Looking in the mirror, we have the chance to see ourselves as others see us. Experiments show children taking fewer sweets from a bowl placed in front of a mirror because their own reflection reminds them not to be greedy. They become ‘self’-conscious. Our plays and films hold the mirror up to nature, letting us see how we really are from a third person perspective. But when Alice passes through the looking glass, she finds a distorted, fantastical version of reality on the other side. Recent films encourage us to follow Alice through the glass. Purporting to reflect reality, they provide an illusion of self-consciousness at the same time as escape into fantasy. In this false self-consciousness, we know the consequences of our actions, but are allowed to maintain the fantasy that they will not happen.

‘Our plays and films hold the mirror up to nature, letting us see how we really are from a third person perspective’

In the film Precious, an abused, overweight teenager with two children achieves redemption and escapes the clutches of an evil mother. Ostensibly, the film holds up the mirror to child abuse and poverty. Yet, when her hard working high school headmistress engineers a fresh start she takes us through the mirror to a fantasy reflection of that world. Precious’s fresh start is in a special class with an inspirational, beautiful teacher: she has her second child in a clean hospital room with plenty of space for her friends to come and hang out: she gets counselling from a wise, thoughtful – and yes, young and attractive – woman at the Citizens Advice bureau who confronts the mother in the film’s dénouement.

Society pulls out all the stops for Precious, but it is up to her not to succumb, not to perpetuate the cycle of abuse and not to abuse the state through wilful welfare dependency. The film closes as Precious walks free, carrying her kids into the crowd. Walking out of the film back through the mirror into the real world, she will be utterly ill equipped to raise them. The mythically nurturing state will indeed enforce a clear answer to the question “Who’s responsible?”: it’s up to you, Precious. You’re on your own now. Society holds the mirror up to itself, knows that it fails 99 out of 100 Precious’s, but stays on the other side of the mirror where individual redemption relieves society of responsibility.

The parallel of reality and fantasy is the central structure of the film Avatar. Ostensibly, the film delivers a clear Malthusian message. Humanity is destroying the planet through excessive consumption and neglect of the natural environment. The good guys are the indigenous aliens (read blue Native Americans) and the bad guys are the capitalist invaders (white Europeans). A few of the invaders are able to pass through the looking glass to the prelapsarian world beyond. The main protagonist is a crippled marine. On the other side, as one of the blue aliens, he is redeemed and recovers his powers: he helps the locals expel the invaders and elects to stay permanently.

Watching, we are able to pretend that we are conscious of what we are doing to the planet. But, by following him through the looking glass we can pretend that it is not actually us destroying Eden. We do not identify ourselves as the dishevelled crowd herded into their spaceships, forced to return to a now brown Earth at the end of the film.

‘Expect more of this false self-consciousness. More of this having our cake and eating it’

Expect more of this false self-consciousness. More of this having our cake and eating it. As individuals we are adept at recognising our virtues, of trumpeting our successes; and we are just as good at wishing away our vices and placing the blame for our failures on others. As a society, we do the same. Democracy intensifies this process. Our politicians must flatter us to win our votes; must promise us more hospitals without asking us to accept the cost. Our films must tell us that we do look after the disadvantaged like Precious: so that those that do not redeem themselves can be held responsible for their own fate. Our debates over climate change will continue to reassure us that we are playing our part, even as we blame others for not playing their’s.

As an undergraduate I was fortunate to have tutorials with Mary Warnock, looking at Plato. I read Karl Popper’s criticism of the false consciousness of the shadows in Plato’s cave and also of Marx’ theory of false consciousness. For Popper, these critiques of human reason inevitably led to Plato and Marx’ totalitarian prescriptions. Today the field has been set for the same arguments again. This modern false self-consciousness is clearly pernicious, but who has the right to tell people what to think?

As I get older, I get more and more worried about the general sense of university as the best days of your life. I mean, Oxford has exceeded my expectations by yards, and yet I still sometimes get that itchy sense that my life just isn’t as good as how I want to be able to say it was, in twenty years time. And talking to Simon Reynolds, that feeling is back with bells on. He’s one of the most interesting music journalists Britain has, and yet he went to university in a town which (let’s face it) lacks the kind of interest in its music scene which would spark the fascination of a twenty-something who had ‘the absolute fixed notion I was going to be a music journalist’.

‘Music on a national level, and the music papers, above all the NME inspired me to want to do music journalism’

From asking about his experiences, Oxford seems a bit more glistening. I start by questioning him about the music scene when he was here. He lists the Oxford Apollo (now the New Theatre), and a slightly more exciting-sounding ‘discotheque called Scamps’. But even with a few exciting names popping up – The Smiths, for example, or Elvis Costello – Reynolds notes that it wasn’t the music scene in Oxford that really got him into music journalism, but rather ‘music on a national level, and the music papers, above all the NME, that inspired me to want to do music journalism’.

