Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Nothing looks as good as money

    Amanda Mull has found the secret to perfect skin: be rich.

    That’s not to say you shouldn’t moisturise, keep hydrated or stay out of the sun. But the celebrity beauty secrets magazines are so keen to share tend not to include the best-kept secret of all:

    You can drink as much water and wear as much sunscreen as you want, but the most effective skin-care trick is being rich.

    Rich people look different to the rest of us, because rich people have access to things the rest of us don’t (and don’t do the jobs many of us mortals do, some of which are hardly skin-friendly).

    Rich people who are also handsome or pretty have usually been lucky in the genetic lottery too. As Mull writes:

    It’s no mystery to beauty editors and writers, as well as the famous women surveyed, that the answer is a combination of youth, genetic luck, and access to expensive products, treatments, and cosmetic dermatology procedures that few people outside their world could ever hope to experience.

    If you get plenty of sleep, eat well, drink plenty of water and use skincare products you probably won’t end up looking like a monkey’s scrotum. But you’re not going to look like your favourite Hollywood star either – and the older you get, the more of a difference money, or lack of it, makes.

  • Writers don’t use words by accident

    There’s been a bit of controversy over a new film, Girl, which is about a trans woman. It’s interesting to see how that’s been reported: almost without exception, the trans movie reviewers and reporters who’ve made legitimate criticisms of the film (such as a shocking scene of self-harm they worry might be imitated) have been described as “trans activists”.

    One such “activist” is Out.com’s director of culture and entertainment and former Los Angeles Times reporter Tre’Vell Anderson. Anderson is not amused by the New York Times report of the controversy, which described the criticisms as:

    trans activists and others who consider its scrutiny of a trans character’s body so dangerous that they urge no one to see it.

    That’s a blatant misrepresentation of what people are saying, as well as of the people who are saying it. The criticism suggests that the film may be irresponsible, that it could risk copycat behaviour. Anderson:

    The danger in this lies in the message it sends to the little trans and gender nonconforming kids that might stumble upon this film in their Netflix queue at the top of the year and do what kids do: follow suit.

    Nobody is demanding the film be banned, or that the filmmaker be silenced. But characterising the critics as “activists” – a pejorative term in this context – is an attempt to silence the critics. Anderson again:

    On Wednesday, Erik Piepenburg of The New York Times called the critiques a “firestorm,” invoking language that has long been used to keep critics who aren’t straight white men at bay. Piepenburg referred to us not as critics or reporters, but instead as “trans activists.”

    Frankly, this is a thinly-veiled effort to dismiss, ignore, and invalidate perspectives and critiques that differ from those dominated by newsrooms that are overwhelmingly white, cisgender, heterosexual, and male. Asserting that the pushback the film has received, including not making it to the Oscars foreign language shortlist, is the work of “activists,” erases the necessary and effective work of journalists and career film critics. Left in its place is the impression of a host of negligible, pesky, and unfounded opinions, now seen in the nation’s paper of record as extreme and unreasonable.

    This is something that happens time and again in mainstream media whenever trans-related issues are reported on by cisgender people: any trans person with an opinion, no matter how well informed, is described as an activist. The people on the other side are never characterised as “anti-trans activists”, even when that’s exactly what they are.

    The reason “activist” is pejorative here is because it suggests that, as Anderson explains, “my vantage point… is purely an emotional response and, therefore, must be uninformed.”

    This isn’t limited to trans people. People who don’t agree with the status quo are often described as activists,  zealots, militants, extremists. It’s a form of “poisoning the well”, a debating technique that attempts to undermine the other person’s argument before they can even make it.

    Anderson doesn’t say that the label of activist is inherently bad, but I’d argue that it usually is used in a pejorative sense. An angry trans person on Twitter isn’t a trans activist; a trans person writing to complain about a newspaper article isn’t an activist; a trans film critic with a nuanced analysis of a film isn’t an activist either. And yet that’s how they’re described in mainstream media reporting. To categorise people as such is to dismiss them, to suggest that what they have to say is worthless.

    This can’t be accidental. When you’re a writer of any kind, you know exactly what words mean and the power they have.

