Straight to the point

Forget the much drooled-over Rat Boy summer, it seems we’re in for a Hot Keir one. The entry of Labour into government this week has made certain female journalists come over all peculiar. Caitlin Moran has documented these current heightened arousal levels over at the Times where she claims that every middle-aged woman she knew felt “fruity” the day after Starmer’s arrival at No. 10. Her observations were backed up in Metro, where a lady hack breathlessly described how the “new Daddy in town” — aka the Prime Minister — was “turning up the heat in Westminster”. In another unfortunate image, particularly for any readers stuck in a sweaty, overcrowded railway carriage, one X user was quoted as saying that “some of us have been on the horny Keir train for quite some time”.

Meanwhile, in the Spectator, Zoe Strimpel was engaging in a forensic analysis of the “beefcake-adjacent” leader and his “rugby player face”, which came out very well in comparison to poor David Cameron’s reported absence of chin, “thin lips and tiny mouth, more like a fish’s than a person’s”.  Starmer, Strimpel marvelled, “looks like he could actually take someone on in a fight. He looks like if furious he could be dangerous. He looks, in short, like what one used to think men ought to look like.”

My first response was to go and find some current footage of the man in order to check which of us had lost the plot. Sure enough, I found the familiar stolid features and adenoidal vowels of a 61-year-old chartered surveyor, and not Russell Crowe in Gladiator as I had been momentarily led to believe. In fact, in common with nostalgic paeans to British imperialism, a lot of the hype around Starmer’s hotness seems to be based on what he looked like when a lot younger: first, like a New Romantic lead singer and later like the dad in Bluey.

My second thought was to wonder whether such pieces were covertly aimed at establishing their authors’ fealty, either for strategic or ideological purposes — a bit like a Pravda apparatchik rhapsodising over Khrushchev’s beneficence, or some hack on CNN insisting that President Biden is still compos mentis. So much of modern life seems to require pretending, as convincingly as possible, that you don’t see what you do see, or do see what you don’t.

More from this author

The most infantilising election of all

By Kathleen Stock

Or perhaps the heat is down to hypergamy in human females, also known as the spectre haunting the manosphere’s nightmares: the idea that women are particularly attracted to high-status partners, leading them to shun more Lilliputian types who long to get laid, yet remain cruelly untouched. Obviously, there is something in this. No other explanation of Rupert Murdoch’s continued allure as husband material makes sense. And many of my lesbian friends have an otherwise inexplicable yen for Penny Mordaunt, especially when she’s wielding a ginormous sword. Ditto Strimpel’s simultaneous hots for Nigel Farage, whom she was waxing lyrical about only a few weeks ago.

But as a generalised explanation of human female mating choices, based on the instances I know of, hypergamy has never rung true; surely even less so, then, as an explanation of female sexual fantasies about men they are unlikely ever to meet. (It’s probably the case that women tend to want what other women want, René Girard style, but that’s not quite the same thing).

And anyway, the role of British Prime Minister after years of decline hardly screams take-me-now, world-straddling omnipotence. If powerful politicians are your thing, you might as well go abroad for your fantasy kicks and spend a transgressively thrilling half hour with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping instead. Not for nothing are there headlines out there like “I Pretended to Be a Young Joseph Stalin On Tinder, and It Went Weirdly Well”.

Rather than proximity to titanic levels of potency, Moran explains her torrid feelings in terms of the much more unshowy value of “competence”. Basically: relative to the last lot, this lot look like they know what they are doing — a bar that is both terrifically low and scarily defeasible, especially at an early stage. Starmer’s storied career history, first as lawyer then as Director of Public Prosecutions; his surviving the Corbyn years by pretending he believed in socialism; his present insistence upon caution in policy-making, and upon costing everything in advance; his ruthless removal of potential troublemakers, hostile to his market-friendly aims; all this suggests the unfolding of an actual plan to onlookers who are parched for the sight of one after the last years of Tory chaos. It is also true that, as I’ve written before, nobody knows what the plan is, but at least it looks like there is one. If the Conservative Party were any type of erotic fiction, it would be a Carry On film; on current appearances, Labour would be a big, serious Alan Hollinghurst novel.

Of course, appearances can quickly change. But there is such a thing, per Moran, as a “competence kink”: much discussed on fiction message boards, also known as a “competency boner”. The competence in question can be that of a group — “the thrill of watching talented people plan, banter, and work together to solve problems”, as one blogger puts it — or of an individual character, highly proficient at doing something in a way that causes blood to immediately rush to a reader’s loins. There’s even a sub-genre of fiction on Goodreads called “Competency Boner”, with titles like Once A Fallen Lady and Wrapped Up With A Ranger. It’s scarcely reassuring that capacities basic to human functioning are now being treated by some as a niche sexual fetish, to be ranked alongside a penchant for latex or Lily Allen’s feet, but that’s apparently the world we live in now. For all I know, OnlyFans is full of pay-per-view videos of people competently changing bicycle tires or descaling kettles; when it comes to fathoming the soundless depths of the human libido, I wouldn’t be surprised.

And I also regret to inform readers that there is a small but perfectly formed category of softcore fanfiction out there called “Sir Keir Starmer stories”, from which probably the cleanest bit I can quote is: “My knee still hurts from the football match. But my hands are fine.” It’s surely only a matter of time before the two genres merge and we get a fictional Sir Keir winning a steamy tussle with the Blob over planning reform. Who knows: perhaps in time, people with “competence kinks” will even come to displace asexuals and furries as the edgy new identity at Pride, in which case an entire generation of gay men and lesbians will be able to sigh gratefully with relief. At the beginning of a new regime, everything glows with what the non-fictional Starmer called “the sunlight of hope” during his first speech last week, using a boring metaphor perfectly competently.

But it’s not just Moran feeling it. In this time of growing civilisational chaos, a companion yearning for competence is rising. The education system and many workplaces are obsessed with something called “competence-based education”, specifying behavioural or learning outcomes that have to be demonstrated rather than bits of knowledge that have to be grasped. Some educationalists have argued that, perversely, an obsession with competence in an educational system produces more incompetent people not fewer, since at most they learn to fulfil basic requirements instead of getting really good at things, and they don’t typically get to use any creativity or initiative in doing so.

If this were true, it would be a perfect example of the way in which the people in charge of us these days — including, of course, our recent politicians — only seem to be able to think one or two chess moves ahead of their own initially flashy-sounding decisions, introduced with great fanfare to solve some problem that ends up being made much worse. In a world of frogs, anything vaguely humanoid can look like a prince. If Labour under Starmer can think even five moves ahead of their future decisions — about housing, the economy, the justice system, defence, education, social care, sewage, the NHS, infrastructure, prisons, and all the messy rest of it — I promise I’ll write a highly charged erotic poem to the Surrey man myself.

view comments

Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/