Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (11 page)

“Fantastic!” male readers may now be burping from their sofas. “I'll have another couple of pork pies and a Guinness. I knew I was over-washing!” And, indeed, these 5,000 women do seem very obliging: a fifth of them don't mind “a bit of body odour”, 10% have no objection to man boobs and another 10% like their men to smell of beer. They like their men to smell of beer? That's an evolutionary cul-de-sac if ever I heard one: “Oh yeah, pick the paunchy, pissed one – he'll be there for you in a crisis.” It's almost impossible to evade the conclusion that most of these women were on the pull.

But these accommodating physical preferences aren't why this study has helped men. After all, it hasn't really made the fat and smelly an iota more attractive than they were before. What women want is still what it's always been: either you or, more likely, not you. Citing an article in the
Daily Express
is unlikely to rescue any otherwise doomed, beery-breathed attempts at seduction.

No, the reason this study is good news for malekind is that it's being taken by the media as a blow to the previous trend, which it had itself created, towards male grooming, exercising and general body-image fretting. The results have been reported as if they contradicted what was formerly thought about women's taste, as if preening dandies were the established norm of attractiveness and more traditional “manly” attributes a weird fetish.

The media like nothing more than to be contrarian about their own manufactured consensus on which the paint is still not dry, just as a dog loves nothing more than chasing its own tail. Words spawn more words. Of course, I don't need to tell you that: you're reading a collection of a comedian's opinions about the news.

But it's daft to suggest that everyone previously thought most women were turned on by men with fastidiously toned bodies,
reeking of cologne, hair made Himalayan with “product”, dressed in gleaming Hugo Boss and generally showing every sign of effortful, self-absorbed vanity. That's just what style sections have been telling people they thought.

“Men are now expected to take just as much care over their appearance as women,” has been the line; “Come on guys, step up!” the exhortation. Men have supposedly been liberated from the etiquette of not being openly vain, liberated into a world of moisturising, styling and plucking, of miserably spending money to fight nature, all in the name of self-respect, a world in which women have been trapped for centuries.

This was never much of a genuine trend – and the Lion Bar study shows it. The convention is still that men aren't supposed to care too much about how they look. Any effort they put into their appearance should be hidden. A beer belly is not ideal, but is far preferable to unconcealed calorie-counting. Obviously, there's vanity in this rejection of vanity but, crucially, it doesn't involve a high spend.

That's what underlies those claims that everyone now thinks it's fine for men to obsess about shoes, style their hair or have facials. Cosmetics and clothes manufacturers are giddy at the thought of doubling the vast sums they already make out of the weird and screwed-up social conventions about how women should look. They're trying to sell more worthless crap, and to do that you need to invoke fashion.

We men should be afraid. The forces of retail are ranged against us. The yoke of skimpy clothes that look sexy but leave your kidneys cold, expensive make-up, agonising shoes and youth-prolonging surgical roulette under which women labour is something we have avoided up to now, and that's a situation we would do well to prolong. But how?

Lion Bar Ice Cream has shown the way. We must fight retail with retail. We must show the merciless market that our
slovenliness can be even more effectively monetised than the meticulousness it's trying to foist on us. If we promise to spend as much on beer, ice cream, hamburgers, video games and reinforced obesity furniture as we would on cologne, moisturiser, hair gunk and jewellery, then the retailers of the former will defend us from those of the latter. The Lion Bar studies will see off the style sections' trendsetting.

And those 4,000 women are on our side as well. “Save yourselves!” they're imploring. “It's too late for us, but you could still avoid this fashion and body-image hell!” They're right – it is too late for them. These customs are too ingrained: women will always be expected to shave their legs. Intellectually, I understand that it's just an annoying, pointless faff but, like most men, and even though our forefathers must have happily fancied hairy-legged women for millennia, I find it a bit gross when they don't. God forbid that most women should ever take the same view about back-waxing.

