Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • “The importance of humility in the face of something you do not understand”

    Nora Mulready writes in The Independent about her journey from “gender critical” fighter against “a new ‘woke’ orthodoxy” to trans ally.

    I read everything I could find that validated my instinct that the increase in transgender identity was a millennial fad, mental health issues, trauma, social contagion, fashion, patriarchy, you name it, I clutched at it.

    But unlike many – most? – anti-trans people, Mulready knew and loved a trans person. In this case, her nephew.

    I saw my nephew thrive, I met many wonderful trans people who simply wanted to live their lives, I listened, and I learned, a lot. Over time my views changed.

    …The final end to my sympathy for gender-critical campaigners was the collective punishment approach to trans women. All trans women are held accountable for any misdemeanour by any trans woman. This is the very epitome of prejudice. “You cannot share our toilets, you cannot share our spaces, because you might be all the same.” It is a heart-breaking act of cruelty towards trans women and is reminiscent of the very worst of the American deep south attitudes towards racial integration.

    …Seeing this issue unfold within my own family taught me a profound lesson: the importance of humility in the face of something you do not understand.

  • Teaching boys to hate women

    This, by Zoe Williams interviewing author Laura Bates, is terrifying: the toxic world of online misogyny. I think many people appreciate that the internet is a toxic swamp, but I don’t think many people appreciate the scale or the danger of it.

    “I started hearing boys at school who already felt that they’d been poisoned against the idea of even having a conversation about feminism. And they were coming out with some quite extreme things: feminism is a cancer, all women lie about rape, white men are the real victims of society … But the moment it really clicked for me was when they started repeating, at schools from rural Scotland to inner-city London, the same wrong statistics.

    Women and minority groups have been trying to raise the alarm about this online radicalisation for at least six years, and they have been ignored.

    The point Bates makes is both stark and subtle: there is a live community of violent extremists, operating online without censure, generating concrete terrorist attacks in which the perpetrators are very open about their guiding ideology of misogyny, and radicalising young boys

    …this world of extreme misogyny is chillingly intertwined with the neo-Nazi one. “The journey of many men who are groomed and radicalised online towards white supremacy starts in anti-feminist forums,” Bates says. “You can see it in the overlap of the lexicon – the entire dense, complex language they’ve created for themselves [red pills, blue pills as in The Matrix, black pills to denote suicidal certainty] – is very similar across both groups.

    A lot of white supremacy is predicated on this obsession with birth rates and replacement theory, the idea that white women need to be forced into sexual servitude and raped, in order to bear white, pure babies. The incel movement is obsessed with sterilising or forcing abortions on black women. And some groups explicitly say – they call it ‘adding cherry flavour to children’s medicine’ – that you target kids of 11-up with anti-feminist memes and jokes, and that’s the gateway to white nationalism.”

    Many of these tropes – replacement theory, “tradwives” and so on – have infiltrated the mainstream media and politics both here and in the US.

  • Another phoney war

    Much of the media – and much of the government, including a Prime Minister who didn’t appear to give a shit about the exams catastrophe or anything else that’s actually important – is huffing and puffing about the Wokerati Thought Police Black Lives Matter Political Correctness Cancel Culture Gone Mad “ban” on singing Land of Hope And Glory at the Last Night of the Proms.

    There’s no ban. We can’t have entire venues full of people singing because there’s a bloody pandemic.

    Joel Golby:

    We’re somehow now on day three of #Promgate, and the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph – as well as about half of the government – are raging about what the Sunday Times in its headline gently refers to as the “BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’”.

    …I hate to be the one saying “you know we’re in a pandemic, right?”, but you know we’re in a pandemic, right? If I didn’t know better, I’d think the political right was deftly exploiting our national inability to ignore culture-war bait in order to obfuscate bigger stories, like, I don’t know, the fact that things are going badly for the government, literally all of the time. How many more times do we have to watch this happen? What do four more years of this government have in store for us? Five hundred children somehow catch the plague due to government negligence and the Express front page is “EU demands hungry Brits RENAME Cornish pasties”? After the 2022 banking crash, Boris Johnson stands behind a podium and vows that, despite the rumours, “the woke left will never make poppies illegal”?

  • “For far too many men, misogyny is not a deal-breaker”

    Jessica Valenti writes about the Aaron Coleman saga in the US.

    The short version: Coleman, a Democratic candidate, “committed serious harassment and sexual misconduct when he was a teenager: Between the ages of 12 and 14, he bullied one girl so badly that she attempted suicide; extorted another classmate with a nude photo which he later sent to her friends and family (which legally amounts to distributing child pornography, among other things); and harassed a third young woman for months.” Credible allegations of more recent abusive behaviour including physical violence are emerging.

    Coleman initially dropped out of the campaign but changed his mind after a lot of men offered their very vocal support: what you might call “himpathy”. Supposed defenders of women suddenly decided to throw women under the bus to defend the prospective politician.

    Valenti:

    The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, for example, tweeted last week that the 19-year-old was being “sabotaged” over “middle school misconduct” (which sounds nicer than revenge porn, I suppose), and questioned whether minors should be tried as adults and sentenced to life in prison — as if not being able to hold public office is somehow akin to incarceration.

    …Men might want to take a pause and examine why they are now repeating the same argument Republicans trotted out during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings: that not elevating a man to public power is a life-ruining consequence for something they did when they were a minor.

    Something very similar is happening here over the Alex Salmond trial. Supposedly progressive men have decided to ignore all the evidence that Salmond has a long track record of inappropriate behaviour; some have gone on to demonise the women who testified against him. 

