Charity is not about your face. Nor is it about your nipples, or your lack of makeup, or a bucket of bloody ice.
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I unfollowed Jemima Khan on Twitter this week, which made me kind of sad, because I like jemima khan. I'm sure it didn't make jemima sad. A longshot perhaps, but I'm pretty fucking certain she didn't notice. Imagine that. The reason I unfollowed jemima was because of a new campaign called wakeupcall, one that veers so close to satire, you'd think it WAS satire if not for the fact that even satirists seem to get coy when it comes to the kind of thing that benefits a cause.
For those who don't know (and I know you all know but I'm pretending I'm writing a proper article here), wakeupcall features celebrities and other such genetically improbable people taking selfies first thing, to raise money for people in Syria. It was spearheaded by jemima Khan, and is basically that obnoxious Beyoncé line from Flawless except, y'know, it makes money for people in Syria. So it's, uh, different.
Now I don't live in Syria, and besides reading the odd guardian article and watching a harrowing vice video I'd urge anyone to see, I haven't followed the crisis as closely as I maybe I could have. As a result, I'm totally open to being told I'm wrong about it. All of it. Infact, I would actively welcome being told I'm wrong when I say that I fail to see the link between hot celebs showing us just how hot they are, just like, naturally, and uh, vice's footage of infants with their insides spilling out.
Im not a total shit; I know it's bad form to knock things that raise money. When there's so many people being so terrible in the world, why fight something that tries to do good? I mean, these things raise money for charity - and a lot of it, too, if my Facebook friends are to be believed (and generally they're not but for the sake of argument and all that). I accept these points and I can't argue with them. I just think it would be nice if we could do it more, I don't know, discretely.
Its not to say I hate social networks, either. in my secretly optimistic way, I think social media is fucking great. Sure, it's bred a culture of narcissism but as a classic self-loather, I'm for anything that makes you feel better about yourself. Triple-filters, deleted tweets-retweeted tweets-deleted retweets, whatever, so be it. Recently I was thinking about why I couldn't ever do stand up comedy and it boiled down to the fact I can write stuff I think is funny but I can't deliver it. It's exactly the kind of discrepancy social media was made for. With Twitter and Instagram and, to a lesser extent. Facebook, the infrastructure is in place to fucking own it, whoever you are, so own it, own it some more and own it to fuck when the haters come out (and they will).
The other argument would be that I'm "jealous". The stupidity of that argument is fuel for a blog post of its own, and yet it's not totally unfounded; when Alexa Chung slaps an earlybird on an already gorgeous IG, I definitely feel a thing. But it isn't really jealousy; more a mix of awe and bafflement, with a hint of the horn. Besides, in a totally non-Alexa way, I scrub up alright with the help of expensive makeup and a generous filter, just like everyone else that isn't jemima khan (whose 4am, naked cheekbones could plausibly slice through a CCTV camera all by themselves) For me personally, it's just I'm lazy as fuck and all the people I fancy are at their best when then they're dishevelled as hell, so I figure why bother. It's the kind of thing I convince myself everyone feels, until I realise I'm probably the only person on the subway who's not sure if they own a comb or not.
My point is that these campaigns amount to narcissism disguised as altruism. A cynic would argue that it's the logical progression of activism in the Facebook age. A cynic might be right. Wakeupcall is not actively damaging; infact it's ultimately helpful. It's just there's something kind of off about it. Perhaps it's an issue of taste. Call me a traditionalist, but charity just ain't charity when it gets more likes than donations.
