I wrote this essay for Dorset Eye as a part of their recent Banned Books Week focus.

In a mindless scroll through social media yesterday, due, I hasten to add, to a friend’s indignation rather than my own preferences, I accidentally noticed ex-footballer Joey Barton.

Joey Barton, found guilty earlier this year of kicking his wife in the head, is of the opinion that women playing football is bad because REAL women don’t WANT to play football. A few listless sweeps later and there’s some preppy dude, a ‘right wing commentator’, explaining what REAL Englishness constitutes, how that means, truthfully and scientifically, that Englishness is and can only ever be, a special prize for white people. Surprise surprise. 

What both these boys made me think was how desperate they and so many others are to define, delineate, tick-box the world, then exclude everything and everyone that can’t or won’t fit inside the thick, crayon lines of their boxes. The one with the crayon in their hands doesn’t care about the difference between can’t and won’t fit – it’s just a hard ‘no’ from crayon dude. He just wants to control everything until the whole of life is safe and tepid, like blancmange, nursery food, smooth and pale and easy to swallow even for the easily spooked. 

According to Kate Manne, in her book Down Girl, the definition of misogyny is not in fact the hatred of all women, but the hatred of women who refuse to perform female-coded services. After all, those misogynist bros LOVE their barefoot mammas, their non-football playing cheerleaders, their gingham-wearing nurturing nursemaids. These ladies fit, thank you very much, inside the pink bitty box labelled ‘women’. The rest, the sluts, the witches, the hags and the bitches, are just – yuck. They surely don’t belong and therefore must be at least outsiders, if not downright enemies. All of them. Poke them with a stick to keep them away, I beg of you.

For these crayon-clutchers, the world is a dangerously complicated place. Darn, not only are there non-nurturing, outright football-playing women, there are all those fluid genders, all that non-hetro sexuality, all those hordes of people who look weird and sound different. What the heck is a bro-dude meant to do with it all? It sure as hell doesn’t fit in any of the neat little cartoon boxes. It’s all just loose, flying around any old how, scary as hell.

The reason for writing about this ragged and repulsive feebleness, this weakness that still creates genuine peril for so many people is that it is surely part of the reason that books are banned too. 

What more electrifying palace of diversity is there than a well-stocked library?  Every time Bro-normative and his best female-coded-services gal step through the door, they risk being assailed by a riot of dangerous ideas, unthinkable kinks, spanking flamboyance, a melee of absolute misfits – not in EVERY book mind, but it is all there nestled amongst (and sometimes within) the scholarly tomes, the classics and romances, the moving tales and page turners. Perhaps, even worse, they risk being assailed by the orderly calm and competence of a society that isn’t even freaked out by it. People are just going to the library, putting things in alphabetical oder on the shelves or borrowing books and reading them. Maybe doing a bit of photocopying. They don’t even take precautions against the low flying potty mouths, the angry outsiders, the lusty, ragged wenches, the queer boys and sexless dames, the devils and the bad angels, hiding any old where in the pages on the shelves. 

It’s not simply that these books exist, it’s that perfectly sane people in Marks and Spencers slacks are walking around reading them. Not a drip of saliva sullies their chins, not a bead of fright-sweat jewels their foreheads. They just read a book, and then bring it back. And then a quietly-spoken, sensible person wheels it around on a trolly and slots it back onto the shelf in pin-neat alphabetical order. 

For those who can’t bear living in a world that seems confusing and complicated, they equally can’t bear the obvious fact that most of the rest of us are fine with the glorious mix and mess of it. It drives them insane, and there we all are, just being normal. 

When Sunak had his drab little moment, he talked of stripping the arts out of schools because who needs that weird, hard to understand, colouring outside the lines stuff? He spoke with the residue of a long hurt, a baffled square who had got sick and tired of watching the cool kids do their awkward, exploratory, glorious, messy, sometimes inept and always entirely necessary thing. He spoke in the spiteful tone of a boy who was fed up with not getting it, of not even really knowing what it was – but now the shoe was on the other foot, and by golly, he was going to make them pay.  

Banning books is a desperate rearguard action by the terminally afraid. But I wonder if it is also in part an attempt at revenge – the anxious, spiteful, fearful, revenge of the ones who can only use their crayons to delineate who they think does not belong.