Are you feeling guilty about not maintaining all your friendships through COVID? Me too. Brandy Jensen takes the helm of Jezebel’s “Ask a fuck-up” and tries to explain.
The problem, for me, is that it feels like there is simply nothing to catch these people up on anymore. Too many things are happening but also nothing much is happening at all, and I find I have nothing particularly interesting to say about it. Life is dull and that has in turn made me a dullard.
One of the minor weird things about having a different name and pronouns to the ones you were assigned at birth is that they sometimes feel like an odd fit with other aspects of who you are. For example, I mentioned being my son’s dad in my last post; on the radio the other day I laughed as I recounted my daughter saying affectionately but exasperatedly, “Dad! Why are you like this?” after one dad joke too many. To some eyes and ears, I know, the juxtaposition of “dad” and “woman” is weird. I know because sometimes it feels jarring to me too. But just because I’m not a man doesn’t mean I’m not a dad. A dad’s pronouns don’t have to be he and him.
Kids get this, so for example I recently overheard my daughter telling a friend “oh, that’s just my dad, she’s playing a video game”. Â But many adults apparently don’t, or perhaps more accurately won’t.
It was international pronouns day yesterday, a day that could just as easily be entitled “come on, don’t be a dick to people day”, and I saw lots of people claiming that in much the same way trans women apparently don’t have pelvises, they don’t have pronouns. She/her, he/him, they/them weren’t for them. They didn’t need such silliness. They are too sensible for such political correctness and they don’t have any time for people who cared about such things.
I bolded their pronouns to help them out. I’ll stop now.
Everybody has pronouns. Without them, speech and writing would be awfully cumbersome: we’d have to say things like “Uncle David called to say that Uncle David wasn’t going to be around this weekend. Uncle David is off to do a thing and Uncle David won’t be back until Monday. I’m not sure where Uncle David is going. I forgot to ask Uncle David.”
If you don’t think you have any pronouns, chances are it’s because people don’t habitually get yours wrong. The kind of guy who goes on the internet to damn people who include pronouns in Twitter bios would probably lose his shit pretty quickly if people started routinely addressing him or describing him as she, her, madam or miss.
I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? Imagine going through life being misgendered every single day: in shops, on the phone, at social things, at work…
Yes, I am making a face right now.
The same people who would be the first to lose their shit if people started using the wrong pronouns for them – in many cases, people who lose their shit if anybody misgenders their pets – expect others to put up with it, even when it’s actually malicious. Why should they have to treat anybody else with the same respect they demand for their dog? They’ll call people whatever pronouns they damn well like!
Once again we’re in “It doesn’t happen to me personally so nothing should change” territory with a side order of “but mummy! I don’t want to be nice to other people!” It takes virtually no effort to be a little more considerate of others, but sadly for some that’s still too much to ask.
You might not think it from reading this blog, but one of the things I’m known for is laughing: as one of my friends put it the other night, “I don’t know ANYONE that laughs more than you”. I’m often reduced to tears by the silliest passing thought, and the more inappropriate it is to laugh the funnier I find it.
Pre-COVID I’d risk a beating from furious parents during school shows, because there is nothing funnier than a child trying to play a musical instrument they can’t play in front of a whole bunch of people who know they can’t laugh, and I’ve been in fits of laughter a thousand times on live radio, while trying to record podcasts, during doctors’ appointments and even while getting electrolysis. All it takes is one stupid thought and I completely lose it.
Yesterday was a good example. I was waiting outside my son’s school to pick him up, standing among a smattering of other parents when a Parcel Force van went by. My brain, which loves Spoonerisms and puns, immediately piped up.
“Porcel Farce,” it said.
I started to grin. And then I thought about it some more and how funny “porcel” sounds. And I started to giggle.
I looked up. A couple of other parents were giving me odd looks. As soon as I noticed them I knew that I didn’t stand a chance.
When you’re laughing and trying not to laugh, the worst possible thing that can happen is for you to see someone judging you. It’s an amplifier that makes whatever you’re laughing about roughly one thousand times funnier.
“Stop laughing!” I told my brain. “People are looking!”
My brain paused to consider this information and respond in a mature and sensible fashion.
“Heh heh heh,” it said.
It paused.
“Porcel farce,” it snickered.
