Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • One of these things is different from the other

    When Michael Phelps, who is a straight white man, became the most decorated Olympian of all time he was hailed as a “legend” and greeted with glowing newspaper profiles on how “a biomechanical freak of nature” had a competitive advantage over other athletes because he had a “body made to swim”.

    When Caster Semenya, who is a gay black woman, became an Olympic champion she was greeted with racist, misogynist, homophobic hatred and a vicious campaign that now means she  will be forced to alter her natural body chemistry in order to remove her competitive advantage over other athletes.

    I wonder if there’s some kind of explanation for the way in which Michael Phelps, who is a straight white man, was treated differently from Caster Semenya, who is a gay black woman. It’s a mystery!

  • Come friendly bombs, and fall on Brexit

    A picture tells a thousand words, especially this one.

    For me at least, most of the thousand words are swears.

  • “The gravitas of a tuck shop queue”

    Many newspapers have based their digital strategy on lazy clickbait: contrarianism, hyperbole and trivia. There’s just one problem with that. It’s a road to nowhere.

    Writing in The Irish Times, former Sunday Independent editor Anne Harris describes the new media operations of Ireland’s beleaguered Independent News & Media group.

    A decision was made to prioritise digital, and the strategy was called digital first. This could have worked out fine were the right decisions made. But digital first was profoundly flawed.

    INM opted for click-based journalism, thereby bringing it downmarket. The idea of click-based journalism is already redundant. And you don’t need to be a marketing genius to know that when you bring a product downmarket it is almost impossible to bring it back up. Added to that, the market is always reluctant to pay for what was once given free.

    As Harris rightly points out, if your plan is to get people to pay for your journalism via a paywall you need to give them content worth paying for.

    …journalistic quality is the sine qua non of a paywall, and that will prove extremely difficult to achieve in an organisation that has not prioritised talent for some years.

    (The title of this post comes from a Twitter user describing Scots newspapers’ social media feeds.)

  • Not in their name

    The writer Aidan Comerford, who’s ended up getting a lot of online abuse for being supportive of trans people, asked women who support trans rights to share their photos so he could put them in a collage. The collage was to show that the anti-trans crowd are not acting in their name.

    In just a few days, he’s received nearly 2,000 photos.

    Some days are hard. Things like this make them easier.

     

  • Taking victims’ phones is a step too far

    Today’s stupid ideas: rape victims should hand over their phones to police or have the investigations dropped.

    There are two big problems with this. One, it’s victim-blaming: the number of false allegations is incredibly low and massively overshadowed by the solid, evidence-backed allegations that don’t lead to prosecution. The idea that a victim’s communications history and social media should be demanded before investigating rape is despicable. It’s also a gift for defence lawyers who could ask for such history so they can try to paint the victim as somehow responsible for her own assault if she didn’t live the life of a Carmelite nun.

    Two, you can’t trust the police to get it back to you. I’m seeing lots of women on social media with tales of phones held by the police for as long as three years, three years in which the bills still had to be paid; one woman was hounded by a debt recovery agency over her Vodafone bill for a device the police kept for months. By the time it was finally returned, the hugely expensive phone had been in police hands for so long that it was effectively obsolete and completely worthless. As the woman put it on Twitter: “I had to make do with an old handset (not a smartphone, an ancient handset by today’s standards) on a pay-as-you-go basis until I could afford otherwise. Having been the victim of a crime, I now felt I was being punished for reporting it.”

  • Sometimes you surprise yourself

    Although I’m a musician, I haven’t performed in public for 15 years.

    It’s not about lack of opportunity; even if you aren’t in a band there are plenty of open mic nights around if you want to grab an instrument and play. It’s mainly because of crippling stage fright, something I used to address with that musician’s crutch, alcohol. The longer I went without performing the more frightening the prospect became.

    Last night, I played a short gig.

    It wasn’t just my first time performing in 15 years. It was my first since coming out, my first as a visibly trans woman, my first time standing in front of strangers under lights in a dress.

    I had an icy blast of fear during the day, but it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. Back then I’d be unable to concentrate all day, often nauseous and unable to eat because of the ice cold in the pit of my stomach. It would fade a bit once I was actually on stage, but the fight or flight response means that the most memorable gigs I ever played, I barely remember at all.

    But last night I wasn’t scared, just full of nervous excitement. I wasn’t full of booze, either. Just two medicinal whiskys for a cold that was threatening to take my voice away. I’d intended to take beta blockers, but I decided not to. I simply wasn’t as scared as I used to be.

    While the gig itself was in sad circumstances and one of the songs bassist Kenny and I played is terribly sad, I loved every second of it. It helped that the room was a positive one, there like us to remember a friend. But even in less friendly environments there is a buzz you get from playing live, from connecting with strangers through songs you wrote in isolation, from opening your heart in a strange room at high volume. That all came rushing back last night.

    Sometimes you don’t realise you’re missing something until you experience it again. Sometimes fear keeps you from the things you love, the things that give you life. For me, music is one of those things.

  • “Grieving for all those Alisons who never were”

    This, by artist Alison Wilgus, is wonderful and terribly sad at the same time. It’s a comic about “mourning the versions of ourselves that will never exist.”

