Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Bright SPARKs

    I’ve become a little bit obsessed by the marketing for Positive Grid’s SPARK, a very clever guitar amplifier. In recent weeks I’ve been seeing a lot of videos like the one pictured below, in which really amazing women guitarists test the amp.

    I’m not used to seeing women in marketing for musical stuff, which tends to be a boy’s club; musical marketing has often been appalling, with a particular low in the 1980s when Tokai’s “Tokai is coming” campaign placed full-page magazine ads showing a naked woman apparently masturbating with an electric guitar. We’re generally better than that now, but there’s a long legacy of sexism in the industry. Guitar.com has some other examples:

    I volunteer and podcast for Scottish Women Inventing Music, an organisation dedicated to achieving gender equality across the music business, so I’m very interested in this stuff. The SPARK ads got me wondering: is this a deliberate strategy to boost the visibility of women musicians, thereby positioning Positive Grid as a forward-thinking firm, or is it just precision targeting on social media?

    I’m not just wondering idly. Half of guitar buyers are women, and I recently spoke to guitar legends Fender about their marketing: this year will feature more signature models from women guitarists than ever before, and the marketing for the online Fender Play service has a good mix of people showing the variety of folks who play guitar.

    Is Positive Grid doing the same? What are the boys seeing?

    It turns out that the answer is boys.

    I’m being shown women playing guitars but my male musician friends are seeing men in their ads. And that makes me wonder some more: is that because the firm has done testing and discovered that men won’t click on the link if the amp is being tested by a woman?

    I fear that the answer is yes, because the frequency of the advertising indicates there’s a lot of money being spent on this campaign. You don’t make and target different ads for different genders if it doesn’t have a demonstrable effect on your sales.

    I’m not picking on Positive Grid here. Seeing women in musical instrument marketing is still so rare that what they’re doing does feel like progress. As Guitar.com put it:

    the guitar industry, and the music industry at large doesn’t accurately reflect the wealth of female talent out there. The fact that people have noticed this at last means that, hopefully at least, we’re finally starting to see some progress…

  • Please take part in the Scottish consultation, which closes at midnight today

    I know, I know. I’m sick of it too and there are plenty of other things to worry about. But the Scottish consultation on gender recognition reform closes tonight and you can be certain that the worst people have made their voices heard.

    I know of lots of people who’ve been meaning to do this but haven’t yet; after midnight those good intentions won’t be able to help a very marginalised community.

    Please, take five minutes to complete the consultation. Everything you need to know is on the Equal Recognition website.

    With excellent timing, an important study in The Lancet Public Health describes the importance of accurate documentation for trans and gender non-conforming people: it reduces psychological distress and saves lives.

    the authors’ findings support the need to increase the availability of and streamline the processes to obtain gender congruent IDs. Gaining gender-congruent IDs should be easy, affordable, and quickly completed

  • Some people genuinely want us dead

    One of the most incredible things I’ve seen in recent days is transphobes gleefully predicting that coronavirus will kill lots of trans women. They’re responding to Chinese stats that indicate a higher fatality rate among infected men than women; this, apparently, means those of us assigned male at birth will get our just desserts for whatever perceived injustice they believe we’re perpetrating. And the people doing this aren’t the lunatic fringe of Twitter. They’re the newspaper columnists and college professors who get to set the tone of supposed “legitimate debate”.

    If you’re chuckling about the potential deaths of people, you’ve long abandoned “reasonable concerns”.

    Many of these people and their followers have contributed to the Scottish Government consultation on gender recognition reform, which closes on Tuesday. If you haven’t already done so, please add your experiences; if you contributed to the initial consultation, please contribute to this one too. The first consultation was on whether gender recognition needed reform; this one is about how it should be done.

    This article by Laura Waddell gives the lie to the claim that women’s groups aren’t in favour of the reforms.

    Here’s what various organisations have to say about gender recognition reform in Scotland and what they hope you’ll say in the consultation.

    Sisters Scotland:
    https://sistersscotland.com

    Equality Network :
    http://equalrecognition.scot/respond/

    #GWithTheT:
    https://gwiththet.scot

    YWCA Scotland:
    https://www.ywcascotland.org/our-gra-consultation-response/

  • 17,700 bottles of hand sanitiser

    The Coronavirus pandemic has brought out the best in many people. But it’s also brought out the worst in others, as the panic buying in your local supermarket demonstrates. But the selfish sods filling their vans with enough toilet paper for an army pale in comparison to this arsehole.

    On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

    Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

    Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.

  • Rough boys

    The new ZZ Top documentary, That Little Ol’ Band From Texas, is a little Netflix gem.

    It traces the history of the band from their earliest musical adventures until the release of their smash hit Eliminator  in 1983, which coincided with the launch of MTV. I’d have liked it to continue – the band didn’t stop making music in the eighties, and songs like 2012’s Gotsta Get Paid (which plays over the end, and which I’ve included below) continued to showcase the songwriting chops, gravelly vocals and glorious guitar sounds that I love so much – but it’s understandable from a narrative point of view.

    The band come across as thoroughly likeable and a little bit bemused by it all; if there are skeletons rattling anywhere they aren’t rattling anywhere on screen. And the live performances filmed specially for the documentary are absolutely wonderful. It’s a shame about the 80s videos though; they made the band superstars but… let’s just say they were made in less enlightened times.

    Here’s a marginally less sexist take on the same idea featuring the same band.

  • “Using minority rights to attack women’s services says it all”

    Another thoughtful column: Laura Waddell on feminism, transphobia and GRA reform.

    …often the cry of “listen to women” comes up. So let’s do that now. Here’s what women’s organisations across Scotland have actually said.

    During the original consultation, Close the Gap, Engender, Equate Scotland, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, Women 50:50 and Zero Tolerance released a joint statement supporting self-ID. At odds with the inflammatory phrase ‘war on women’, they clearly state: “We do not regard trans equality and women’s equality to contradict or be in competition with each other.”

    …They also stated: “The complexity, restrictions and expense of the current gender recognition process particularly discriminates against trans people who are disabled, migrant, minority ethnic, unemployed, homeless, fleeing domestic abuse, young or non-binary. Enabling trans people to smoothly change their birth certificates at the same time as they change their other identity documents is a much needed positive step forward for society.”

    It’s a great shame that voices like Waddell’s – and of the women she writes about here – are not given the same prominence as pale, male and stale middle-aged newspaper columnists.

  • “We have fought tooth and nail for the rights we have, only to be met with resistance, sabotage and abuse”

    A thoughtful piece on feminism and trans women by Scots author Elaine Gunn:

    I get it – honestly, I understand how protective women feel of their safe spaces. In a world that feels unsafe a lot of the time, where our rights are hard-won and grudged at every step, it’s reasonable to feel nervous and insecure around changes to our habitual experiences of gender. What we must not do, however, is allow that nervousness and insecurity to be redirected by media manipulation towards a group that faces even more hatred and violence for claiming their rights than we do. It’s tempting to cling to the concept of women being right at the bottom of the privilege pile, but it only takes a moment of empathy to understand that while women have good reason to fear men, trans people have good reason to fear both men and women right now.

    On a related note, journalist Vonny LeClerc has recorded an equally thoughtful piece on her journey into “gender-critical” feminism and the realisations that led her to leave it behind.

  • “Strength in numbers, solidarity and, ultimately, love”

    Writing in The Guardian, Zoe Williams takes a very different stance from the majority of Guardian pieces on trans rights. As she points out, it isn’t the anti-trans feminists who are being silenced here.

    All kinds of voices have been excluded. The experience of trans men, for instance, has been more or less erased, because the core issues have been whittled down to such a sharp, conflicted point – do cis women need protected status? – that the very existence of trans men has become too inconvenient to accommodate. The mainstream feminist view, which is trans-inclusive, has been sidelined to maintain the fiction that this is a generational battle between old and young feminists.

    …Women-only space was a realm protected from our Harvey Weinsteins, where we could talk about our Harvey Weinsteins; it was not a hallowed place where we communicated through our ovaries. It was where we came together in unity against people who hated us. I can’t imagine the mindset that would exclude a trans sister from that.

    I’m not going to say anything mean here: I’ve always liked Williams’ writing, and while it’s a drop in a very poisonous ocean of anti-trans pieces the paper has run in recent years it’s still a welcome drop.

  • Get Killt

    My excellent pal and fellow radio blabber Louise Blain has launched a new podcast, Killt. As a glamorous radio celeb I was of course allowed to hear it before anybody else and trust me, it’s a wee treat.

    Killt is a podcast about podcasts: specifically, true crime podcasts. If you’re a fan of the genre you’ll know how frustrating finding the good stuff can be. That’s where Louise comes in: she’s your guide to the good stuff, a digital detective helping you find the true killers in a genre often choked by filler.

    It’s on Spotify here: https://spoti.fi/3aGwcBo
    And Apple has it here: https://apple.co/2VYMwJE

  • Transphobia is as British as bad teeth

    Juliet Jacques in the New York Times:

    Transphobia Is Everywhere in Britain: it’s a respectable bigotry, on the left as well as the right.

    …There are two main types of British transphobia. One, employed most frequently but not exclusively by right-wing men, rejects outright the idea that gender might not be determined only by biological traits identifiable at birth. This viewpoint can often be found in publications aligned with the Conservative Party, such as The Spectator, The Times and The Telegraph, all of which are looking for a new “culture war” to pursue now that the long, exhausting battle over Brexit has finally been resolved in favor of Leavers

    The other type, from a so-called radical feminist tradition, argues that trans women’s requests for gender recognition are incompatible with cis women’s rights to single-sex spaces.

    It’s telling that Jacques, a former Guardian writer, had to approach a US publication to get the article published.

    Meanwhile closer to home, Helen Martin in the Edinburgh News claims that gender recognition reform will lead to…

    women’s shops compelled to supply men’s lingerie and size 12 stilettos

    This is from the same school as the equal marriage claim that letting gay people marry would lead to people marrying dogs and cousins.

    Transphobia is as British as bad teeth and unfunny sitcoms. As poet Jay Hulme noted on Twitter, we’ve had transphobia as part of our culture for hundreds of years. The word “bad” originally meant a feminine man.

    I’d say that everyone in Britain over the age of 20 (at least) has done or said something transphobic, and so calling out transphobia means calling out a whole nation – and British people don’t do well with guilt.

    …You’ll find transphobic tropes lurking in art and literature from the 1500’s, the 1400’s, earlier. They’re basically the same ones making up the transphobia in 2000’s comedy.

    …The world has been transphobic for a long time, Britain just held on to it. Made it funny. Made it ours. Put it in the fabric of the nation. Made everyone complicit. Made everyone guilty. And now we’re fighting for trans rights we seem unreasonable – and everyone feels attacked.