You know when you laugh so much you start to cry? I was doing that. I whipped out my phone to try and pretend I was laughing at something I’ve seen on Twitter, desperately trying not to make a sound but emitting the odd squeak, and I laughed until I couldn’t see my phone for the tears. I’m quite sure my face was as red as my hair. I couldn’t dare look up for fear I’d make eye contact with another parent and it’d amplify the amusement even more, so I stood there shaking, squeaking and vibrating until my son appeared to save the day.
In the car, I told him about Porcel Farce. He thought it was funny too, but not as funny as the sight of his dad absolutely corpsing all over again.
I was getting facial electrolysis today, which was painful as ever. No prizes for guessing what my brain said to me or what happened next.
In response to the news that US writer Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended from his job for masturbating during a video meeting, Dr Jennifer Gunter pointed out on Twitter that “masturbating while on a work zoom/call is a choice. If Toobin was on mute he was still listening/watching the other participants and that’s still disgusting and violating. If the urge is so great, end the call. He knew that.”
There is some confusion over the precise circumstances: it’s been suggested that the writer was simultaneously having phone sex while taking part in the meeting, or that he was having phone sex during an interval between calls and accidentally rejoined the meeting too early. But whatever the explanation, his colleagues saw something they shouldn’t because he was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.
As you’d expect, many women who’ve experienced sexual harassment have opinions on this. And I’ve already seen some of those women having to limit their Twitter accounts because of a backlash against the completely uncontroversial statement that you shouldn’t be masturbating at work or during video calls with people from work. I’ve been on social media for decades so I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m seeing people – and of course, they’re men people – saying that there’s nothing wrong with having a surreptitious wank while talking to or listening to your colleagues. The only crime is getting caught.
I’ve written previously about the word “himpathy”, used by Kate Manne to describe the sympathy that’s extended to men rather than to their victims. That appears to be at play here, even though exhibitionism and masturbation are both well-known forms of sexual harassment.
As shocking allegations of egregious sexual misconduct continue to emerge, one form of harassment has become a recurring theme.
It isn’t a physical assault, and it doesn’t necessarily involve men using sexual language. Instead, a powerful man masturbates in front of unwilling women made to witness the act.
Gunter linked to this piece, by Lili Loofbourow: The Myth of the Male Bumbler. It’s about the way some people rush to excuse men for doing inexcusable things.
Male bumblers are an epidemic.
These men are, should you not recognize the type, wide-eyed and perennially confused. What’s the difference, the male bumbler wonders, between a friendly conversation with a coworker and rubbing one’s penis in front of one? Between grooming a 14-year-old at her custody hearing and asking her out?
The world baffles the bumbler. He’s astonished to discover that he had power over anyone at all, let alone that he was perceived as using it. What power? he says. Who, me?
It’s an act, of course. The men who claim to be baffled about what is and isn’t acceptable in the workplace, as if there’s no difference between complimenting a female colleague’s new hairdo and making her watch you masturbate into a plant pot, know exactly where the line is. They just don’t think the rules should apply to them.
There’s a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler’s perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men — particularly powerful men — use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts. The bumbler takes one of our culture’s most muscular myths — that men are clueless — and weaponizes it into an alibi.
Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof.
Breaking that alibi means dissecting that myth. The line on men has been that they’re the only gender qualified to hold important jobs and too incompetent to be responsible for their conduct.
…If you’ve noticed a tendency to treat girls — like the 14-year-old whom now-Senate candidate Roy Moore allegedly picked up at her custody hearing — as knowing adults and men in their 30s — like Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump, Jr. — as erring youngsters, large sons and “coffee boys,” this is why.
Loofbourow continues:
This is how the culture attempts to normalize this stuff: by minimizing the damage to women and the agency of men.
…Economists have long and lazily attributed the exodus of women in various industries to their decision to bear children, but now this giant explanatory iceberg is floating up — this absolutely gigantic, widely denied story about how women are routinely driven from their industries because their male colleagues need to be free to use their professional power to indulge their sexual urges.
This is a great, and terrifying, piece of journalism: The 31-Day Campaign Against QAnon. It’s about what happened when a “nice guy” ran for Congress against a right-wing extremist.
