Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Representation

    Stephen Paton writes in The National about the abuse currently being thrown online at Mridul Wadhwa, who is a potential SNP candidate. You’d think that Wadhwa would be exactly the kind of person a supposedly progressive, forward-thinking country would want: she’s an advocate for Black and minority ethnic voices and has spent fifteen years working to tackle violence against women.

    Nope. Because Wadhwa is trans, she’s being demonised as a danger to women. That’s where we are now: someone who actively works to help vulnerable and abused women, the manager of a rape crisis centre, is being abused by the “protect women” crowd.

    With no recourse to revert to arguments about safeguarding or any other progressive cover, anti-trans activists within the SNP have been forced to reveal the crux of their position which is, simply, they do not want a trans woman to be recognised as a woman.

    The fundamental belief at the core of anti-trans activism is that trans people are deceivers who should be “morally mandated out of existence”. That means making it impossible for trans people to exist in society at all: no healthcare, no safe spaces, no legal recognition, no protection from abuse or discrimination. And definitely no political representation.

  • One potato

    Because I live in the central belt of scotland, I’m not going out anywhere right now. The pubs and venues are all closed, so there are no gigs to go to, no open mics to play, no comedy shows to cackle at. I can’t meet my friends in restaurants and I can’t cook for them at home. With a couple of exceptions there are no online things either. All my communication with my friends is via texts or instant messaging and the only people I spend any time with in real life are my children.

    One of the results of that is that I don’t pay much attention to what I wear right now. Nobody’s going to shove themselves into underwired bras or clacky heels unless they absolutely have to, and I absolutely don’t have to. If I’m not going out, there’s no reason to bother with make-up or fun clothes; if I didn’t have to go to the shops or pick up the kids I’d probably stay in my dressing gown all day. My AW2020 signature look is “Carrie puts the bins out.”

    It’s surprisingly demoralising. I feel like a human potato, or something else similarly ungendered. A disembodied head in a jar, perhaps, or a balloon with a face on it. Something that doesn’t exist in the world but independently of it.

    I feel ungendered because gender is partly a performance, a feedback loop where you perform a particular role – such as “man” or “woman” – and people respond to you accordingly, both positively and negatively. So in non-COVID times I inhabit the world as a woman and spend time with people who recognise me as and respond to me as a woman. That’s an important corrective to the ongoing demonisation of people like me, which happens daily in the press and constantly online. In myriad ways it shows you that the narrative in your own head, that the world is a hateful and dangerous place for people like you, is not true.

    For most of this year, that corrective has been taken away. The press haven’t stopped and the social media bullies continue to abuse trans people and anyone who supports trans people. If anything, covid has made them worse: they have more time to spend online, and they have become bolder and less concerned about maintaining a veneer of respectability. And the real-life interactions that give the lie to their scaremongering are not happening.

    That’s not all. LGBT+ groups have all had to move online, as have the life-affirming Pride events. Healthcare has been reduced to the occasional phone call; no monitoring, no referrals. Safe spaces are shuttered.

    I’ve written before that this is a hard road to walk. It’s harder still when you can’t walk it at all.

  • “And nothing feels right now”

    This, by Jared Misner for the NYT, is devastating.

    Now that I’m actually married (the legal kind), I can say I love my husband very much. He is pragmatic, kind and handsome.

    But he does not pull over for garage sales. He does not smuggle bags of dog costumes and treats out of press events to later give to my dogs and my parents’ dogs. He does not bring friendship bracelet crafts or design-your-own hats to our annual Labor Day trip and does not understand my references to the Beehive.

  • “Pundit brain is a form of stupidity”

    This, by Tom Whyman, should annoy the right people.

    If the image of the pundit-brained journalist has been crystallized anywhere, it is in the early satire of Chris Morris: shows like The Day Today and Brass Eye where his anchor character was constantly drawing wildly over-confident conclusions from nonsensical infographics, howling at unassuming guests that they need to solve absolutely everything that’s wrong with the world, right now, and smirking gleefully to camera at the possibility of instigating a war.

  • “How have I been?”

    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.

  • Nouns and pronouns

    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”.  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.

  • May the farce be with you

    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.

  • “Accidentally”

    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.

    CNN, back in 2017:

    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.

  • “I’ve seen some mention of lizard people?”

    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.

  • Weakness

    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.’”