part,

has no problem with

concepts such as white

privilege or structural racism.

He acknowledges them but

just isn’t very interested in

dwelling on them. “It’s not

that racism doesn’t exist, but

it is hardly the impediment

that it once was,” he says.

Similarly, he sees Black

Lives Matter as a naive but

well-meaning organisation

that has suffered from

“mission creep” and “drifted

into certain financial

irregularities”.

Because of his views,

McWhorter has been called

an Uncle Tom, and worse. Do

the slurs bother him? “They

definitely don’t hurt because

they have so little to do with

who I am,” he says. “It’s a

cartoon.”

J

ohn McWhorter might be

the most interesting man

in America right now,

sitting as he does at the

fulcrum of America’s

swirling racial debate.

McWhorter is a black,

Democrat-voting, liberal

intellectual with a column in

The New York Times and a

fierce admiration for the

heroes of the civil-rights

movement. But he is also a

withering critic of the post-

George Floyd racial

awakening, loathes

“wokeism” and has become a

public enemy of the radical

left. Some view him as a smug

traitor; others as a rare voice

of sanity and moderation in a

tempest of excess.

As the fightback against

wokeness, hyper-awareness

to inequalities of race, sex

and other forms of prejudice,

gathers pace in America,

McWhorter, 56, has become

perhaps the most compelling

counter-revolutionary voice.

He is a professor of

linguistics at Columbia

University in New York. He’s

also a prolific author,

broadcaster, public

intellectual and, in his spare

time, cabaret impresario:

McWhorter enjoys taking his

two daughters to musicals on

Broadway and met his wife at

a singalong piano bar. He

speaks with imperious

erudition and writes with

admirable clarity.

Whatever you think of his

views, and they’re certainly

contentious, McWhorter has

become essential reading for

anyone trying to make sense

of the race debate in America

and, because of the way our

cultural conversation takes its

cues from across the Atlantic,

Britain too.

His latest book, Woke

Racism: How a New Religion

Has Betrayed Black America,

is a slender volume but his

argument is challenging.

McWhorter views America’s

new ideology of race, which

he terms “third-wave anti-

racism”, as something more

akin to a religion than a

practical movement.

First-wave anti-racism

fought slavery and

segregation. Second-wave

anti-racism, in the 1970s and

1980s, taught America that

being racist is a moral flaw.

The third wave teaches that

racism is baked into the

structure of society, making

all whites who aren’t actively

fighting it complicit in its

persistence.

This latest generation of

anti-racism represents a

dangerous wrong turn in

McWhorter’s view. It has

given us cancel culture,

microaggressions and a

culture of easy offence. It

patronises black people, he

argues, by treating them as

eternal victims. Most

importantly, it hinders

progress for black America

through its impractical

demands and the distractions

of religious fervour.

“There’s been a detour

into striking a pose, showing

that you are aware of an

injustice as opposed to being

sincerely interested in

helping real black people,”

he says.

McWhorter has plenty of

examples of this harm at his

fingertips when he Zooms in

from his book-lined study. An

obvious one is the call to

“defund the police”, which

he argues is not supported by

most people living in areas

with high crime rates. “And

yet a certain kind of person

insists on calling to defund

the police,” he says. “Because

when you’re saying that

you’re showing that you

know racism exists. We’re

operating on the basis of what

I think is a religion, rather

than engaging with reality on

the ground.”

When McWhorter uses the

word religion, this is more

than just an analogy. “An

anthropologist would see no

difference in type between

Pentecostalism and this new

He attributes his counter-

consensual views to a

lawyerly desire for coherence

and not being “a joiner”. He

also thinks growing up in a

racially integrated area of

Philadelphia helped.

“White people don’t scare

me,” he says. “For a lot of

black people, either white

people do scare them or they

pretend that they do.”

McWhorter merrily applies

his critique of wokeism to the

daily culture war news cycle.

He was irked by the campaign

waged against the podcast

host Joe Rogan for using the

n-word, which he argues

deliberately misunderstood

the fact that Rogan was

referring to and describing,

not actually using, the word.

He also objected to Whoopi

Goldberg’s suspension from

an American television talk

show because of remarks she

made about the Holocaust

not being a racist crime.

“Her suspension was an

example of a prosecutorial

strain in today’s woke culture

that has gone way, way too

far,” he says. “She made a

mistake, she apologised.

What happened wasn’t a

crime. She should have been

smacked on the hand. We’re

in Galileo territory: this is

pursuing heretics, not having

mature discussions in

society.”

Woke Racism is published by

Forum at £14.99

having less sex than previous

generations. A

study published in The British

Medical Journal in

May 2019 suggested that

nearly a third of men and

women had not had sex in the

previous month, up from a

quarter in 2001.

The pandemic exacerbated

the trend, with the National

Survey of Sexual Attitudes

and Lifestyles study reporting

that the number of one-night

stands had fallen. People

reporting a new partner in the

previous four weeks halved in

2020 to 4 per cent.

Gunsaullus believes that

lockdown accelerated the

trend for people to want

vicarious pleasure on screen.

In June 2020 365 Days, a

Polish erotic drama criticised

for glamorising sex trafficking

and rape, was a surprise hit

for Netflix. “Even just kissing

somebody became

dangerous,” Gunsaullus says.

“So it’s a combination of

factors: the Covid lockdown,

porn and our busy lives.

There’s also an issue with

vulnerability: when it comes

to showing up in front of

Netflix is

now Sexflix

— and we’re

gagging for it

We may be having less sex in real life,

but what we’re streaming is getting

steamier, says Rosamund Urwin

Reinventing Sex for Women.

“Netflix is blunt with using

sex as a way of getting

people’s attention ... We were

already building in this

direction of more sexual

content in our regular viewing

— all generations have become

more used to porn, especially

the young. Watching sex on a

screen has become more

normalised, especially in the

past ten years.”

Even staid old Auntie is

following suit. After the

adaptation of Sally Rooney’s

Normal People was a monster

hit for the BBC in April 2020,

the broadcaster is bringing an

adaptation of her 2017 debut

novel, Conversations with

Friends, to the screen in May,

starring Jemima Kirke. The

trailer was unveiled last week,

suggesting the series will be as

sex-filled as its predecessor,

which featured 41 minutes —

someone counted — of

“amorous action” in its 12

episodes.

But while we may be

watching more sex on

screen, behavioural

studies in the UK and the

US suggest that adults are

orgasms, full frontal nudity

and a masturbatory montage.

Then there’s the Regency

romp Bridgerton — nicknamed

Bonkerton — which returns

for a second series next

month. The hero of the first

series, Simon, played by Regé-

Jean Page, managed to make

many viewers swoon simply

by licking a spoon.

The streaming platform

also hosts the Mexican

adultery thriller Dark Desire,

of which one critic wrote

“there’s so much sex, you

struggle to find some story”;

the Polish comedy Sexify,

about a student trying to

develop an algorithm for the

female orgasm; and Sex/Life,

an American drama about a

suburban mother yearning

for her past life with a former

boyfriend. Netflix even has a

dedicated “steamy” section to

browse.

Has Netflix become Sexflix?

“It was always quite sexy but

it does feel like there is a lot

more sex now — just look at

the names of shows,” says

Jennifer Gunsaullus, a

sociologist and the author of

From Madness to Mindfulness:

Metadata

analysts

‘tag’ shows

that have

sex in

Kristen Bell, below,

and Sex/Life, top, are

drawing in viewers

1 3, 202 2

This week’s question:

Is there too much sex

on TV?

Have your say at

sundaytimes.co.uk/poll

Mary Bale’s life was ruined

after she put a cat in a bin

another person, with all of

your emotional messiness

and bodily insecurities, that is

a very vulnerable thing to do

and I think as a society we are

becoming less skilled at that,

especially the younger

generations who have this

example of porn.” She notes

that sex-filled Netflix shows

roughly split into two: those

portraying the awkwardness

of relationships, such as Sex

Education, and those offering

a dark fantasy, such as

365 Days.

Netflix, of course, is in the

business of giving its

customers what they want. Its

algorithms are designed to

lead us to the next thing we

might like, based on what we,

and others with similar tastes,

have watched before. They

don’t take into account our

age or sex.

To this end, explains Tom

Harrington, head of television

at the media research

company Enders Analysis,

Netflix employs scores of

metadata analysts, also

known as “taggers”, whose

job is to watch programmes

and films and categorise

them. They log everything

from actors and locations, to

particular emotions, trends or

narrative devices, and

whether a series or film

qualifies as “steamy”.

In this case, what that

viewer wants seems to be sex

— maybe not in real life, but

certainly on screen. Just be

careful if you’re watching

with mother.

NETFLIX