There was a time when Kevin Van Ausdal had not yet been called a “loser†and “a disgrace†and hustled out of Georgia. He had not yet punched a wall, or been labeled a “communist,†or a person “who’d probably cry like a baby if you put a gun in his face.†He did not yet know who was going to be the Republican nominee for Congress in his conservative district in northwestern Georgia: the well-known local neurosurgeon, or the woman he knew vaguely as a person who had openly promoted conspiracies including something about a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
If you’ve been wondering why the far right is so keen on anti-masking and so against any measures to combat COVID other than letting the virus rip through the most vulnerable, the answer is simple: a core tenet of fascism is about casting out the weak.
On the internet there’s a famous trope called Godwin’s law, which says that in any online argument sooner or later somebody will be compared to the Nazis or Hitler. But as Godwin himself has said, the law only applies to false comparisons. When you’re talking about actual neo-Nazism, Godwin said:
By all means, compare these shitheads to the Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.
And right now, the shitheads are everywhere.
It’s frightening to see ideologies that once belonged solely to the far right appearing in mainstream discourse, as sides in a “debate”. It’s as if we’ve persuaded ourselves that fascism only manifests itself in Hugo Boss uniforms and shiny boots, rather than in smart suits, carefully chosen soundbites and Facebook groups.
Here’s political analyst Natascha Strobl on the far right’s belief that COVID should be left to eliminate the weakest members of society, an ideology that’s becoming worryingly echoed by sectors of the mainstream press too.
And it is precisely here that we witness one of the most central elements of fascist ideology: the weak and all its synonyms. A decadent, soft, unmanly, hysterical, panicky, timid, effeminate society is the problem… men aren’t men anymore, but nervous, urban, overly intellectualized and (here it comes) sickly weaklings. The idea of sick as weak is important.
… Protagonists now proclaim with great pathos that should they be befallen by the virus, they will look death calmly in the eye. Self-heroization against a virus (which doesn’t care at all).
And what is demanded as a globally social strategy is to let things go their usual way, both in order not to ruin the economy and because the lockdown is a fearful and thus unmanly strategy, and the measure are the strong, not the weak.
The idea that some people are weak and not deserving of saving – that their weakness is harming the strong and damaging the economy – has a chilling precedent. The first victims of the Nazis were the “unfit”, the “unworthy of living”: the disabled, the mentally ill, the chronically sick. Nazi propaganda posters told the public that disabled people were a drain on the economy, and that the money spent on them was “your money too”.
One of the programmes responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of disabled people was called Aktion T4, aka T4. Speaking at the unveiling of a memorial to its victims, German culture minister Monika Grütters told the crowd that the memorial “confronts us today with the harrowing Nazi ideology of presuming life can be measured by ‘usefulness.’â€
There’s been a fun discussion on Twitter about the various kinds of writers, how they organise their workflow and what apps they use. This image has made a lot of us laugh.
The last option, “write directly into the CMS”, is listed under Chaotic Evil. And it is. If you’re a working writer and you have any choice, and I know not everybody does, don’t write directly into a content management system.
There are several reasons for that. The first and most important one is that if the CMS crashes, or something on your computer crashes, you may need to start all over again and you don’t have a backup. Whereas if like me you write first and then copy it to the CMS, a crash is only a minor irritation.
I had a conversation once with a younger colleague who clearly thought I was daft for writing locally and then going into the CMS. Just do it directly, he said, before the CMS crashed and wiped out his day’s work.
The risk of that happening is particularly important if, like me, you’re paid by the word. If you have to write the same article twice because the CMS crashed, you’ve effectively cut your hourly rate in half. With so much freelance writing barely making minimum wage in the first place, that’s potentially disastrous. Many of us are barely paid enough to write a piece once, never mind twice.
It also has an opportunity cost. For the financial reasons I’ve just mentioned freelancing these days is often about achieving a certain volume of work to pay the rent. That means your days are often very packed. There’s very little wiggle room there, so if you get your work done and then have to do it again that can have a knock-on effect on the rest of the day. It might mean not hitting your next deadline, or having to cancel social plans so that you can.
Another key consideration for freelance writers is that if you don’t have a local copy of your work, a problem with the CMS or the closure of that particular publication can mean you end up without any copies of anything you’ve done. In recent months several publications I’ve written for have closed down, but everything I’ve written for them is right here on my Mac.