  • The war on observable reality

    Little Mix: definitely a thing that exists. And hurrah for that.

    There’s an interesting piece by Alex Hern, the Guardian’s tech correspondent, about online fakery. He thought it would ruin the world, but considerably less sophisticated bullshit got there first.

    On social media, the public is for the first time exposed to the raw firehose of news, with no ability or desire to perform the work of verification, with incentives for sharing the most sensationalist content.

    Faced with a race to keep up with the pace of change and an explosion in the availability of new information sources, hoaxes and untruths have gradually infiltrated the pages of even the most respectable journals…

    This is an internet-age phenomenon, technology making an age-old problem considerably worse.

    The internet has brought us what’s best described as a war on observable reality, and it goes rather like this:

    Expert: I have two legs.
Person: No you don't.
Expert: Yes I do. [points] One leg. Two. 
Person: No.

    The real version usually has more swearing and personal abuse, but you get the idea.

    This isn’t the same thing as having a difference of opinion. This is rejecting observable reality.

    Let’s bring Little Mix into this for no good reason.

    Little Mix are a pop band. I think they’re very good. You might think they’re absolutely awful. But the fact that Little Mix exist, that they play concert venues, make videos and sell records is a fact. If I were to say that I think Little Mix are brilliant and you were to say that Little Mix don’t exist, you would clearly be a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

    And yet many people are denying provable reality, often about much more serious things. Donald Trump’s cry of “fake news!” when he really means “inconvenient news!”, the flat earthers and the moon landing truthers are the most obvious example, but it happens constantly, all over the place. Politicians say things that are provably untrue on air and aren’t challenged on it. Fringe views are given a platform as if they’re legitimate. Blatant falsehoods are circulated as if they’re facts. Propaganda is reprinted.

    As Hern notes, this is because gatekeeping has collapsed.

    Here’s how it used to work. Big-name American magazines (and some of the publishers I work for) famously use armies of fact checkers who go through entire articles demanding citations: where’s the evidence for this? How can you prove they said that? Which article was this in? If you can’t prove it – and proof requires more than some website by some crank – it doesn’t get published. The UK wasn’t quite so detailed but you still had to get through sub-editors, who were famously unforgiving.

    That scrutiny – any scrutiny – is increasingly rare. Women’s magazines run debunked and sometimes dangerous health advice by new-age idiots. Newspapers parrot bullshit by anti-LGBT pressure groups. Radio presenters let politicians tell the porkiest of porkies. TV news politicises real events by using terms such as “migrant crisis” to describe something that’s nothing of the sort.

    And because traditional media still has a cachet and some remaining trust, once bullshit makes it into the pages of a magazine or the website of a newspaper, many people think it’s true. Bad information is lent legitimacy.

    Commenting on Hern’s piece, journalist and former publisher Adam Banks, posting on Twitter, hit the nail on the head:

    Fake news tech isn’t the point. The point is we need media that’s incentivised to explain what’s real and debunk what’s fake, not paid for anything that catches anyone’s eye.

    Today we have the reverse, a toxic brew where what feels right is more important than what is right, where what gets clicks matters more than any of its consequences, where the only people getting paid are the ones who can make their readers, listeners or viewers angry or upset instead of better informed. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not valuable.

    We get what we pay for. This is what we get when we don’t want to pay at all.

  • What the world needs in 2019

    I’ve posted before that we’re lucky to be alive right now: for most of us the world is a better place than it’s ever been. But it also feels very divided, and some of the world’s worst people are deliberately fuelling those divisions. Sometimes it’s malicious – it’s a lot easier to push through a repellent agenda if the people who would normally stop you are fighting each other instead – and sometimes it’s much more banal, such as the way significant parts of the media have normalised extreme views because outrage gets clicks.

    Never mind ABBA, or Oasis. The only comeback I want to see in 2019 is the return of empathy.

    Happy New Year. I hope your 2019 is healthy, happy and cares about everybody.

  • Goodbye, The Pie

    We said goodbye to The Pie today. She was 13.

    Megan – immediately dubbed The Pie by my wife – was born in 2005 and we got her in early 2006. We were young marrieds, starting a new life in suburbia. For a couple of years it was just the three of us: me, my wife and The Pie, a whole future ahead of us.

