Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • “Consider your man card reissued”

    Following on from yesterday’s post about violent, insecure men and shootings. here’s how the AR-15 assault rifle used in the most recent shootings (including Sandy Hook and yesterday’s atrocity) has been advertised.

    This one dates from 2010. In the accompanying press release, Bushmaster Firearms explained:

    …visitors of bushmaster.com will have to prove they’re a man by answering a series of manhood questions. Upon successful completion, they will be issued a temporary Man Card to proudly display to friends and family. The Man Card is valid for one year.

    Visitors can also call into question or even revoke the Man Card of friends they feel have betrayed their manhood.

    This is what toxic masculinity looks like. As the writer Andi Zeisler put it on Twitter, toxic masculinity doesn’t say that men are toxic.

    It refers to cultural norms that equate masculinity with control, aggression, and violence and that label emotion, compassion, and empathy “unmanly.”

    And sells military assault rifles as the solution.

  • Publishers, women writers and online abuse

    Recommended uniform for women in journalism, 2018

    Like many people, I have a personal Twitter account. And like many writers, that personal Twitter account is often used by people who want to contact me for work reasons. Luckily for me I’m not a young woman journalist, because if I were that means my personal Twitter account would be full of rape threats, death threats and the other horrific misogynist abuse that young women journalists so often attract.

    To be a woman with any kind of profile is to find a howling void of misogyny every time you go online. Other minorities get it too, of course, but I’m talking here about a very specific, poisonous and widespread form of misogynistic abuse.

    And it just seems to be getting worse, not least because nobody’s taking responsibility. The social networks don’t act on abuse reports, or they ban the complainer; on the rare occasions the reports do work, the trolls are back again under a new account in seconds. Same with email providers. Vicious online abuse of women is just a fact of life.

    That can’t be right.

    I’ve been thinking about this, because like many people in publishing my Twitter account isn’t provided by or run by any employer; it’s mine. But my various employers often publish it as a way for readers to get in touch with me, and get in touch they do.

    For me it’s a minor irritation: mainly PRs pitching products I don’t care about for publications I don’t write for. And because I’m freelance, I’m under no obligation to be nice to or to listen to anybody, so I subscribe to multiple block lists to keep known offenders out of my timeline.

    But if your business publishes pieces that attract controversy (you know the kind of thing: hot-button subjects such as, are women people? Are brown people people? Is a piece of music good? Is a game worth buying?) and that controversy sends shrieking misogynists into the journalist’s personal social media accounts – which it does – then shouldn’t the publisher have a duty of care?

    Back in 2014, Magnus Boyd of law firm Schillings thought so. The FT reports:

    …many organisations now expect employees to maintain an active presence on social media as part of their day-to-day work. As a result, there is a clear “duty of care” to be met, says Magnus Boyd, a partner at Schillings, the law firm. “An employee being trolled, courtesy of business-related social media activity, is no different from an employee being shouted at by a customer in-store,” he says. “Employers have a duty to protect their staff and, with proper planning, they can be ready for any eventuality, even the scourge of the online troll.”

    It strikes me that if a publisher hires you in part for your social media profile, or provides a way for readers to contact you via email or social media, then that publisher has a responsibility to deal with any abuse that comes via those channels whether it’s during working hours or not.

    As ACAS puts it:

    Legally, employers must abide by relevant health & safety and employment law, as well as the common law duty of care. They also have a moral and ethical duty not to cause, or fail to prevent, physical or psychological injury, and must fulfil their responsibilities with regard to personal injury and negligence claims.

    I can understand why employers might not want to get involved in the murky world of social media (and I can imagine the “you’re freelance: none of our business” response to contractors), but it seems pretty clear to me that if social media / email is part of the job, then the duty of care to provide a safe working environment encompasses that too. If your readers were coming into the office to bellow abuse, you’d do something about it. Why not in online spaces too?

    I wonder, has anybody attempted a tribunal over this? Is it something the NUJ has considered? Am I being hopelessly naive here?

  • “Our shared progress toward a more equal society has depended on people standing together”

    The Green MSP Patrick Harvie has always struck me as a good man. He was namechecked in an anti-trans piece in Scots newspaper The National yesterday, a piece that dragged up the usual “trans people are silencing women” bullshit and accused Harvie of not listening to women.

    Harvie responded on the Scottish Greens website. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s an extract:

    Many national media outlets carry relentlessly hostile coverage, turning the argument for human rights and basic respect into a “culture war” to divide people from one another. That tactic has been used to oppose all forms of equality, time and again down the generations. Progress has been made by people standing together, supporting each other and refusing to accept that your equality or human rights are incompatible with mine.

    …Or we can do exactly what the opponents of equality always want us to do by trading my rights off against yours, yours against hers, his against theirs. If we do that, we will all lose.

    Meanwhile in America, President Trump proved Harvie’s point when his administration announced protection for religious people who don’t want to give healthcare to trans people.

    That’s any kind of care: plasters for cuts, painkillers for headaches, saving your life after a car crash.

    And it’s not just trans people. That was just the headline. The bill is also about protecting people who don’t want to give healthcare to gay people, to lesbians, to people who’ve had abortions, or to anybody else they disapprove of for any other reason. In Kentucky it’s been suggested that similar “religious freedom” legislation will also enable discrimination against interracial couples.