Last but not least, if you work for multiple clients the likelihood that they’ll all use the same platforms and software is very small. Even individual departments of the same company use different things, so for example today I’m doing work for a publisher that uses a CMS but for a department that uses Google Docs instead. In a typical week I’ll write for a half dozen different clients, none of whom have the same submission requirements.
For me at, least, the solution is to use the same writing app for everything. I write almost everything in Ulysses, which then enables me to copy and paste into CMSes, export to Word format, PDF or rich text, paste formatted copy into email… you get the idea.
There are many apps that do what Ulysses do; I just happen to like the way Ulysses does it.
The benefits of doing everything in Ulysses is that the actual writing process never changes. There are no different CMSes to learn, no different interfaces to remember, no apps to relearn. The app I’m writing in always looks the same, works the same, uses the same keyboard shortcuts, displays the same fonts.
That matters because it means I waste exactly zero time trying to remember how anything works. 100% of my writing time is spent writing. When I’m finished I can then export the document in whatever format the client wants.
It also means I have an archive of everything I write for absolutely everybody, and that archive is all stored in the most widely supported format of all: plain text.
That’s because Ulysses enables me to use a writing language called Markdown, which is plain text with a few additional tags for things like links and formatting.
Here’s an example of how that looks when I’m working.
I press the hash key for a title, press it twice for a subtitle, type numbers at the beginning of lines for a numbered list and so on.
Plain text means the system requirements are tiny, performance is blazingly fast and I can search my entire archive instantly. I can also synchronise that entire archive with my phone, iPad and laptop so I’ve always got access to all of it.
CMSes are useful things, I know. But if you’re freelancing for lots of different people I think it’s worth taking the extra time – and it isn’t much extra time – to do everything in your favourite text editor first and then put it into the appropriate format or publishing platform. It’s a lesson I’ve learnt the hard way. I hope you don’t learn it the same way.
The UK, which is very far away from China, has a population of around 66 million people and has officially recorded 635,000 cases of COVID-19 and 43,000 deaths.
Vietnam, which has a long land border with China, has a population of 95 million people. It has recorded 1,113 cases and 35 deaths.
The difference isn’t some special Asian COVID-resistant DNA, as some of the more unhinged right-wing commentators have suggested, or the Vietnamese government suppressing the real scale of the virus; doctors on the ground say the figures match their experiences. It’s that Asia has learnt lessons from previous pandemics and applied them competently.
To take just one example, in Vietnam temperature checks were introduced in Hanoi airport in January before human to human transmission had even been confirmed. In the UK, we started trialling temperature checks for Heathrow arrivals in late May, two months after we went into lockdown. Vietnam began contact tracing and quarantining in January. As The Guardian reports, the UK track and trace system wasn’t announced until late May and it still isn’t working.
the government’s Sage scientific advisers have concluded NHS test and trace is not working.
Too few people are getting tested, results are coming back too slowly and not enough people are sticking to the instructions to isolate, they say.
The system “is having a marginal impact on transmissionâ€, as a result, and unless it grows as fast as the epidemic that impact will only wane.
One of the reasons it isn’t working is that the government decided to outsource everything to private firms instead of using existing public health services. The Guardian again:
The percentage of people reached and asked to provide details of recent close contacts [by the national test and trace system] hit its lowest level since June at the end of September, with performance worsening steadily over the month. It means about 25% of contacts are not reached at all.
Our World In Data has a fascinating and comprehensive explanation of how and why Vietnam responded to COVID. Not everything could have been replicated elsewhere, but in its conclusion the report says that many lessons are applicable to other countries: investing in public health infrastructure, taking early action to curb community spread, having a thorough contact tracing system, quarantining based on possible exposure rather than symptoms, and clear, consistent and serious public communication.
When Vietnam did lockdown and contact tracing, it did it properly. Here, the time lockdown was supposed to buy us wasn’t spent on building an effective track and trace system; it was spent enriching the Government’s mates and giving lucrative contracts to cronies. That’s already killed thousands of people, and it looks likely to kill very many more.
Helen Rosner, the New Yorker’s roving food correspondent, is a great writer. And this is a great article: although it’s about New York I think it has resonance here too. It’s called The Uncertain Promises of Indoor Dining in New York City.
