Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Hate, speech

    The trial of the teenage killers of Brianna Ghey, the young trans girl murdered in broad daylight earlier this year, has begun. And I’d strongly advise you not to read about it, because the details are horrific – a lesson I learnt the hard way. But on the basis of the prosecution’s evidence so far, her murder was in large part because she was trans. That makes the decision not to prosecute this as a hate crime all the more baffling.

    The Daily Mail, which has spent years fuelling anti-trans hatred in the UK, is delighted by the horror: it’s titillating readers with the gruesome details and it’s now promoting a podcast promising “every twist and turn” in the “Brianna Ghey trial”, as if the murdered girl were the suspect and the trial a celebrity court case rather than a brutal and squalid tragedy. It’s a horrific reminder that as far as much of the press is concerned, trans lives don’t matter unless they can be used for profit.

  • Selling sadness

    I was thinking some more about yesterday’s idiotic Washington Post editorial that attempted to blame women for men’s loneliness. Posting on Bluesky, writer Ian Boudreau made an excellent point:

    If guys are suddenly very lonely it’s probably worth asking what they expected by following the advice of influencers who tell them to be maximally selfish, and who sneer at thoughtfulness, kindness, generosity, and genuine courtesy as weakness and wokeness.

    He’s right. What these influencers offer – and it’s not just men’s rights activists but also various other anti-woke grifters preying on the unhappy – is isolation, because that’s what their business depends on. The lonelier you are, the sadder you are, the more isolated you become, the more of a hold they can have on you. It’s cult programming for profit, and it’s doing enormous damage to so many people.

  • Wedding hell

    There’s an astonishing editorial in the Washington Post today about a looming marriage crisis – its framing, not mine – in which it highlights an apparent problem: increasing numbers of single women don’t want to marry whiny fascist man-babies who get their life advice from misogynists such as Andrew Tate. And rather than come to the obvious conclusion, which is that said men should stop being whiny fascist man-babies who get their life advice from misogynists such as Andrew Tate, the editorial says:

    This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise.

    That someone does not, you’ll be amazed to discover, mean the men.

    The article is quite rightly being destroyed in its own comments section, but it’s yet another sign of a problem that newspapers don’t like to cover: the homogeneity of newsrooms and their reliance on content written by external sources with agendas, in this case a blog by the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. It’s yet another attempt to paint right-wing men as victims of a censorious society rather than victims of their own bad behaviour and poor choices, incel rhetoric made palatable by the columnist class.

  • Ad nausea

    Twitter informs me that it’s 15 years today since I first posted on the service. I don’t post there at all now; I’ve unfollowed everybody and locked my account, and unless there’s a change of ownership and a huge change in culture I don’t anticipate returning.

    It’s sad. For its first decade or so, Twitter was net positive: for all its flaws – and I’ve been reporting on and giving talks about the misinformation and disinformation on the service for many years now – it was an incredible communications platform for everything from breaking news to ridiculous flights of fancy. What Elon Musk has done to it in just one year is as tragic as it was predictable.

    Over the last few days big brands such as Apple, IBM, Sony Pictures, NBC Universal and many more (but not, so far, the BBC) have pulled their advertising from the service in response to Musk endorsing a blatantly antisemitic tweet. It’s a welcome move, but it’s also an overdue one: Musk has been endorsing, amplifying and paying money to the worst bigots on Twitter for a long time now, and these brands were quite happy to have their advertising dollars used to finance that.

    There are two things worth pointing out here. The first is that despite widespread publicity around Twitter’s lurch into bigotry the brands seemed perfectly happy with Twitter as recently as Friday, before a Media Matters investigation highlighted specific examples of the brands’ ads being positioned next to pro-Nazi content and even tweets praising Hitler. And secondly, the brands have not said they’re cancelling their advertising; they’re just pausing it. What we’re seeing here isn’t brands developing a backbone; it’s brands trying to ride out what they hope will be a short-lived PR storm.

  • Year we go

    I can barely believe it, but Carrie Kills A Man is a year old this week. That’s a year of going to amazing places, meeting amazing people and having amazing adventures, and I feel just as excited and delighted and pinching myself about it all as I did on publication day.

    Thanks to everybody who’s been part of making CKAM happen and helping it find new homes: my publishers, of course, but also the brilliant booksellers and book bloggers and book reviewers and bookstagrammers and booktokers who’ve helped spread the word, the podcasters, writers, producers and festival organisers that have very generously given me space to bump my gums and most of all, the people who’ve read the book.

    I feel incredibly lucky: it’s been a rough year personally but this has genuinely been the most fun year of my writing life so far.

     

  • A true original

    It’s Wendy Carlos’s birthday today. Carlos is one of the most influential electronic musicians of all time: half-artist, half-scientist, she is a pioneer without whom today’s music would sound very different. Her 1968 album Switched-On Bach introduced a generation to the synthesiser, she was an early creator of what we now call ambient music, and her soundtrack for Clockwork Orange is just as astonishing now as it was back in the 70s. You could say she’s the godmother of modern music, particularly electronic music.

    Wendy is trans, and transitioned in 1972 – the same year I was born. And sadly her trans status means she missed out on many of the rewards her talent should have brought her: she has previously said that she “lost an entire decade” avoiding performing live (in a few cases she disguised herself as a man, crying in her hotel room beforehand) and working with other musicians because she didn’t want to go public about her transition. Carlos later said that those fears were unfounded – “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent […] There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life” – but there were still many indignities, accidental or otherwise. The most recent version of the Clockwork Orange soundtrack that I’m aware of, from 2001, still credits her under her deadname.

    I’m a huge admirer of her, and in addition to her recorded work I’d really recommend checking out podcasts in which she’s interviewed; her appearance on History Is Gay is really fun. She’s a true talent as well as a very entertaining storyteller.

  • Awareness

    I’m deeply cynical about awareness days and weeks: while well intentioned, I think any Awareness Day also provides an easy way for people to pretend they’re part of the solution without actually doing anything – and in some cases, while being part of the problem. Mental health awareness weeks are a very good example of that, with politicians posting platitudes to social media while simultaneously enacting policies to make mental health provision even worse.

    This week is Trans Awareness Week, which started in the US as the lead up to Trans Day of Visibility – a day to mourn the many trans people, mostly trans women of colour and often sex workers, murdered worldwide. As the bigots are quick to point out, trans people are much less likely to be murdered here in the UK – although it does happen, as this month’s trial of teenager Brianna Ghey’s killers demonstrates. But the awareness week is also about raising awareness of healthcare problems, of discrimination, and of anti-trans hate. And those things are global and in countries like the UK, growing.

    The problem, I think, is that the sharing of these things is largely a waste of time. Trans people are already very aware of the dangers and issues we face. And people who aren’t trans will often post in support before returning to the very things that make trans people’s lives so difficult.

    There will be people posting in support of trans awareness week on X/Twitter, the social network that has done more than any other network to facilitate (and now, promote and pay for) anti-trans hatred. There will be people posting in support of it that will then pick up their copy of The Guardian or The New Statesman, publications that have helped normalise anti-trans bigotry on the left instead of just its usual home on the right (and there’s plenty on the right). There will be people posting in support of it while listening to Spotify or watching YouTube, which both pay enormous sums of money to anti-trans rabble-rousers.

    Forget awareness. There’s plenty of awareness already. What we need isn’t empty platitudes or hollow social media posturing. We need people to stop financing, amplifying and excusing hate-spewing platforms, publications and people. Until they do, the flags they wave are worthless.

  • Motion picture soundtrack

    At the risk of sounding like those obviously fake stories that end “and everybody applauded”, I’d like to share a lovely little real-life movie moment that happened to me yesterday.

    I was bouncing around the flat with my youngest and, as I often do, I picked up a guitar to plonk away on it. I came up with a wee tune I quite liked so I went over to the computer to record it and try a few other ideas. Mid-way through putting down the bass line, which I was happily headbanging along to, there was a clatter to the side of me and then a beat. My youngest, who’s just recently started learning drums, had sneaked onto the kit. One perfectly executed drum roll later and we were both locked into the same tune, playing along to the recorded guitars. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry – it’s the first time something like this has happened – so I did a bit of both, grinning with watering eyes.

