Volume control

I’m writing a long-form piece about Mumsnet at the moment (more about that in a few months), so I’ve been thinking about my time there a lot. One thing I’ve realised is that I was ill-suited to being a forum moderator. This wasn’t apparent to me at the time, because I was good at the process elements: replying to emails, having meetings, knowing the rules — goodness me, did I know the rules. The problem was that I was far too eager to impose myself.

Moderators are basically school prefects: small-time, small-stakes functionaries in enclosed communities. Both roles, in the wrong hands, lead to endless pettifogging. In the same year that I was a prefect at school, the Head Girl, Rachel, was a friendly and mildly rebellious Siouxsie Sioux fan. I spent the year enthusiastically patrolling the corridors, taking names; Rachel spent the year calmly hanging out with her mates, spreading bonhomie. Rachel would have been great at moderation, whereas I should have pursued a career in speed camera calibration. This is all summed up by an old internet graphic showing the layers of Hell from Dante’s Inferno — little segments labelled ‘lust’, ‘treachery’ etc — on which someone had drawn an additional, giant segment labelled ‘PEOPLE WHO ASK TO BE MODS’. People who want to be mods are exactly the people who should not be mods.

The other way in which I was ill-suited to being a moderator is that I am fundamentally icked out by people who cannot get a goddamned grip on themselves. I find — I’m just being recklessly frank here — I find these people enraging, and I think they should be punished. But the thing about large internet communities is that at any given moment, they contain several thousand people who have catastrophically mislaid their grip: because their marriage is breaking down, because someone was doing 35pmh in a 50 zone, because next-door’s dog is a yapper. To be a good moderator, you have to have to actively practise high-level empathy for bed-wetters, rage-mongers, self-pityers and drama queens. You have to know that these things are normal, and usually temporary. This was beyond me.

It was Tobias who first noticed how unbearably infuriated I become when I see other people losing their shit. We were watching Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), which somehow I had never seen before. Ominously, the title dispenses with ‘Charlie’ and instead goes all-in on Willie Wonka. Gene Wilder’s performance as the eponymous child-murderer had an electric effect on me; all that contralto screaming made me beat against the walls like a giant moth. Since then, I’ve realised three things. First, I have a very low tolerance for shouting and screaming. Second, I cannot watch films with top notes of agitation and/or hysteria. And third, I hate Gene Wilder in everything. Seriously, keep that man away from me.

After that, a lot of past experiences made sense. At university there was a film club that showed classic movies in a lecture theatre with raked seating, which was where I first saw Citizen Kane (1941). And while I could see it was very good, blah blah, the scene towards the end in which Dorothy Comingore has a screaming fit had me vaulting over the desks and running for the exit.

Another mis-step was Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) which, clearly, I should have avoided on the basis of its title alone. I was trapped in a cinema for that one, wedged in the middle of the row. The only way I could stop myself from breaking something was to stuff tissues in my ears and refuse to look at the screen. Now, at least, I know why I cannot bear Almodovar films: everyone is screaming, all of the fucking time.

Woody Allen always makes me feel like Quincy Jones trapped in a studio with Michael Jackson: STOP YELPING, MOTHERFUCKER. I can’t watch dramas made in the 1930s (something to do with nascent sound technology, I think: it’s either sticky-mouth murmuring or trebly screeching). And I can’t bear all those ‘60s Euro farces, stuffed to the pastel nylon gills with frantic people who have absolutely no grip on themselves.

Now, I suspect some of you will be reading this and thinking that I might have some level of neurodivergence. And who knows: you could be right. As well as being a big fan of rules, and hating loud noises and screamy people, I also dislike restrictive clothing, unfamiliar foods, and things that are wet. So perhaps signs point to ‘yes’. But given I’ve survived into my 50s mostly unscathed, I’m not trying to claim any sort of special consideration here. I’m happy to concede that I’m unusually intolerant, and that this is very much a ‘me’ problem.

What I do think is that there’s something interesting about how literal, figurative and emotional noise is tied up with ideas about self-control, and ideas about class.

Very early on, my mother taught me that uncontrolled emotional expression — which tends to involve making a lot of noise — was infra dig. My brother got away with absolute murder on this score, so maybe there was some internalised misogyny here. But in fairness, I think my mother’s background also had a lot to do with it. In the working class community where she had grown up, things were different for girls. Consequential judgements were made about people — especially female people — who shouted in the street. Girls with poor impulse control tended to get pregnant early and became trapped in bad marriages and dead-end jobs. Self-disciplined girls were rewarded with O Levels and some choices.

My mother was determined that I should never be mistaken for One of Those Girls. Screaming and shouting were absolutely forbidden to me because they spoke of a loss of control, and vulgarity. And so I was painfully taught to get a grip on myself, one slowly diminishing tantrum at a time. Now, whenever I see someone losing their shit, my one thought is: I had to learn not to do that, so why didn’t you? I have the same feeling whenever I see a spoiled child who isn’t being smacked on the back of the legs. Basically, I’m bitter. If the UK ever descends into fascism, you’d better locate me quickly and shoot me through the neck before I get appointed to any kind of tribunal.

There’s a whole load of stuff in there about how volume levels relate to privacy — to the desirability of everyone minding their own business — and how both operate as class signifiers. Any given suburban evening allows a complete taxonomy of your neighbours’ class aspirations, from the affogatto clinks of the striving middles to to the prosecco halloos of the hot-tub brigade. Truly rich people live so far away from everyone else that none of us have any idea what they’re doing, or at what volume, but let’s face it: whenever you encounter them in large numbers, they are bloody loud.

And of course there’s a thread of ancient sexism here, as described by Mary Beard in Women and Power (2018). Male voices are relatively low and rich; this is the timbre of authority and reason. Women’s voices are higher and thinner; they are associated with cowardice and uncertainty. And when we scream, we set off nerve endings that male voices cannot reach.

The other evening, as I was trying to work, a little girl down the street was practising screaming, in the way little girls do. (I think there’s a moment in any little girl’s life when she realises that this noise is something her brother or father cannot achieve.) Just in case you’re about to call the police, I’m almost certain this wasn’t distressed screaming: it was confident, experimental. After a while I took the Zen approach: I stopped trying to do anything else, and began to actively listen: she has stopped screaming; I can hear cars in the distance; she has started screaming again. There was something liberating about it. For her, if not for me. It had a sense of physicality, something embodied. By the time it stopped for good — presumably because someone stuffed her into a sofa cushion or trapped her under something heavy — I had almost made my peace with it.

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For more on the esoteric rules of the British class system: