Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • A tweet is not a war

    Director of British Future, Sunder Katwala, has posted an interesting twitter thread about whether the UK is undergoing a culture war.

    One of the points he makes is that a great deal of culture war stuff in our media is manufactured by the media. For example, a few weeks ago there was a kerfuffle about the singer Adele’s hair: was it cultural appropriation? Most people couldn’t care less, but it was puffed up by a media that thrives on reporting conflict – and which will create conflict if there’s nothing to report. Katwala:

    Almost nobody in Britain thought there was any issue with Adele’s hair. Broadcasters had to get some muppet from Philadelphia on to pretend there was a controversy.

    This happens all the time, and it’s getting worse: some media outlets deliberately trawl social media for the most extreme opinions they can find and pretend that they’re representative of a wider group or movement. They file their non-story and the rest of the media picks up on it – so other newspapers will rerun the story and the BBC will get a bunch of people into the studio to discuss it. Cue endless column inches and broadcast hours about a movement that doesn’t exist.

    Most of the time these supposed controversies don’t reflect public opinion, but people largely agreeing with each other doesn’t make for dramatic conflict on radio or TV. I know from experience that contributors to discussions are sometimes asked to take a particularly extreme point of view in order to make the debate more spicy (I’ve refused to do so; I’m not asked to go on those programmes any more). This is why contrarians get so much airtime.

    So I’m not sure I agree with Katwala on this:

    The media should be less credulous in reporting every tweet as if it reflects a movement

    I don’t think much of the media is credulous; I think it knows exactly what it’s doing and it gets what Katwala brilliantly describes as a “sugar rush from platforming conflict, however trivial”. It knows that the voices it platforms are extreme. That’s why it platforms them.

  • What Dr Seuss didn’t say

    If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’ll know that from time to time I get fascinated by online misquotes, which often go on to have a life of their own. As I’ve written before, the urinal trough in the gents’ toilets in Glasgow’s King Tut’s venue is engraved with a quote from the writer Hunter S Thompson that says:

    The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

    He never said that. He did, however, write that the TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench where thieves and pimps etc etc etc. Swapping TV for music and adding “there’s also a negative side” is the work of someone on the internet. One of the upsides of transition is that I can now go for a wee in Tut’s without getting annoyed by this.

    I found out about another one today, which I had previously thought was an old advertising slogan of some kind:

    The people who mind don’t matter. The people who matter don’t mind.

    Nope! The actual quote is this:

    Be who you are and say how you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.

    Multiple sites, including Good Housekeeping, have attributed it to Dr Seuss. You can buy it on cushions and framed prints on Etsy. But despite their claims that it’s in The Cat In The Hat, it isn’t. There’s no evidence that Dr Seuss ever said it.

    Quote Investigator looked into it and found an early example in Punch magazine in 1855.

    A SHORT CUT TO METAPHYSICS.
    What is Matter?—Never mind.
    What is Mind?—No matter.

    And the TV show QI found a version of it in an engineering journal in 1938:

    Mr. Davies himself admitted that it was highly controversial and open to criticism; but criticism concerned both mind and matter. “Those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind!”

    The phrasing was used in the 1940s in some popular anecdotes about the seating arrangements at parties and turned up in various newspapers before being attributed to the US financier and philanthropist Bernard Baruch. But it appears to be one of those bits of anonymous wisdom that gets attached to various people in various places at various times. As Dr Seuss put it*:

    Sometimes we just see
    What we want to believe!

    * You knew I’d to this. No he didn’t. I made it up. 

  • Salt water

    I know it’s hard for people who aren’t trans to understand what gender dysphoria is like. I thought this analogy, by Dr Emmy Zje, is pretty good.

    Imagine that you’re sitting with a bunch of people and you’re all drinking water. Their water is spring water, but yours is salt water – and you don’t know this, so you don’t understand how they can drink their water so easily when yours makes you want to choke. So you try to do what they do, and you drink, and you drink, and you keep drinking until you nearly die from dehydration.

    As another Twitter user, Rachel de Spoons, points out, the analogy works particularly well because different people experience different levels of dysphoria. As she writes: “everyone has different concentrations of salt. Some can’t manage a sip and for others it’s just tainted enough that they last decades.”

    The original tweet has gone viral, so Emmy has asked people who like it to consider donating to #transcrowdfund to help a trans person achieve their transition goals.

  • Bad journalism

    I’ve been listening to the You’re Wrong About podcast, this time about the infamous Ford Pinto. It seems that almost everything I thought I knew about it was incorrect and largely based on a single Mother Jones article.

    The podcast makes an interesting point about that, and about journalism more widely: a lot of bad journalism comes from writers who are operating in good faith, or at least partial good faith. They believe that they have uncovered something so huge that they must tell the world. That belief can cause a kind of myopia.

    Journalism is as much about what you choose to leave out as what you choose to put in. Let’s say you’ve got a whistleblower from inside an organisation with a suitably salacious tale. If it’s a really good story, if it’s the kind of story that’ll have people gasping over their morning paper, how much consideration will you give to the things that contradict or cast doubt over what the whistleblower is telling you?

    People like to be heroes, and journalists are no exception – so if you think you’re the hero who’s going to break the story, you’re not going to consider that perhaps you’re being misled, or seeing connections that aren’t there, or ignoring evidence that shows that you’re not the hero here but the villain.

    The MMR scare is a good example of that. How many journalists telling their readers of the entirely invented dangers thought they were doing Pulitzer-worthy public service journalism? And how many lives have been destroyed by the anti-vaccination movement they helped spawn?

  • Shhhhh

    Sophie Labelle’s Assigned Male comic hits the nail on the head once again.

    Comic strip showing someone claiming that they're being silenced

  • Never kiss a Tory

    Do you remember when bigots were ashamed to be openly bigoted? When racists were too scared to say racist things? When it wasn’t okay to brag about grabbing women by the pussy? I do, and I’d like those days to return.

    One of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in is that far too many people are far too willing to make allowances for the ignorant, the intolerant and the downright dangerous.

    I get particularly annoyed by the assertion, usually made by affluent middle-class conservative columnists, that we have an obligation to tolerate people with repellent beliefs. If we don’t invite our nazi uncle to dinner, we’re refusing to entertain alternative points of view.

    I disagree. I think if you have nazis at your dinner party, you’re having a nazi dinner party.

    Jessica Valenti clearly feels the same, and has articulated it with much less swearing than I have.

    This week, as the president of the United States casually retweeted an account accusing Joe Biden of pedophilia and baselessly claimed that “it’ll start getting cooler” as smoke haze from California reached New York City, writers Bari Weiss and Johann Hari both waxed nostalgic for a time when friendships and romances blossomed across the aisle. “I don’t denounce my friends when I disagree with them,” Hari tweeted. “If you do, then you don’t actually have friends, you only have political alliances, and your life will be filled with anxiety and unhappiness.” (Never mind the anxiety that might come along with being “friends” with a person who doesn’t believe in your right to marry or control your own body.)

    …These calls for bipartisan amicability in the face of unrelenting injustice are a reminder that the life-and-death issues so many Americans face are often just cocktail-hour talk for others. It’s easy to bemoan the lack of politeness in politics when you have no real skin in the game.

    My friends don’t make me anxious or unhappy; bigoted people do, which is why I’m not friends with any.

    Like Johann Hari, I don’t want to denounce my friends. I find the easiest way to avoid that is not to be friends with assholes.

  • Doctors say trans rights

    The BMA’s annual conference has called on the government to protect the rights of trans and non-binary people both in healthcare and in wider society.

    Dr Helena McKeown, Chair of the BMA representative body, said:

    The BMA supports transgender and nonbinary individuals’ equal rights to live their lives with dignity which includes the right to equal access to healthcare. We oppose discrimination of all kinds and are committed to ensuring universal access to healthcare for all on the basis of clinical need.

    While the BMA has numerous policies affirming our support of LGBT individuals, [The agreement to this new policy means] that, for the first time in our history, we now have a BMA-wide policy giving specific attention to the needs of transgender and nonbinary individuals. Receiving any medical treatment can be stressful for patients and so it is important for individuals to receive healthcare in settings they feel comfortable with. This applies to transgender as well as cis individuals.

    The BMA hasn’t, however, clarified whether trans women have pelvises.

  • A little bit of good news

    Sarah McBride

    The world’s on fire, everything is awful and it’s not a great time to be LGBT+, so it’s important to celebrate the little pieces of good news among the relentless misery of 2020. The luminous Sarah McBride won the Democratic nomination for a Delaware seat last night, which means she’s on track to be America’s highest-ranking openly trans elected official.

    McBride is only 30 but she has already had to deal with a great deal of shit in her life. She lost her husband to cancer, she’s had to deal with all the crap a trans woman with a public profile has to endure, and she was even targeted by UK anti-trans bigots who flew to the US courtesy of the Heritage Foundation and verbally abused her in her office. And despite this she remains incredibly strong, incredibly dignified and – amazingly – full of faith in humanity.

    Her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different, is really good and very sad. You can find out more about her on her website.

    As Annise Parker, president of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, commented:

    Sarah’s primary win shatters another lavender ceiling in our movement to build LGBTQ political power, and her victory will inspire more transgender people to run for elected office. At a time when the Trump administration, cynical politicians and too many state legislatures are attempting to use trans people as political weapons, Sarah’s win is a powerful reminder that voters are increasingly rejecting the politics of bigotry in favor of candidates who stand for equality.

    Representation matters. Not just politically, but visually. Somewhere there’s a trans kid seeing Sarah on TV and thinking, I want to be just like her.

  • Wooooooooooooo

    Vogue contributor and trans woman Paris Lees posted something online yesterday that sounded too crazy to be true:

    More Americans claim to have seen a ghost than to have met a transgender person.

    But it is true. Huffington Post points out that a 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that 18% of Americans claim to have seen a ghost; a 2015 GLAAD study found that only 16% of Americans say they know someone who’s trans. I’ve looked at a number of more recent surveys and across the entire population the numbers for the latter question are consistently between 11% and 20%.

    It’s interesting to look at lots of these surveys because a clear pattern emerges: younger people are much more likely to know someone who’s openly trans or non-binary, while older, more conservative people are more likely to think they’ve seen a ghost.

    Among Fox News viewers, the number of people who say they’ve personally seen a ghost is a whopping 60%. And of course, you’re much more likely to be personally visited by a spirit from the other side than see a positive portrayal of trans people on Fox News.

  • Hundreds of Emilys

    This is heartbreaking, powerful and thought-provoking: Buying Myself Back, by Emily Ratajkowski.

    It’s about photographs and paintings and who can control images of you. And it’ll probably further damage your faith in human nature.

    Pictures meant only for a person who loved me and with whom I’d felt safe — photos taken out of trust and intimacy — were now being manically shared and discussed on online forums and rated “hot” or “not.” Rebecca Solnit wrote recently about the message that comes with revenge porn: “You thought you were a mind, but you’re a body, you thought you could have a public life, but your private life is here to sabotage you, you thought you had power so let us destroy you.” I’d been destroyed.