    NPR gives examples of recent religious exemption claims:

    a nurse who didn’t want to provide post-operative care to a woman who had an abortion, a pediatrician who declined to see a child because his parents were lesbians and a fertility doctor who didn’t want to provide services to a lesbian couple.

    At the press conference to announce the changes, acting Department of Health and Human Services secretary Eric Hargan compared what I’d call religious extremists’ hateful bigotry to the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust and Martin Luther King’s quest for civil rights.⁠

  • Don’t take nice to a gun fight

    I enjoyed this piece by Lindsay King-Miller in Rolereboot.org.

    In You Can’t Kill Racism with Kindness, King-Miller writes: 

    “My goal is not to create a country where everyone tolerates each other, agrees to disagree, and goes about their business. I cannot agree to disagree on whether poor people deserve medical care, whether black people deserve safety from police brutality, whether my queer family deserves equal legal protections.

    These are matters of right and wrong, not questions of opinion.”

    It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot given the recent moral panics over LGBT* people and trans people in particular: I’ve been very loath to call people exhibiting bigoted behaviour or espousing bigoted views as bigots, because that’s not nice. But I’m doing so as not to harm the feelings of people who are actively trying to stir up hatred against particular minorities.

    King-Miller again:

    “Calling a racist a racist might make him sad, but it doesn’t oppress him in any way.”

    When I posted the link on a forum I hang out in, another poster quoted French feminist writer Christiane Rochefort’s comment that oppressors don’t realise you have a grievance until you pull out the knives. I’m in a less militant mood so I’ll talk about Karl Popper instead.

    In 1945, Popper described very well what has been happening with far-right arseholes on Twitter and what’s happening in certain sections of the UK media right now. He called it the “paradox of tolerance”.

    The paradox of tolerance is what happens when you tolerate the intolerable: neo-nazis, for example, or bigots.

    “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant,” Popper wrote, “if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

    He wasn’t arguing that we silenced the intolerant, however, provided that “we can  counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion”. However, “we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.”

    This is inevitably caught up with the issue of free speech, which some people seem determined to misunderstand. Free speech says that nobody can stop you from having particular views. But it doesn’t say that you have a right to have a platform for those views.

    You can make a painting that’s really anti-semitic but you don’t have the right to have the Louvre replace The Mona Lisa with it.

    You can write a book about how lesbians are just awful but you can’t force Diva magazine to review it.

    You can write a song about how you really hate working class black people but you can’t force Stormzy to cover it.

    And so on.

    This is where the controversial topic of no-platforming comes from. No-platforming started off as an anti-fascist tactic, with universities refusing to give a platform to the likes of the National Front and the BNP. We can’t stop you being big old racists, the students said. But we can stop you from being big old racists here.

    In an ironic twist, some vocal former no-platformers such as feminist writer Julie Bindel now face no-platforming themselves, from the same kind of angry students that used to no-platform the NF and the BNP. I say “same kind” but thanks to tuition fees the students are also paying customers now, with expectations of what their money should and shouldn’t be spent on. Some of those students, the trans ones and their allies, don’t think it should be spent on giving people who say awful things a platform to promote their book or raise their media profile at the expense of other, more vulnerable people.

    We can’t stop you saying awful things, the students are saying. But we can stop you from saying awful things here.

    It’s not silencing people. As if. The people being no-platformed reach a collective audience of many millions through national newspapers, BBC TV and radio and social media. Some, like Katie Hopkins, seem unaware of the irony in campaigning against our supposed tolerance for hate speech and then whingeing when people try to no-platform them. As she said on her LBC radio programme:

    “Why do we pride ourselves in being a tolerant country when being tolerant seems to mean that we give these individuals free reign to say what they like?

    Hopkins’ bosses at LBC clearly agreed, and when she posted a tweet suggesting a “Final Solution” against muslims she lost that particular platform (although it’s sad that the end of her Daily Mail career wasn’t because she called foreigners cockroaches and other repellent things; it’s that her losing-libel-cases habit was too expensive for the paper to stomach. Like a cockroach, she’ll be back).

    There’s a great XKCD comic about this very thing.

    XKCD free speech

    It’s not silencing. It’s just saying not here.

    I’m okay if that hurts some bigots’ feelings.

  • Swimming in poisoned water

    This week is both anti-bullying week and transgender awareness week, so some newspapers have chosen to celebrate both by, er, bullying transgender people (see my previous post). I’m not going to get into the arguments or unpick the bullshit — Alex Sharpe does a superb job of that here.

    I’m just going to share a trans person’s tweet I saw yesterday.

    So I’m sat on the train and there are four people reading The Sun and two with the Daily Fail in my eyeline… I’ve moved seats! No wonder trans people feel bombarded. #caniliveonthemoon?

    Imagine starting your day by seeing six people in the same carriage as you holding newspapers that are doing their damnedest to stir up prejudice against you.

    LGB people, muslims and non-EU citizens will recognise the feeling.

    And the supposedly grown-up papers aren’t any better: The Times appears to be obsessed with trans people of late, often taking the side of religious evangelicals, while the Telegraph gives space to people like Norman Tebbit, who claimed that gay marriage would lead to him marrying his son.

    It’s disproportionate, it’s relentless and it’s causing a great deal of distress for no good reason. And it’s getting worse.

    To be trans in the current media climate is to constantly swim in poisoned water. No wonder so many of us end up feeling sick.