    Megan was the perfect dog, funny and never fierce, the world’s worst guard dog and our best friend. She became our kids’ best friend too, and was there for them when I was no longer able to be.

    Today, as the vet prepared to put her to sleep, we were able to kiss her and rub her tummy and tell her what she always knew but didn’t hear enough: she wasn’t just a good girl. She was the best girl.

  • Some friendships aren’t forever

    Cerian Jenkins is one of my favourite writers, both in her day job as a columnist for DIVA magazine and as a blogger. In The [Other] C Word she’s been blogging about her experiences of cancer treatment, both in terms of the physical effects and the wider impacts on her life.

    This post, on friendship, is typically astute. Big life events can have a seismic effect on your friendships, and many of those relationships don’t survive.

    In shining a harsh light on the fundamental foundations of relationships I had, up until now, probably taken for granted as unshakeable, I have been granted a rare insight into which special friendships I should invest much of my time and effort into nurturing and which friendships I should accept were not what I had perceived them to be pre-diagnosis.  It allowed me to build upon old connections, and even to create brand spanking new ones.

    As Jenkins noted on Twitter, the response to her blog demonstrated that it’s not just the big C: people undergoing gender transition, divorce, becoming parents, experiencing other major life changes or just going travelling have encountered similar changes. I wrote about my own experiences of absent friends earlier this year:

    And like every other big step I’ve had to take, I had to do it solo. No wingman to give me confidence. No voice offering assurance that I can do this. No shoulder to cry on when the sheer enormity of it all seems too much.

    But Jenkins, like me, has found positive effects too.

    …you will be amazed by how right you were about a handful of brilliantly supportive friends, as well as completely blown away by people you would never have expected coming out of the woodwork and proving themselves to be invaluable pillars of strength. I know I have been.

    Nowadays, when I look at my wonderfully eclectic group of friends, I am acutely aware of the truth in the words ‘quality over quantity’.  I feel infinitely lucky to know that there are people in my life who will be with me through thick and thin, in sickness and in health; and that they will always be able to rely on me doing the same for them. In truth, I wouldn’t be standing today, let alone still smiling, without them.

    Not everybody in your life is going to be there forever. Sometimes friendships will fade; sometimes they end much more abruptly and in ways that may upset you. But rather than mourn the death of friendships that are beyond repair, it’s much better to work on the new friendships you’re making – and if you’re not making them, to put yourself in situations where you can make connections with new people.

    Many of those connections will be strictly temporary; some might not last beyond a single day.

    But some of them will blossom.

    Some of them may turn out to be the most important connections you’ve ever made.

    Will those connections last forever? Nobody knows. They might screw it up, or you might.

    But equally, they might not, and you might not.

    And even if there is a screw-up in your far future, the friends you have now can have a phenomenal effect on your life right now.

    With very few exceptions, the people who matter most to me now – the people who pick me up when I’m feeling down, who get me out of my comfort zones and who make me feel the sheer joy of being alive – are people I didn’t know two years ago, or didn’t know as well as I do now. I am a better person, and live a happier life, partly because of people who weren’t in that life just a short time ago.

    I love Jenkins’ conclusion.

    In the end, the important thing is to be generally kind and to nurture understanding of yourself and those around you, whatever role they choose to play (or not play) in your life.

  • Green sheep, bendy bananas and boys having periods

    It’s Sunday, the day when the UK press likes to post multiple anti-trans articles. I want to look at one from last week. It’s the story that virulently anti-trans MP David Davies described on Twitter as the “latest example of barking mad trans-activism”: the idea that eight-year-old boys will be told they can have periods.

    The story has legs: I’ve seen it turn up in Sky News Australia and the Monserrat Reporter. Talk radio hosts have used it as evidence that “the world’s gone mad” and of “bonkers Britain” and the usual columnists have weighed in to moan about the excesses of trans activism.

    Is it true?

    Here’s the document the coverage refers to (pdf). It’s a presentation by the neighbourhoods, inclusion communities and equalities committee of Brighton & Hove council on the subject of period poverty, the horrible situation where some students don’t have access to sanitary products because their parents are broke. This has an effect on their education because some of those students stay home when they have their period instead of attending school.

    In the 3,000 word document, trans people are mentioned exactly once, in a description of the period positive educational approach. The document notes that:

    • Trans boys and men and non-binary people may have periods.

    This is undeniably true: irrespective of how you identify, if you have the appropriate plumbing then you may have periods. And that means you can be affected by period poverty.

    This has got nothing to do with any sinister agenda: it’s an attempt at inclusivity. And yet what seems to me like a perfectly rational and humane point – that period poverty can affect students who do not necessarily identify as female – has been used once again to attack trans people, and young trans people specifically. Scoring a political point is more important than any child’s welfare.

    What we’re seeing here is an old trick with a new target.

    It’s sheep we’re up against

    Exaggeration and falsification have long been used by newspapers to attack people they don’t like and anything that’s happened since 1953. For example, in 2014 Mail Online readers in Australia finally got a story we Britons have known about since 1986: the evils of politically correct forces demanding children sing alternatives to “baa baa black sheep “because the black bit might be racist. 1

    It was a real story – a couple of Australian kindergartens had indeed changed the lyrics for fear of causing offence – but it was an isolated incident, just as it was in 1986 when a single nursery (Beevers Nursery in Hackney, London; a private nursery, not a council-controlled one) rewrote the song as an exercise for children and the newspapers went mad.

    The English story made the Daily Star and then The Sun and the Sunday World, and then the Daily Mail embellished it by claiming Haringey council, not Hackney, had ordered playgroup leaders to attend racial awareness courses where they were ordered to make children sing “baa baa green sheep” instead. 2

    As the saying goes, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. It was completely untrue, and Haringey council attempted to sue the newspaper but had to drop the legal proceedings for lack of funds. The Mail version of the story made it to the Birmingham Evening Mail, the Liverpool Echo, the Yorkshire Evening Press, the Birmingham Post, the Sunday People, the News of the World, the Sunday Mercury, the Carlisle Evening News and Star, the Yorkshire Evening Courier, the Ipswich Evening Star, the Sunday Times letters page, the Hendon Times and the Sunday Telegraph.

    The story continued to spread, this time with Islington council being blamed, and it turned up in the Economist, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror and the Sun. The story was used in political broadcasts by the Social Democratic Party, and it came back from the dead in 1998 in the Sunday Times. Over the next five years it would pop up from time to time in various newspapers. In the two decades since it began, only two newspapers have printed corrections admitting that it isn’t true.

    Sheep weren’t the only fabrication. Stories about manhole covers being renamed were invented by the newspapers, as were supposed bans on black bin bags. Other stories about “super-loos for gypsies” or special treatment for gay people were pretty dodgy too.

    According to the Media Research Group of Goldsmith’s College in the University of London, British tabloids ran some 3,000 news stories about such “loony left” ideas between 1981 and 1987; the vast majority were either partially or wholly fabricated and were targeted against the handful of London councils under Labour control. 3

    Very similar stories were fabricated about the European Union too, most notably by a young journalist called Boris Johnson. Between 1989 and 1994 the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent filed knowingly exaggerated and sometimes entirely invented stories about supposed EU madness, creating a whole new genre of Europhobic scare stories. Other journalists were appalled, but the stories were very successful and ultimately helped pave the way for 2016’s Brexit vote to leave the EU.4

    It’s not reporting. It’s propaganda. And it works.

    It works because most people remember just the headline – and that headline can have tremendous power. In a series of studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Ullrich Ecker of the University of Western Australia tested the effect of misleading headlines on people’s perceptions on hot issues such as genetically modified crops. As The New Yorker reports:

    In the case of the factual articles, a misleading headline hurt a reader’s ability to recall the article’s details. In the case of opinion articles, a misleading headline, like the one suggesting that genetically modified foods are dangerous, impaired a reader’s ability to make accurate inferences. For instance, when asked to predict the future public-health costs of genetically modified foods, people who had read the misleading headline predicted a far greater cost than the evidence had warranted. 1

    Everybody remembers the headlines about the EU’s bonkers ban on bendy bananas. It was completely invented, but the stories were a key part of a long campaign against the EU that ultimately resulted in the UK voting for Brexit.

    Most tabloid stories about trans activists or the sinister trans lobby are fictional too, but by the time they’re fact-checked – if they’re fact-checked at all; there are so many of them few people have the time – the damage is done. Throughout the land, breakfast tables vibrate to the sound of readers harrumphing about political correctness gone mad.

    anImage_2.tiff

    1 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2796447/lyrics-baa-baa-black-sheep-changed-kindergarten-teachers-racial-overtones.html

    2 Curran, J.; Petley, J.; Gaber, I. (2005). Culture wars: the media and the British left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 85–107. ISBN 0-7486-1917-8

    3 John Gyford; Steve Leach & Chris Game (1989). “Political change since Widdicombe”. The changing politics of local government. Routledge. pp. 310–313. ISBN 9780044452997.

    4 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/15/brexit-boris-johnson-euromyths-telegraph-brussels

  • The best of all possible worlds

    One of the biggest things I’ve learnt over the last couple of years is that there is often a very big difference between the world as it is and the world as you perceive it to be. For example, on a personal level the world is a lot less scary, a lot more inclusive and a lot more fun than I imagined it was before I came out.

    It’s true on a bigger scale, too. It’s easy to believe that the world is in deep shit and that everything is terrible, but while there are of course terrible things happening the truth is that for most of us, this is the greatest time to be alive in the history of the human race.

    Here, Future Crunch details 99 good news stories you probably didn’t hear about in 2018. It’s an interesting counterpoint to Frankie Boyle’s review of the year, which is acerbic and funny and of course, incredibly negative.

    The piece is by Angus Hervey, who recently wrote about the “fear virus”:

    Fear can be transmitted digitally as easily as it can physically—and that’s a problem because digital technologies reach everyone. It’s not a few thousand people in a crowd anymore. Three-quarters of adults on earth now have a smartphone, which means we’re getting 24-hour access to all the worst stories happening everywhere to 7.6 billion people—all the time.

    Bad, alarming or frightening news isn’t a new phenomenon: good news doesn’t sell papers. But what’s different now is the speed and scale of it. One of the reasons I massively cut down my Twitter usage is because the constant flood of terrifying stories was harming my mental health.

    Hervey again:

    Every day terrifying stories sweep through the global village, in articles, tweets, and evening broadcasts, and they are amplified a million times over until there’s nowhere to hide. Algorithmic bias, mental illness, foreign infidels, chronic pain, hooded extremists, robots coming to take our jobs, burning forests, warlike naval maneuvers, marching racists, rising waters, surveillance regimes, trade wars, toxic chemicals, predatory capitalism, roaming gangs of criminal youths, drug overdoses, benefit-devouring migrant caravans massing at the border… the list goes on and on. The fear virus takes hundreds of forms and mutates and spreads every time we click or watch or mutter darkly about the future at family dinner.

    The world as we see it can be a terrifying and brutal place, and of course in some parts of the world and for some groups of people it us. But there is a chasm between the world as 24/7 media and social media paints it and the world as it actually is.

    By almost any measure, the world is becoming a better place. The large scale evidence for this has already been well documented by people such as Max Roser, Steven Pinker, and the late, great Hans Rosling. Poverty is disappearing, battle deaths are falling, violence is less common, suicide is decreasing, life expectancy is increasing, literacy is on the rise, child mortality is declining, we’re making great strides in battling diseases like AIDS, cancer, and malaria.

    The internet has democratized information, education, and business; it’s given voice to the silenced, helped to erode outdated taboos, and advanced human rights. Of course, it’s not all perfect and there are always setbacks, but every day, the human species is making incredible progress.

    …We’ve never had it so good, and yet we’ve never been more scared.

    That doesn’t mean we should all become Polyannas, ignoring the very real threats of climate change, right wing populism, economic inequality and other horrors. We shouldn’t be gaily skipping over homeless people on our way to the theatre.

    But we can and we should reject the fear that tells us everything is terrible, that other people want what we have, that everything is hopeless and there’s nothing we can do about it.

    Fear is a terrible thing, and a useful weapon for the very worst people in the world.

