Misogyny turned good: #DannyDyerDonate
guest post from Liam Barrington-Bush
A quick timeline:
7/6/10, 4:00pm – I’m ‘on Twitter’; I notice a Tweet from @VictoriaPeckham, that said a remarkably low 24 people went to see Danny Dyer’s new film, Pimp, during its entire opening weekend; £205 was grossed. The blog points out that Dyer was last in the news when his advice column in Zoo lads’ mag had caused fury, after he recommended a reader cut an ex-girlfriend’s face, so ‘no one would want her’.
7/6/10, 4:10pm – I noticed that @andyvglnt had also picked-up the story, Tweeting “Danny Dyer’s new flick take £205 in 1st weekend? @Diazzzz and I took more than that for band t-shirts and cupcakes yesterday!” Banter ensues… we decide that more people would choose to support the women Dyer ‘jokes’ about cutting, than would want to see his film. I suggest finding a suitable charity and sending a link to their donate page, @andyvglnt suggests a page on JustGiving.com, so we could see “how much more generous people are than Dyer is successful.”
7/6/10, 4:20pm – In about 10 minutes, I’d set-up a JustGiving page for #DannyDyerDonate, giving money to Solace Women’s Aid. I sent the following Tweet: “Danny Dyer’s ‘PIMP’ film made £205; can we raise more for the women he ‘jokes’ of abusing? http://bit.ly/aK91xw #DannyDyerDonate”
7/6/10, 6:30 – £210 had been made, surpassing the goal and outdoing ‘Pimp’s opening weekend take.
8/6/10, 9:25am – £420 had been raised for Solace Women’s Aid, via 47 separate donors, pitching in between £2 and £100 each.
£420 is hardly going to change the world…
In the scheme of things this sum is not a remarkable total. But there are a few key learning points here for people who want to make change in the world, and for organisations that want to be a part of it.
Emergence
There is an important idea in Complexity Theory that describes how “patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” The common metaphor is of a flock of birds – there are no ‘leaders’ per se, but there is clearly an aligning of independent efforts that have an effect greater than any of the individual parts – the flock. There have been countless examples of how technology has enabled social ‘flocking’ to occur. What was simply a few combined hours of @andyvglnt and my time, became something far bigger than either our efforts or our means (we are both pretty poor right now) could have achieved. Which leads to the next point…
How communication is changing via technology
Technology was obviously a big enabler in this process, whether as the initial source of information and the distribution platform (Twitter), or as the channel through which funds were received (JustGiving). But what it did was not unique to technology – it amplified and sped-up the natural human urge to share things we find valuable, allowing them to reach far more people than would have ever been possible without it.
My suggestion goes a step further…
While a dedicated day-per-quarter has been a successful model for supporting innovation at Atlassian, passion isn’t always something that can be scheduled, and may be sparked by, or may come to influence, a range of other time sensitive outside factors that don’t happen to fall on the given Thursday.
In other words, within this model, these are still ‘lost’ opportunities. What would happen if a more flexible approach was taken, giving staff a certain amount of flexible time – maybe it’s a day a quarter, maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less – but that, when the conditions were right, people could feel empowered to run with an idea, while it’s ‘still warm’?
The logistics of this would prove challenging for most organisations, depending on individual workloads, but my personal, evidence-free hunch, especially in the voluntary sector, is that most staff would recognise during especially busy periods, where their efforts were most needed.I will leave it to all of you to pick-apart the detail of this, but believe that it could provide a possible way for those of us who spend our days working for social change, to tap into some of the emergent social forces at play all around us, that we often don’t pick-up on in the course of a busy day at the office…
In the meantime, if you haven’t and are able, please chip-in or help share the #DannyDyerDonate page and help Solace Women’s Aid make a difference in the lives of the women who have been victims of the domestic violence normalised by Danny Dyer’s ‘jokes’.
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A longer version of this article is at Concrete Solutions
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Filed in: Humour,Media,Sex equality
The total raised by #DannyDyerDonate is now at £483. Solace Women’s Aid need this money because of people like Danny Dyer.
Excellent.
not that I’m a fan of danny dyer, or his films, but one of the main reasons the film performed so poorly is that it was out on DVD about a week later…
I’ve cut the article down a bit and linked the full version. It was a bit too long
There’s way to many links in there for that to make any sense.
I think it’s about the most cheapest kind of argument, going after what Danny Dyer didn’t say.
Ask him if he meant that you should cut your ex bird’s face if she dumped you … and he’d say ”no way at all”.
But it sure makes for a great media story.
damon – I’m sorry you are unable to read the OP – perhaps you could cut and paste it into a word document so the text is all one colour?
As for what Dyer did and didn’t say, Zoo stated:
http://www.zootoday.com/lateststuff/archive/2010/05/07/zoo–magazine-error-apology.htm
A previous Ask Danny ‘column’ advised a reader to set fire to his girlfriends ‘munt’ if she didn’t keep it trimmed to his requirements.
http://www.shoutingatco.ws/blog/2010/04/08/the-wonder-of-danny-dyer/
Perhaps, damon, you could have a read of this almost link-less post and try a bit harder with your next excuse/comment: http://soisaystoher.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/zoo-and-danny-dyer-cross-the-line-but-join-the-dots-and-its-easy-to-see-how-the-production-error-happened/
Earwicga, again we reach one of these cultural divides.
http://www.globalexchange.org/images/peacewall.jpg
I walk past that one every other day and my kind of liberalism and yours might as well be on the other side of that wall from each other.