    There’s a narrative you hear a lot about people who come out: they always knew. And that’s true for many, but not all. Some of us take a terribly long time to realise who we are, partly because it’s not always so obvious and mainly because we actively fight against it. And that means when we do finally put it all together and finally become ourselves, we do so late in life.

    That’s hard. It’s hard practically – coming out often means throwing a hand grenade into a life you’ve spent many years constructing, causing all kinds of devastation, and of course there are physical aspects too: it’s a lot harder to transition if you’re old, overweight and baggy than when you’re young and slim with great skin.

    But it’s harder emotionally. You find yourself looking backwards with a mix of sadness and sometimes anger, mourning the you you never were. It’s hard not to focus on what Wilgus describes as “the opportunities I’m never going to get back. The doors that feel like they’re closed to me.” There will always be huge gaps in your experience because you wasted so many years trying to live the wrong life.

     

  • “Basic facts have not been apparent in much of the media coverage”

    Writing in Bella Caledonia, Caitlin Logan describes the current backlash against trans people as evidence of widespread media failure.

    In Scotland, the conversation on trans rights started out as distinctly civil in comparison to our counterparts in England. Women’s organisations stood alongside LGBT campaigners in explaining why trans people can and should be included in their joint efforts for a more equal, safer and socially just Scotland. MSPs from across the political spectrum were photographed with ‘Equal Recognition’ campaign signs, demonstrating their support for reforms which seemed a fairly simple extension of progress which had already taken place with limited fanfare.

    It was as the public – media-driven – debate in England intensified that the Scottish media began to follow suit.

    … the news media has always been driven by competition to be the “most interesting”, but I fear that its decline in the digital age has spawned a whole new impetus to shock, to incite debate, and even to anger.

    …We are now witnessing, on multiple different issues, the political and personal consequences of a media strategy centred more on generating heat than shedding light, coupled with a disregard for clarifying whether the controversial opinions it platforms are even based in fact.

    It’s hard to express just how draining this poison is. Writer and activist Julia Serano is as sick of it as the rest of us are.

    We are now living through the biggest anti-#trans backlash since the 1970s. it’s been going on since at least 2016. it’s not just Republicans or evangelicals – it’s coming from numerous fronts. & most cis people seem entirely oblivious to it…

    …anyway, my point is, these cis people – often people very close to me – seem surprised that lots of people are still very much anti-trans. because they (the haters) have all since learned to couch their bigotry via buzz words about “biological sex” & “women’s safety” and “the science is still out on that” & so on.

    Logan:

    The media is not merely a mirror, reflecting society back at itself – it is part of society, and to ignore its own power in shaping the social and political dynamics it reports on is a dereliction of duty which can no longer stand.

  • Twitter: our rules don’t apply to white guys

    As Twitter continues to ignore calls to ban nazis from its platform, a leak provides one explanation: fear of collateral damage. Twitter fears that if it were to ban white supremacist hate speech, that might mean banning some US republican politicians. Politicians such as, er, the President of the United States.

    That fear only appears to apply if the collateral damage affects white people. According to Vice, reporting the claims of a disgruntled employee:

    When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

    In other words, it’s okay to have collateral damage if it affects brown people.

    Twitter denies it all, of course. But Twitter is awfully slow to act on hate speech when it’s perpetrated by white guys. Founder Jack Dorsey followed a number of alt-right demagogues on the service and won’t even say if he’d have a problem with Trump posting tweets calling for the murder of journalists. Vanity Fair:

    Dorsey has typically been evasive when questioned about banning white supremacists, only saying, “we’d certainly talk about it,” when asked point-blank if Trump asking his followers to murder journalists would warrant a ban.

    Twitter has become a megaphone for hatred: white supremacy in particular, but bigotry of all kinds. And it does appear to operate a double standard where members of minorities can be abused in horrendous ways and then kicked off the service if they dare to answer back.

    Last year, the actor Seth Rogen had a months-long conversation via Twitter direct messages with Dorsey about the problem of nazis and other white supremacists on the service. His conclusion:

    I’ve been DMing with @jack about his bizarre need to verify white supremacists on his platform for the last 8 months or so, and after all the exchanges, I’ve reached a conclusion: the dude simply does not seem to give a fuck.

  • The anti-vax movement is lethal

    Newspaper and internet scaremongering is so commonplace now that we’re numb to it, but we shouldn’t be. Some of this misinformation kills. The mainstreaming of anti-vaccination lunacy by newspapers such as the Daily Mail and later, idiots on social media, has seen vaccination levels drop and infection levels soar.

    In the UK, more than half a million children weren’t vaccinated between 2010 and 2017. Cases in England have quadrupled in the last year as vaccination levels have fallen. The WHO target is 95% vaccination of children, but in England it has fallen to 87.5%. We lose herd immunity at around 90%.

    Measles kills. It recently killed 1,000 children in Madagascar in a horrific example of how quickly it can spread. The cause was lack of vaccination: nearly 40% of the population are unvaccinated. Before we introduced vaccination in the 1960s, Measles killed 2.6 million people a year.

    In some parts of the world such as Madagascar the problem is down to lack of access to medicine. But in the affluent west, it’s because of first world problems such as complacency and believing bullshit on the internet and in newspapers.

    This is not a debate; there are not two sides to this story. Measles is a lethal and entirely preventable disease, and if you don’t get your children vaccinated you’re risking other children’s lives.