This grinding moral calculus leaves us with a fallacious sense of personal responsibility and misplaced blame. In recent months, I’ve seen chefs and restaurateurs lash out on social media at those whom they deem insufficiently supportive of the industry’s return. Those declining to eat in restaurants during the pandemic, they argue, are complicit in the economic suffering of their businesses and employees. (The crisis is unimaginably severe, and the stress is nearly unbearable, but such a position seems rooted more in existential terror than in logic.) There are, of course, ways to be supportive without prioritizing capital over safety: early in the pandemic, when the mass extinction of small businesses was looming, I purchased more logo-emblazoned sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and tote bags than one human ever ought to own, and encouraged everybody I knew to do the same. Still, it is obvious that restaurants will not be saved by T-shirt sales alone. I’ve found a measure of relief in a simple piece of advice passed along by a friend: pick three businesses that matter to you and your community—a manageable number—and then pour everything you can into making sure they come out O.K. on the other side. But, in September, during a Zoom conversation I had with the chef David Chang to promote his new memoir, he put the same idea in more dire terms, invoking philosophy’s infamous trolley problem: “I think ninety per cent of independent restaurants are going to die,†he said. “We need to start to choose which ones we want to prop up.â€
The COVID-related adoption of the rainbow flag to mean “I like the NHS” has caused dismay for many LGBT+ people. It’s not because they’re snowflakes. It’s because some of the flags, badges and other merchandise have appropriated two things: the Pride flag, and the logo of a very specific NHS initiative that’s been running for several years.
The original NHS rainbow was, well, a rainbow: seven colours in a semi-circle with clouds at either end. Here’s one.
But we’re seeing more and more of this. This is a “Thank You NHS Hero” flag from Amazon:
As you can see, it bears a strong resemblance to the Rainbow NHS Badge, shown below.
The former is cheap Amazon tat. The latter is the logo of a specific initiative to improve access to healthcare.
The Rainbow NHS Badge programme was created because many LGBT+ people have experienced appalling treatment from healthcare workers. Those experiences, and hearing about those experiences, can make LGBT+ people very wary of accessing NHS services. That reluctance can cost lives.
To try to address this, the Rainbow NHS badge project was created in late 2017. The aim was to create “a strong visual symbol to say to LGBT+ people accessing NHS healthcare, ‘I am a good person to talk to about LGBT+ issues and I will do my best to help you if I need it.’” The badge combined two instantly recognisable images: the NHS logo and the Pride flag.
There’s a potted history of the whole programme here.
It’s not just a badge. It’s also a commitment to equal healthcare and equal treatment, something LGBT+ people cannot take for granted. Prior to COVID, the badges were in use in 223 NHS trusts in England with more to follow and it was also rolling out to GP practices and other organisations.
Rainbows are important to LGBT+ people. They indicate safe spaces in a world that’s often very unsafe; in the NHS, they indicate that somebody is safe to talk to. The horizontal Pride flag is recognised globally as a symbol of LGBT+ people and LGBT+ inclusion.
Now, though, we’re being told that any and all rainbow flags – including the Pride flag – mean the NHS. They don’t.
Here’s The Portal Bookshop:
I appreciate the rainbow arguments seem silly to anyone on the outside but let me put it this way.
For years, if you saw the rainbow flag up somewhere, queer people knew they would be safe there.
Now? Is it safe? Or does that person support the NHS – and want to send you to it?
The Pride flag is not a rainbow, but it’s beginning to be used by people who don’t know the difference. So the use of the six-colour pride flag in NHS-related branding and merchandise – and clothes shops and supermarkets have been particularly bad for this, cynically rejigging their Pride ranges to make them about the NHS instead – is taking a very specific symbol and ignoring its meaning. As The Portal bookshop put it on Twitter, it’s having “a symbol of safety and unity snatched out from under us in six months flat.”
If there’s a silver lining to this cloud, it’s that it’s driving adoption of a newer, alternative Pride flag called the Progressive Pride flag. It was designed by Daniel Quasar in 2018 and adds more colours to represent people of different colours and genders.
As Tom Haynes wrote on TheTab.com:
I’m certainly not trying to tell you LGBT+ people own the very concept of rainbows… but the way brands and the Tories have taken the rainbow and ran with it is uncomfortable to watch. Looking at summer streets full of boomers dangling actual Pride flags with NHS written on them, it’s hard not to to think: yeah this is a form of erasure. There’s a nuance here that most people are missing.