I mean, just have a look at these picturs from the London Gaza demo on saturday (we are on diferent sides on that too)
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8965/
and then have a look at this other article.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8863/
I know Sunny hates these guys and I presume you do too.
But that’s politics IMO.
damon, forgive my ignorance but I didn’t know those walls were still up! I don’t know that we are on opposing sides re I/P – I took agin your blanket statements towards all Israelis and back-packers. I guess you know the type of hatred shown there more than most of us. I’m not clicking into the Spiked links as tbh their articles irritate me.
You didn’t really respond to my comment at 6 – you stated that Dyer didn’t say make the comment on his ‘Ask Danny’ column, but actually he did, and other similarly vile comments. And he’s not unusual either.
Ask him if he meant that you should cut your ex bird’s face if she dumped you … and he’d say ”no way at all”.
Yes, I imagine that he would. Now that it has been challenged, otherwise it would have just been, what? Lairy?
Men actually do mutilate women who offend their sense of entitlement, as of course you know. And it is reasonable to argue that this is made easier for them by the sense that other men understand that the bitch had it coming. Even when it is sniggered in a pub rather than shouted from a prominence. The Slate article you linked to was little more than saying the objections were a case of middle-class fear and contempt of the WWC and that Dyer was a modern Lawrence. (OK, I exagerated the last part, but Lady Chatterly?)
I’m not sure what your point is. No-one is calling for censorship, but if you are objectiobable enough, people will object. It’s not a class thing. Ask Ron Liddle.
The ending of an article summed it up for me:
“im glad that people have picked up on this comment, but I hope the anger won’t flare up and die away as it usually does. This shouldn’t be an excuse simply to lambast an individual – whether Dyer writes his column alone is unclear – but to take notice of a magazine, and a wider culture, that depicts women as meat. If anything positive was to come out of this stupid throwaway comment, it would be that.”
For full article: :http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/05/danny-dyer-zoo-magazine-row
Earwicga, the second Spiked article is all about Danny Dyer and what he said or didn’t say. It says:
And if you don’t want to read an article like that, I presume you don’t want to hear an argument like that … which does make talking about this somewhat difficult.
I think the problem here is not getting that Danny Dyer saying something like that was not to be taken seriously. In the way that you don’t take Ali G or Borat seriously.
In the same way that some people who read the ”shocking” Rod Liddle comments on that football site called Millwall Online didn’t understand the way the website works.
Writing with a username but barely hiding his real identity, Liddle and his pals talk the foulest nonsense imaginable, and the joke of it which many ”straight” readers from outside that online community didn’t get was, that most of the time, what is said there is said in jest and you can never really be sure if a person is being serious or not.
I do note though that some of Liddle’s worst utterings were taken down by the website, so I never saw them, but generally speaking you had to take much of it with a large pinch of salt.
Danny dyer has made a living for himself by being a parody of a real life ”hard geezer” and if you don’t get that it’s all a bit of an act …. then you don’t get it I suppose.
You’re right Damon – I don’t ‘get’ misogyny.
It’s questioable if that is real misogyny.
It certainly sounds misogynistic, but then so did Les Dawson’s ‘mother in law’ jokes back in the 70’s.
Were they really hateful – or just harmless humour?
On the forum that I’m now banned on, I was talking about this a couple of years ago and did a link to a longer version of this Benny Hill youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oha4LDlc8nk
Benny’s character is cleaning up in the game until a woman in a skirt slashed to the thigh comes and sits down in the seats right in front of him. As she crosses and uncrosses her legs he completely loses concentration and in the end drives his cue into the felt of the table and loses the game.
Only for the woman to stand up at the end and walk off arm in arm with his oppponent.
I was asking some of the feminist women what they thought of it.
Was it sexist? (yes a bit I thought).
Was it misogynist? I said I thought it was pretty harmless comedy.
None of the women agreed with me, and from about that time they started to tell me to ”go and get some porn” and stuff like that. I got called a misogynist too.
That’s why I take an interest in issues like this.
damon – I saw this and thought of you: http://www.salon.com/books/writing/index.html?story=/books/laura_miller/2010/06/09/links
As for Benny Hill and Les Dawson – are their types of humour still successful today? No.
Earwicga, from your post @6
To me that quote from Dyer smacks so much of an attempt at Sacha Baron Cohen type humour that I can’t begin to take it seriously.
When I was about nine we had a Scottish teacher called Mr O’Connor who used to play the guitar and taught us songs in class.
One I still remember was ”Ye Cannae Shove Your Granny off a Bus” in which you couldn’t shove your mothers mother of a bus, but you could shove your fathers mother of a bus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tcSgUB2OdY
We knew not to take that seriously, even at that young age.
On your last post, I understand your point.