    A terrified populace is far more susceptible to the appeals of people who want to make countries great again and demagogues who see politics as a zero-sum game. A terrified populace is less willing to stand up and fight for an economy that doesn’t cost the earth.

    Fear is not inevitable. It’s the result of our choices: what we choose to read, what we choose to watch, what we choose to listen to, what we choose to believe, what we choose to fear.

    If we choose to believe that the world is a dark and scary place, that people who are very slightly different from us are an existential threat, we will see the world that way – and by action or inaction, we’ll help make that perception the reality.

    Whereas if we choose to believe in the opposite, we can find the energy and the optimism and the connections we need to ensure that not only is the world better than it has ever been in human history, but that it stays that way and gets better still.

    We can choose hope, not hate. Love, not fear.

    It’s Christmas time. There’s no need to be afraid.

  • “I was lost last Christmas, but this year I am found”

    I wrote a Christmas song!

    I love (some) Christmas songs, and I particularly love U2’s cover of Baby Please Come Home. It’s got a real joy to it: where so many Christmas songs are dirges it’s got a propulsive energy that really appeals to me (as does Mariah’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, another favourite). Language aside I have a soft spot for The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York too.

    I think the best Xmas songs are about yearning and unfettered big emotions, and my favourites tend to have a sense of humour to them, and I decided to see if I could come up with something that had the same qualities. The above track is the result. It’s a demo, so it’s really, really, really, really rough. But I really like it. It makes me smile.

    Lyrics and a bit more information is on the linked Soundcloud page.

  • The most wonderful times of the year

    It’s my birthday today.

    I know I had a birthday last month, but like all good queens I’ve got two: my birthday and the day I became Carrie. Legally speaking, that change happened on this day last year.

    I usually post a round-up just before Christmas, and last year’s one just happened to be the day my name changed – although I didn’t know that at the time, because the documents are sent to you by snail mail. As I said last year, it was going to be a big Christmas for me:

    It’s the first Christmas as a separated parent; the first Christmas in many years where I’ll wake up alone; the first Christmas where I won’t be doing bedtime stories for overexcited and highly sugared kids.

    The first Christmas for Carrie.

    This Christmas is much the same, although I’m a divorced parent rather than a separated one now. Where last year was quite sad for me, I’m feeling quite festive this time around. Not least because I fully intend to celebrate my second birthday this year, so by the time you read this I’ll probably be in the pub.

    I keep a diary, and looking back on 2018 it’s hard to believe it’s just been a year. This is the year I began living full time as me, so it’s been a year of firsts, good and bad: first gig as me, first day out as me, first time travelling as me, first time attending college as me, first of many times being misgendered on air, first time experiencing the dubious joys of electrolysis, first time being filmed as me, first time being a wedding guest as me, first time being abused in the street for being me, and so on.

    What jumps out at me isn’t the trans thing or the ongoing drudgery of dealing with a desperately underfunded NHS. It’s that again and again I’ve been writing about having joyful experiences with good people.

    It’s interesting to compare my real-life experiences of living as a trans woman with the way people like me are written about in newspapers and online. In the real world I’ve made stacks of women friends and been treated with kindness and inclusivity. In the media I’ve been the subject of a moral panic just as toxic and malicious as the one over gay people in the 1980s. I’ve stopped buying all kinds of publications because of it, choosing to spend my money on more deserving causes instead, but it’s hard to ignore: every day my news app gives me yet another white, middle-class, cisgender English journalist telling me I’m a monster, a predator. By far the hardest thing about being trans in 2018 has been having to endure this bullshit.

    It will pass, eventually. But it’s done incredible damage to one of the most vulnerable groups of people.

    Enough of that. Let’s stick to the good bits. This has been a year of big laughs and big ideas, of drag queens and dancefloors, of big wheels and big emotions and of stupid jokes and pointy guitars. It’s been a year of adventures and experiences, of pride and of positivity, a year of gigs and of giggles and of comfort zones being dynamited. More than anything, it’s been a year of fears faced up to and good friends found.

    This time last year I was very sad. This year, I’m excited. 2019 is going to be great.

    Thanks for reading. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and a joyful, prosperous and healthy New Year.