Fling on an Adidas hoodie and just boogie woogie with me
September 18, 2006 10:44
Last month, Capital & Coast District Health Board sent forth a proposal that would ban the wearing of hoodies inside Wellington Hospital. A week ago, Hawke’s Bay Hospital proposed an identical move. Many shops and businesses throughout the country have enforced similar measures in the recent past. Critic’s Dan Semo asks, WTF?
It happened just the other day. A nice day, I remember. I was on my way out of the house in the morning – the sun was out, the air was light, and a hint of late-winter breeze tickled fallen leaves across the ground. As I reached out my hand to open the front door, I felt a faint vibration flowing through the door-handle. I could then hear a low, deep rumble building up, punctuated by high-pitched screams and the thuds of small explosions. Looking out into the distance, over the southern hills, I caught my first glimpse of them. I had never seen them firsthand, but I had definitely heard things. A band – hell, an army! – of nihilist degenerates set loose, all high on BZP and drunk on their own perversion, with chains and broken bottles in hand, ready to wreak havoc across the peaceful suburbs. Freaks of all kinds coming together in a quest for chaos and destruction, sharing nothing but an apocalyptic vision and a common emblem – that dreaded cloak of malice; that shield from reality; that… ‘hoodie’.
Actually, none of that last part is true. There are no mobs or bands of freaks out there hell-bent on terrorising the population. But based on the security policies within many stores and shopping centres across the country, you wouldn’t know it.
WTF?
An increasing number of businesses in New Zealand are now enforcing bans on what they consider to be “threatening and intimidating” apparel – with the simple hooded top standing out on top of their black list. Most stores present these moves as pure security measures, aimed at making it tough for potential perpetrators to avoid detection and identification. Rules vary from place – the Warehouse on South Dunedin, for example, allows the tops to be worn, but only with the hood down. Most establishments, however, have no such rules (at least none framed as explicitly) for baseball caps, sunglasses, raincoats, veils, burqas, the Groucho Marx-style moustache-and-glasses, or any other item which could conceivably be used to avoid detection. What’s more, a lot of these stores often happen to sell hooded tops themselves. So it is clear that it is not so much the hoodie itself that is the problem, but what the hoodie represents. Or at least what some people may think it represents.
The public furore over the hoodie can be traced back a few years to the United Kingdom. The issue grabbed the headlines when, in May 2005, the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent, the largest in the UK, enacted a new Code of Conduct whereby shoppers donning hoodies or baseball caps could be banned from the premises. PM Tony Blair himself supported the move, in a typical piece of tough-on-crime electoral posturing designed to communicate the message that New Labour aren’t just a bunch of bleeding-heart liberal pussies. Blair denounced the “loss of respect” in society and stated that “yobbish behaviour will not be tolerated anymore.” Earlier this year, his Party went as far as ridiculing the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, for having the temerity to look beyond the clothing and instead question the underlying causes of youth crime – with Home Office Minister Tony McNulty accusing Cameron of sending out a “hug-a-hoodie message.”
“Begun, this Hoodie War has.”
New Zealand has also been quick to join the ranks in the Hoodie Wars. The Coastlands Shoppingtown mall in Paraparaumu enacted their own ban last year, applying not only to common areas in and around the mall, but to all stores within it. Coastlands manager John Carroll believes the ban has had a “positive effect,” with customer and retailers telling him that they feeling safer and less intimidated. In Dunedin, similar policies are coming into effect, albeit in an unpredictable, hodge-podge fashion. South Dunedin shopping centre has a ban, but the Meridian Mall doesn’t. The Warehouse also has one, but Warehouse Stationery doesn’t.
The legality of any of these policies is not really the issue – private businesses have a right to enforce any dress codes or regulations within their premises as they see fit. Bars and nightclubs have done so for years, as many jandal-and-wifebeater wearers among us can attest. The cases of Wellington Hospital and Hawke’s Bay Hospital are slightly more complex, because it would seem to be the first instance of such a policy being implemented at a public facility, rather than the usual private settings. As such, a question could be raised as to whether this constitutes a breach of Section 14 of the Bill of Rights Act (i.e. the right to freedom of expression). Nicola Wheen, lecturer in Public Law at Otago, notes that under Section 5 of the Act, institutions that perform a public function must set “reasonable limits prescribed through the legislation,” and that, if complaints were to be made, “the courts have to balance the extent of the intrusion onto your freedom of expression versus the need to address the perceived threat.”