But it isn’t the music scene that I’m envious of, even if being able to roll off – as he can – that I had seen The Fall ‘at their absolute most fierce, dense, discordant, impenetrable’. It’s rather the general sense that he gives of his time here, how his major influences were his friends; ‘a bunch of misfit, intellectual types’, which included a best friend who was ‘doing a dissertation that involved Derrida and deconstruction’, and another who was a ‘full-on feminist’. It seems for Reynolds, Oxford’s main impact on his life was that it provided the opportunity for making friends and having fun and, as he puts it, ‘the adventure of being a young adult away from home for the first time, and all the socialising and just doing things like staying up all night talking’.

But from a man as astute and eloquent as Reynolds, it’s hard to believe that if it wasn’t the History degree (he was at Brasenose in the early 80s) which gave him his way with words, he must have been ‘staying up all night talking’ about something pretty interesting.

He was also influenced by books, he concedes, but mainly ‘those I would read in my spare time’, mainly ‘a lot of French critical theory – Foucault, Barthes, etc – and also subcultural theory and academic work on pop culture’. Talking about his work later he says that ‘post-structuralism and the French critical crew had a big influence on me’. His main regret reflects a similar tendency for diversity and intellectual curiosity; he wishes that he ‘had taken advantage of stuff at Oxford, like going to lectures that weren’t on my course’.

Reynolds also avoided the traditional journalistic channels in Oxford, though not – as he notes – as an act of ‘defiance’, and instead published his first fanzine while here. This was a production called Margin that they attempted to start as a full zine but became a ‘wall poster that was in every college and all over town’. This developed after he graduated (though still in Oxford) into another called Monitor, which he took to London.

‘Independent production in the music industry generates a lot of crap and just middling stuff’

Having had this experience, I ask him how he considers independent production more generally. For him, independent production gave the chance to create something with ‘a really potent hit of what you’re about’, and gives you something different, ‘as opposed to being dispersed amid a sea of other text’. However, despite this positivity, he seems a lot less enthusiastic about the idea of independent production in the music industry. ‘It’s good,’ he concedes, but it ‘generates a lot of crap and just middling stuff’, with a ‘ratio that is better than the non-independent production by not that much’.

It seems that he is objecting not to the concept of independent production – something which should be appreciated for its role as ‘an outlet for a lot of weirdo perspectives that would otherwise not get out there’ – rather the idea that independent is equivalent to interesting or original.

‘The interesting zone in music is where the underground breaks into the mainstream’

And it is originality which he seems most enthusiastic about – in both of his chosen fields, music and journalism. A desire for newness infects his unprecedented style of his serious zine (‘it looked so unlike any other fanzine at the time… which was our intent’) to his current opinions on music. The ‘interesting zone’ in music is where ‘the underground breaks into the mainstream’, incidents such as ‘The Smiths getting on to Top of the Pops and gatecrashing the happy-happy vapidity of it all’, ‘rap busting onto MTV’ or the unexpected success of grime.It is where the rebellion of the underground infiltrates and impacts on the commercial world where music gets really interesting.

In his journalism, the same emphasis on difference breaking and changing the tendencies of the mainstream is equally apparent. I ask him about the influence of the internet on his work – widely recognised as the biggest change in the way we write and read since, perhaps, the printing press – and he doesn’t seem that bothered by it; ‘I haven’t noticed it much myself’, he says, except the newness of the ‘sense that opinions have a definite sell-by date’. This is perhaps because of the originality of his work, even where he writes online content, such as his recent blogs for the Guardian, it is often ‘really, really long’, and in this he may be ‘unconsciously bucking the trend for brevity and the twitter-length opinion’.

Reynolds is refreshingly un-snobbish for a music writer, referring, for example, to the most indulgent creators and consumers of underground music as ‘closer to the snooty end of the mainstream’ than they think; ‘a kind of hip snobbery and self-distinction through acts of discerning consumption’. Like his descriptions of his time at Oxford, Reynolds seems more concerned about making his portraits of music accessible, while retaining the qualities of desirability and enviability on which the underground culture so heavily and exclusively relies.

What is the history of the Falklands Islands?

The war of 1982 did not settle the dispute, and the Argentine claim persists: no conceivable Argentine government will ever renounce it. Since 1982 Argentine governments have oscillated in their policy towards the islands, from a “charm offensive” towards the islanders and collaboration over fisheries and other matters under President Menem and Foreign Minister Guido di Tella, to a harder line under the present government of Cristina Kirchner. Her government has ended previous cooperation, has protested the current oil exploration and threatens some bureaucratic harrassment of shipping in the region, but has renounced any show of force in favour of a diplomatic offensive. She has had some success in the recent meeting of Latin American and Caribbean heads of state in Mexico, where they all supported the Argentine sovereignty claim. This contrasts with 1982, when a number of them, notably Chile, Brazil and Colombia, clearly opposed the Argentine recourse to force. It means that Great Britain will have a somewhat harder time in the UN, where the annual exchange in the decolonization committee has hitherto been something of a ritual.

What is the current Argentine policy towards the Falkland Islands?

The war of 1982 did not settle the dispute, and the Argentine claim persists: no conceivable Argentine government will ever renounce it. Since 1982 Argentine governments have oscillated in their policy towards the islands, from a “charm offensive” towards the islanders and collaboration over fisheries and other matters under President Menem and Foreign Minister Guido di Tella, to a harder line under the present government of Cristina Kirchner.

Her government has ended previous cooperation, has protested the current oil exploration and threatens some bureaucratic harrassment of shipping in the region, but has renounced any show of force in favour of a diplomatic offensive. She has had some success in the recent meeting of Latin American and Caribbean heads of state in Mexico, where they all supported the Argentine sovereignty claim. This contrasts with 1982, when a number of them, notably Chile, Brazil and Colombia, clearly opposed the Argentine recourse to force. It means that Great Britain will have a somewhat harder time in the UN, where the annual exchange in the decolonization committee has hitherto been something of a ritual.

Do the Argentineans want the oil as well?

Obvious enough – Argentina is bound to resent the unilateral exploitation of natural resources by the British or the islanders in what she regards as her maritime waters: Oil, a finite resource, is also a much more visceral matter than fish. The British government naturally says it has no doubts about its position in international law – no government ever admits such doubts. It has also taken discreet measures to ensure against any possible Argentine interference, and will dismiss any diplomatic cost as negligible.

Why does Britain want to retain control over the Falkland Islands?

In the aftermath of the war of 1982 no British government will risk outraging public opinion by appearing soft on the question of sovereignty – the political price of that has always been high – it was so on several occasions before 1982, and after the war of course it would be much higher for any government that would be foolhardy enough to risk it. That is the main reason. There are other ones as well: support for the principle of self-determination for the islanders, access to the Antarctic … even perhaps in some minds oil.

How much oil and gas is there?

Wait and see. Watch the share price of Desire.

Malcolm Deas is a retired tutor in history at St Anthony’s College

She is best described as an anomaly; a nation bound to fail but which somehow manages to wriggle on. Poverty, unemployment, religious heterogeneity, cultural diversity and corruption aren’t usually the ingredients of a democratic nation.

‘India ridicules political theorists and their insightful axioms of what is required for success’

Throughout the 60 years that India has remained a republic there have been a plethora of enthusiastic predictions all drawing the same conclusion: doom. With every death of a Prime Minister it has been prophesized that anarchy will replace democracy; after every religious riot the disintegration of a united India expected; with every failure of the monsoons destructive famine anticipated. India ridicules political theorists and their insightful axioms of what is required for success.

Today India is the recipient of laud and invokes deference. The integration of the princely states into a singular nation pre-independence, the division of a mighty nation into the dominions of India and Pakistan, the Pathan invasion of Kashmir, the communal riots that rocked partition and communist threats are all itches that have been scratched. India has a booming economy, her judiciary sets precedents, her elections are free and fair and her fourth estate is steadfast in uncovering the latest political ‘masala’. Dissent is rarely confused with disloyalty. Education systems, while imperfect, are improving. The intellectual rigour of the diverse Indian populace allows them to criticize their fellow nationals without resulting in Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’.

Praise is an excellent way to encourage, but we must avoid encouraging complacency. India’s progress ought to leave a lot to be desired by her citizens who have become comfortable with the present. Where once stood the eloquent and loquacious Nehru demanding change, today demagogic rhetoric dominates the airwaves. Communal influences once divided India, today religious leaders unite to restrict sexual liberties. Instead of sagacious patriots and bold nationalists, today we have corrupt politicians. Where there once stood ‘Ahimsa’, today stands aggressive foreign policies intent on securing India’s position as a nuclear vixen.

‘Catching up with the world has lowered her voracious appetite for progress’

Where once stood a mighty nation, today stands a nation that is far too comfortable with where it is. Catching up with the world has lowered her voracious appetite for progress. If despite staggering odds, India has progressed, it is also necessary that she soon overtake her privileged counterparts and to do so it is exigent that Indians recognize their apathy for the present.

Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian, ended ‘India after Gandhi’ with ‘Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men’. So long as we can kindle the flickering passion for reform, so long as there are intrepid thinkers who can point out our deceleration, so long as we can tolerate criticism, India can hold her role as the world’s largest democracy. The climax of India’s history is still to be written.

Jess Shepherd, JCR secretary, Keble

‘Oxford clubs should follow Thirst Lodge’s example’

Over the past few weeks, we’ve all been subjected to the pontificating of those who are outraged/mortified/secretly titillated about the recent decision of Thirst Lodge to apply for a license to offer services of the lap-dancing and stripping variety. Ooh-er! Such activities are linked to the rise of crime in the area, to men seeing women as merely sexual objects, and to the seedy underworld of human trafficking and prostitution – this is what we are told, in tones of horror and despair, by those who so vehemently oppose the granting of the license. There are 826 such individuals on Facebook, at the last count.I worry, though, that they are all missing the point completely and failing to see how much of a revolution, nay, blessing, this license could be for the student body of Oxford.

Nudity, stripping and overt sexual displays are a common feature, or bane, depending on your point of view, of life beneath the dreaming spires. How could it fail to be, when we are surrounded by rugby boys playing at being men, and fresher girls who have discovered the dance floor for the first time? When you add the omnipresent double vodka and energy to be found in every hole we kindly refer to as ‘clubs’, you invariably end up with a situation far worse than that of dusky maidens, soft of thigh and moist of lip, twirling and swirling their bottoms in your face. At least they’re sexy, unlike the blank-eyed and slurring specimens you find at Escape, who, after a few too many of the suspicious ‘free’ shots, see a pole and think they’re the Next Big Thing. At least they’re easy on the eye, unlike the rugby squad who can’t help but display their fine muscle-coated-in-chub physiques as they run around the quad after…oh, a few too many of the suspicious ‘free’ shots.

I hope all the ‘clubs’ in Oxford decide to follow Thirst Lodge’s stellar example, since employing women to get their bits out for the punters’ benefit means I won’t have to witness the vile sights of Park End’s finest who currently have no choice but to take it upon themselves to entertain the masses.

There is a world, sadly just beyond our reach at the moment, where the only flesh I have to see is that of only the finest, sparkiest girls, who are toned, voluptuous, and most of all, absolutely well fit – and that is a world I desperately, desperately want to live in. Let’s grab this unique opportunity, please – licenses all round!

Jay Bernard, WomCam Committee, Oriel

‘Thirst Lodge reinforces objectification of women’

The photograph on the facebook page of the campaign against a potential lap-dancing club at Thirst Lodge reads “I can’t believe we still have to protest this crap!” Wry as it is, the point is that despite decades of campaigns, the glaringly obvious is still ignored: granting a license to Thirst Lodge re-enforces the idea that women are sexual objects to be bought and sold by men. So obvious is this argument, that the first response is to highlight how dull, old-fashioned and prudish it is. But what it means is that despite the general understanding that such establishments are predicated upon the subordination of women, people are still willing to let them operate. In fact, until April 6th when the law finally changes, a lap-dancing club is in the same legal category as a café – not a ‘sex-encounter’ establishment – which means the process for selling naked women is the same as the process for selling a hot drink.

In an ideal world, this would be a good thing; buying and selling sexual encounters would be as controversial as having a cup of coffee. In the real world it is fraught with inequalities. Thirst Lodge’s club would cater exclusively to the straight, male libido, and even if they did decide to have the odd night for women, it would still play into the heteronormativity that characterises such establishments. Even if I wanted to spend an evening at the new club, as a queer-identified female, I’d have a hard time doing so. Men are encouraged to gratify their desires publicly and women, apparently, have none. This is not about demonising men – it is about the exploitative sexuality that is promoted to them. Safety is a concern – a report by Transport for London noted that “wherever lap-dance and strip clubs appear, women’s quality of life deteriorates…with increased reports of rape and increased fear of travelling as a result.”

Some argue that women can be empowered by lap-dancing – especially working-class mothers and students – because it pays better than a conventional job. This is true on an individual level but true economic empowerment doesn’t come by playing the part given by society, especially when society conflates freedom for women with the playboy bunny. A far deeper discussion about sex, sexuality and gender roles is required. No-one can overturn the double-standards inherent in Lap-dancing clubs overnight, but we can open our eyes to how places like Thirst Lodge might unthinkingly, perhaps inadvertently, re-enforce the objectification of women.