In the summer of 2010, there were two major nominees for the title of World's Most Hated Company: BP, for filling the Gulf of Mexico with oil, and Ryanair, just for being Ryanair. It was very clear to me at the time which one I preferred …

A recent newspaper advertisement for Ryanair has a big picture of Robert Mugabe shaking his fist, under the headline: “Here's EasyJet's New Head of Punctuality”. This sends out a confused message. I'm no Zimbabwe expert but I'm fairly confident that the main charge levelled against Mugabe isn't one of unpunctuality. It's no more meaningful an insinuation than saying that Kim Jong-il is Virgin Atlantic's new head of catering or that Mel Gibson has been taken on by Thomas Cook to handle its IT.

And while Mugabe's an evil man, there's no reason to think that, had history panned out differently, he mightn't have made quite an effective “head of punctuality” for an airline. If what people say about Mussolini and trains is to be believed, a bit of murderous megalomania doesn't go amiss when it comes to getting transport services to pull their socks up.

But we'll never know how he'd have got on because Robert Mugabe isn't easyJet's new head of punctuality at all. It's not clear whether he even applied. Apparently he really, really wants to stay on as president of Zimbabwe. It would have been an eccentric career change – like when Alastair Campbell moved from handling the press for that unsuccessful war to doing the same for a rugby tour that went even worse. But maybe, like Campbell, Mugabe would have been glad of the comparative rest. EasyJet, for all its faults, isn't as unpopular as the government of Zimbabwe. It's not like it's Ryanair or something.

Ryanair is the unashamed villain of the corporate world. Other companies probably do worse things but Ryanair is the only one that delights in stepping into the public eye wearing an opera cloak and laughing maniacally. This horrendously unfair advert is typical. The sole basis for associating its rival with a brutal kleptocrat is a couple of quotations from newspapers both quoting the same third source claiming that easyJet's flights from Gatwick are “less punctual than Air Zimbabwe”.

Michael O'Leary and Ryanair realise that this will seem underhand but they also know that their customers don't need to like them. They're running a “no frills” airline and have worked out that frequent flyers subconsciously consider civility and fairness to be frills. “These people will keep their prices low,” we secretly think, “even if they have to treat us like cattle and stab their competitors in the back to do so.”

This approach is unusual and refreshing. Most companies persist in trying to persuade us that they're nice and care about
charitable causes, the obesity epidemic, equipment for schools or the environment. But these are publicly traded corporate entities, so they're incapable of caring – they're merely trying to make money for their shareholders and believe that this affectation of human feelings will help them to do so. Conversely, Ryanair has attracted customers canny enough to know that a public company can only have mercenary motives but who are happy to do business with it anyway.

BP has not reached this level of corporate development. In common with most other oil companies, it spends a lot of its marketing budget assuring us that it's obsessed with alternative forms of energy – that walking on to a BP forecourt and asking for petrol is like trying to buy a VHS cassette at an Apple store. “Petrol, you say? Not much call for that these days. Wouldn't you rather a quick zap from a solar panel or wind turbine?”

This strategy led the
Today
programme's John Humphrys to ask a silly question: “Isn't the reality that so long as the oil companies are as greedy for profits and nothing else as they are, this problem is not going to go away?” he said, with reference to the issue of replacing oil with renewable energy. It's silly because it only demonstrates Cynicism 1.0: he knows these corporations aren't as eco-committed as they claim because they can still make money out of oil. But he implies that a time might come when plcs aren't “greedy for profits and nothing else”. Cynicism 2.0 is realising that it won't and that we can only properly harness the power and wealth of oil companies for developing sustainable energy sources by creating a business environment in which that activity is as profitable, or looks like it will become as profitable, as drilling for oil.

The continued prevalence of Cynicism 1.0 is presumably one reason BP considered it politic to remove its chief executive, Tony Hayward, in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The spill is an environmental disaster and the company still thinks
it's worth trying to appear as if it genuinely cares about that, and not just about the consequent financial and reputational cost. So heads must be seen to roll, even if Hayward's was detached by a generous severance.

The generosity is because no one at BP, and few unemotional external observers, holds him particularly responsible for the disaster. At worst, he's deeply complicit in a corporate culture where such spills weren't made as unlikely as they could have been – but that's a long way short of it being directly his fault. At best, it was a very unfortunate accident and he's blameless. He made some PR gaffes and seemed a bit callous, but no one has suggested that any of that either hurt or saved a single extra seabird.

This makes the decision to axe him seem illogical. Businessmen of his seniority are incredibly well paid, and this gets justified by the claim that their acumen is so rare that they more than earn their wage. If this is true, surely BP can ill afford to lose a man who has ably run the firm since taking up his post in 2007 merely because his tenure coincided with an accident? If he was worth the money they were paying him, he will not be easily replaced.

Yet he has been, and things will be fine, says BP. Apparently it wasn't like trying to find another Andrew Flintoff or Tom Stoppard – people with amazing talents in their fields. It was more like replacing a good heart surgeon: Hayward's skills are uncommon, but not unique. He isn't, for example, the person who finds all the oil. That such executives know they're over-remunerated is implicit in their “it was nice while it lasted” willingness to step aside when their luck, rather than their competence, runs out. Deep down they know they're only human.

But I doubt Michael O'Leary would go that quietly. Neither, for that matter, has Robert Mugabe.

The private sector is amazing, isn't it? It's easily the best sector. Apart from the voluntary sector, of course, which is inspiring and humbling and should give us all pause. But, obviously, it's not really a proper sector. By which I mean it's vital – perhaps even more vital than the others – in just the same way that the Paralympics is perhaps more important than the Olympics.

But out of the two other sectors – which I'm certainly not going to call “the main two sectors” because that's, I think, a really unimaginative way of looking at the vital voluntary sector – the private one has got to be the best, right? It's like the free west, while the public sector is the Soviet Union but without the nuclear threat: all drab suits, grey offices, unattractive women and queues. You get a sense of concrete and drizzle, flares and puddles, all very 70s, whereas the private sector is dynamic and 80s. It's much more
Dynasty
, more
Howards' Way
, more using-proper-nouns-as-adjectives. It's fax machines and swimming pools, shoulder pads and telling people where to stick it, in both professional and sexual contexts.

Yes, people who work in the private sector must look at public sector workers in disbelief. “How did you end up there?” they must think. “What personality cocktail of laziness, self-loathing and intractable mediocrity would have led you to try to make your fortune (your incredibly modest fortune, albeit with overgenerous pension provision made possible only by tying the hands of enterprise) in that gloomy bureaucratic Mariana trench, far from the nourishing rays of the profit motive? How did the sorting hat of fate come to put you in life's Hufflepuff (but with a touch of Slytherin thrown in when it comes to local government contracts)?”

Those are the sort of questions that Carl Lygo, the chief executive of BPP, one of Britain's only two run-for-profit universities, must have to bite his tongue to stop himself asking when talking to other educators. And he has been talking to
them: he's been discussing the possibility of running the business side of at least 10 publicly funded universities, going into “partnership” with them. They'd still make all the academic decisions, while BPP would deal with the admin. But isn't this an uneven partnership? It lacks a shared aim. One half wants to run a good university, the other wants to make money. If a marriage is a partnership, isn't this like getting hitched to a hooker?

Or maybe it's just paying for goods and services. As Lygo says: “Most universities are running at high costs and don't properly utilise their buildings. The private sector is better at procurement, because they are keener at negotiating better prices.” That's the key argument in favour of outsourcing and subcontracting and other expressions for an institution giving up roles it was constituted to fulfil: the public sector is so congenitally wasteful that a private company will always be able to undercut it – that the inherent public sector inefficiency equates to more than the profit the subcontractor takes.