Capital & Coast DHB Chief Operating Officer Meng Cheong comments that “this proposal is one of many proposals for changes to our internal security policy. Currently we are gathering feedback on all of these proposals from our staff and advisors,” and notes that they “have not yet made decisions about any of the proposals.”
Yoofs, hoods and chavs
Rather than legality, the more intriguing question in this controversy is one of motive. In the case of private businesses, what is it that makes them feel so threatened that they would discriminate against potential customers? Are the threats they face so grave these days? According to official police statistics, instances of theft (and crime in general) have been decreasing steadily through the past number of years – since 2000, the Southern District, which includes Dunedin, has seen a 32% reduction in recorded cases of theft (excluding car theft). This may be well be due in part to businesses failing to report instances of theft; but taking into consideration the constant improvement in technology and security measures available to retailers, it is clear that, at the very least, there is no real reason to panic. It is not as if we are in the cusp of a sudden surge of criminality, which is forcing businesses into drastic measures in order to contain it.
Then there is then is the second part of the equation to consider – the “threat and intimidation” component. Chief Operating Officer Cheong notes that the “the average monthly number of violent events against staff was 14,” and believes that Wellington Hospital’s security policy “needs to reflect the fact that violence, abuse and intimidation, along with any other unacceptable behaviour will not be tolerated on our sites. Our policy sets out processes related to known and probable security risks.” In addition, Emergency Service Department Leader Dr. Philip Mayes notes that “abuse and intimidation occur on a daily basis for staff in ED. It is more likely to occur during the evenings and weekends and be fuelled by alcohol/drug use.” He also observes that “staff have to put up with being sworn at and having personal, racist, and sexist comments made about them” on a regular basis.
One should not downplay the threat of unruly customers and patrons, especially in a venue of such high-stress and pressure as a hospital. It would be difficult to dispute that, as Cheong claims, there is a problem; but it must not be forgotten that it is a behavioural problem. To simply associate the behaviour with an item of clothing seems a little facile and simplistic. Barry Wilson, from the Auckland Council of Civil Liberties, believes that the hospital has a right and duty to maintain order and enforce rules of conduct within its premises, but questions whether it is “reasonable to trespass someone solely on the basis of what they are wearing.”
The difficulty here is that feelings of threat and intimidation are subjective notions, stemming as much from the one allegedly doing the intimidation as the one being intimidated. Many of those feelings are brought about by the associations commonly made by society regarding the nature of hoodie-wearers. In the UK, the hoodie is commonly association with the nascent ‘chav’ subculture, whose members are typically portrayed as loud, anti-social dole bludgers wasting their lives outside fast-food restaurants and shopping centres. However, in New Zealand, the hoodie has now become so common, that what one really smells is the distinct whiff of old-fogeyism. In many ways, the hoodie now represents what the leather jacket did in the 50s, and the tattoo and piercing did in the 60s and 70s – an emblem of youth, in all its glory. An unconformist, contrarian, and (yes, at times) quite loutish youth.
Does it matter what people really think?
Critic went into Meridian Mall and asked shoppers what they thought about hoodies. The responses we got depended heavily on how the question was loaded. Ask people about about the hoodie, the clothing item, and you hear words like “comfortable” and “warm.” Ask them if they find the hoodie threatening or intimidating, on the other hand, and most people would agree that they do. So it seems that rather than strict old-fogeyism, what many of these stores seem to be engaged in is a sort of pre-emptive old-fogeyism, where policy is defined not necessarily by what customers (old or otherwise) might think and feel, but what these stores believe customers might think and feel. And by acting on those suppositions (through the enforcement of bans), stores could be said to be perpetuating a stereotype and conditioning the population to see hoodie (and hoodie-wearers) as threatening and untrustworthy.
So is this whole hoodie ban a big deal? Probably not. It is always easy to play all kinds of slippery-slope games around an issue like this, but the truth is most people just don’t care that much. The majority of us are either too busy or too self-absorbed to raise a stink about little symbolic measures like this, and will acquiesce to any requests and go about our usual business. It is really only an issue if people want to make it an issue, and there are few seem to want to. Eventually, it will most likely lose all relevance – either because hoodies will fade out of fashion, or because the debate could easily morph and move across into deeper, more politically-charged waters. Simply substitute “hoodie” with “burqa” in the equation and you see how thorny things could get.
Besides, whatever happened to those tried-and-true methods of security and prevention of the past? Why can’t store staff just resort to what they did for years and years when faced with perceived threats – stand suspiciously behind them, constantly asking them if they need any help, and then giving them the stink-eye until the poor saps feel so uncomfortable that they have walk out of the store? It’s worked before. I can’t see why it shouldn’t work again.