    As someone with a lifelong love of music I’ve always hoped my kids would have the same, but I’ve also been very wary about trying to live vicariously through them: the instruments – so many instruments – are there if they want to play them and I’ll enthuse about music all day long, but I’d never try to get my kids to play instruments or listen to music they don’t want to play or listen to. So it’s really lovely to have my eldest fall in love with bass guitar and my youngest fall in love with the drums of their own accord.

  • Money for nothing

    There’s a fascinating article in 404 Media about the shameful shuttering of Jezebel, one of the most important feminist publications online. According to the CEO of parent firm G/O Media, which acquired the site from its previous publisher, “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.”

    The audience here isn’t you or I. It’s advertisers. And those advertisers are worried about “brand safety”, which means in effect there’s no money to pay for anything potentially controversial.

    the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

    Let’s see what sort of content is considered too risky for brand safety, shall we?

    words like “abortion,” “pro-choice,” “pro-life,” “wade,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual,” regularly show up on brand safety keyword blocklists, which four different industry experts told 404 Media are extensive, ever growing, and rarely updated.

    The goal, mostly, is to ensure that adverts are not placed next to abusive content – such as bigotry or conspiracy nonsense. But this broad brushstroke blocking means that adverts will not be placed next to legitimate content either, such as magazines for gay and trans people, or information about safe abortion. And it seems rather hypocritical when you see many of the brands who have brand safety divisions continuing to advertise on Twitter next to blatant homophobic, transphobic, racist and anti-semitic abuse and increasingly, illegal content.

    Blocklists are a fairly low-tech tool, and many advertisers are moving away from them to more sophisticated “sentiment analysis”. But that too can have a chilling effect:

    [one ad system giant says] advertisers can choose to block all sorts of potential topics, especially those that may elicit negative emotions as detected by its artificial intelligence: “Exclude content relating to negative news or sentiment around sensitive social issues such as immigration, abortion, euthanasia, vaccines

    As the advertising giant quoted above admits, that exclusion will also apply to:

    educational, informative, and scientific content related to the topic.

    In effect, then, online yahoos effectively get to censor what journalism is and isn’t funded: if it’ll get a bunch of far-right goons, Qanon reality deniers or other vocal minorities outraged, it won’t get funded. And if it won’t get funded, editors aren’t going to commission any more of it.

    This is the fundamental problem with an advertising funded economy. For decades, there was a wall between editorial and advertising, with the latter unable to influence the former. That’s because it was widely understood that the interests of advertisers and the interests of editorial often diverged and could even be in opposition. Now, though, advertising and editorial are linked – and because of this, many publishers are no longer in the business of telling, but of selling.

    The problem with that is by and large, it’s not a problem for right-wing media. The most rabid right-wing publications have generous funders with very deep pockets. It’s the publications on the left, which don’t tend to have billionaires backing them, that have the problem. If advertisers don’t want to be associated with potentially troll-attracting content – content such as information on climate change, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, vaccines and so on – then the only way to pay for it is to put it behind a paywall. And that creates an uneven playing field where the hate speech, misinformation and disinformation is free to read; the accurate stuff is locked away.

    As 404 Media puts it succinctly:

    there’s an entire advertising industry that has fucked the internet, and fucked society. 

    It’s hard to disagree.

  • Trans attacks don’t work

    The results of yesterday’s US elections make something very clear: attacking trans people, which Republicans did with great energy and at even greater expense, doesn’t work – and in fact such relentless demonisation of marginalised people may well motivate people to banish the bigots. This isn’t a huge surprise, because we saw the same in Australia and more recently in English by-elections, where anti-trans culture war bullshit was roundly rejected. But I doubt that it’ll change the planned ratcheting up of anti-trans rhetoric by the UK Conservative government and by their friends in the press in the run-up to the next election.

    As satisfying as it was to see so many bigots rejected yesterday, and as satisfying as it’ll be to see the same happen in the UK next year, that satisfaction doesn’t begin to compensate for the damage these hateful bastards and their useful idiots in the media have done, the lives that they have ruined and the lives that anti-trans policies and rhetoric will continue to ruin. The religious and conservative right have lit fires that will take a long time to extinguish.