    The concern is entirely for the perpetrator, not the victims.

    So as men who claim to be our allies go on a tear about how feminism ruined a young man’s life, some food for thought: The young women who Coleman harassed will likely never run for office. It’s not exactly something you can do when nude photos of you at 12 years old have been spread around the internet.

    …I wonder if the “progressive” men on a mission to convince the public that he deserved a second chance would spare a tweet or two for the girls who never got a first one.

    I think this is very much part of it:

    There are some — like the men who blamed the [#metoo] movement for ruining men’s careers — who don’t want a future that doesn’t tolerate harassment or assault. Too many men they know, or like (or see in the mirror every day) would be impacted.

  • False framing

    Gemma Stone, writing on Medium:

    Recently, an anti-trans activist was spoken to by police over a suspected hate crime. Suzy Ireson has been quite prolific in posting anti-trans propaganda around public places, with a direct intention of drumming up hate for trans people and making trans people feel intimidated. She even gleefully admits to doing this on social media profiles, all egged on by other known hateful anti-trans campaigners.

    This is how the media should have reported on this story, it should have just been a very simple “bad person doing bad thing” kind of affair. Except that’s not what we got when The Mirror got their hands on it.

    The Mirror piece was written by a vocal supporter of anti-trans activists who has written multiple anti-trans pieces for the right-wing press.

    The Mirror ran with the title “Mum in hate crime probe after pro-JK Rowling stickers amid trans rights row” which is very clearly slanted in making her seem like a sympathetic character in this narrative.

    It’s happening again today. A woman in the US, Sasha White, has been fired by her literary agent employer for posting a mountain of abusive tweets about and to trans women, including tweets advocating violence against them. Inevitably it’s being framed as a brave feminist silenced by the sinister trans lobby rather than a tiresome bigot getting the sack for bringing her employer into disrepute. It’s important to note that her employer is very and vocally LGBT+ friendly and represents a number of LGBT+ authors.

    Suzanne Moore has tweeted her support, Toby Young has already been in touch with her. It’s surely just a matter of hours before The Spectator offers her a column and JK Rowling calls her a hero.

    Stone:

    Transphobes and bullies are framed as innocent little victims who didn’t do anything wrong, while trans people are framed as monstrous, authoritarian and dangerous. 

  • “These days, right, if you sexually harass someone…”

    Sometimes columnists accidentally reveal more about themselves than they perhaps intended. Iain MacWhirter in The Herald:

    Doing any of those things without consent is sexual harassment, and the Herald’s self-appointed Defender of Women should know that.

    Emma Rich of Engender Scotland:

    Sexual harassment is sex discrimination & a human rights violation. For decades, unwanted hair stroking, touching, and kissing have been understood to be sexual harassment.

    As one commenter put it:

    Who the fuck is going round stroking people’s hair and thinking that’s normal?

    Rich posted some statistics from a recent TUC survey:

    • Nearly 1/4 of women have experienced unwanted touching (such as a hand on the knee or lower back)
    • More than one in ten women reported experienced unwanted sexual touching or attempts to kiss them.

    Author and Scotsman columnist Laura Waddell:

    What does it say about the security of women’s rights when leading Scottish political columnists like Macwhirter feel completely comfortable and unashamed repeatedly diminishing the idea of consent? Women-hating garbage.

  • Surprisingly pretty

    Something I’ve seen a few times now is people (including staunch trans allies) expressing their surprise when someone in a TV programme is revealed to be trans.

    It’s interesting to analyse that, because it says a great deal about how trans people, particularly trans women, are usually portrayed. I think for many people, the words “trans woman” doesn’t make you think of someone like this:

    Teddy Quinlivan

    Or someone like this:

    Janet Mock

    Or someone like this.

    Nicole Maines

    Of course, you don’t need to be conventionally pretty to be valid. But I think one of the reasons that people are surprised when someone conventionally pretty is trans is because many people’s idea of what trans people look like is based on what they’ve seen on TV before. So depending on your age, I suspect it’s likely to be something like this:

    Les Dawson

    Or this:

    Matt Lucas and David Walliams

    Or this.

    Brendan O’Carroll

    You’ve probably picked up on the fact that Dawson, O’Carroll, Lucas and Walliams aren’t playing trans characters (the Little Britain characters are apparently supposed to be cisgender crossdressers; Dawson and O’Carroll were playing women); they’re just in drag. But that’s kinda the point: until very recently, that was the closest thing to representation trans people could expect.

    As the excellent documentary Disclosure demonstrated, trans representation in media, when we were represented at all, was largely limited to psychotic murderer, dead sex worker or man in drag. So if your mental image of trans people is 20-stone truck drivers in tights then of course you’re going to be surprised by someone who looks like a supermodel.

    Most of us don’t look like supermodels, of course, but neither do most cis people. The difference is that nobody’s ever surprised to discover that someone beautiful is cis.

  • Facebook fuels hate

    This, by Julia Carrie Wong, was written in 2017.

    Facebook groups – like any social capital – can just as easily be used for ill as good. And social capital is not an unalloyed good. A 2013 study by New York University political scientist Shanker Satyanath, Bowling for Fascism, found that dense networks of social organizations and clubs in Germany helped promote the spread of nazism. And even a cursory search of Facebook unearths networks of extremists using groups to recruit and organize.

    And this is from the same paper this week.

    Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people “controlling the world”. However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that ISD describe as a “conceptual blind spot”.

    The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content.

    …A Facebook company spokesperson said: “We take down any post that celebrates, defends, or attempts to justify the Holocaust. The same goes for any content that mocks Holocaust victims, accuses victims of lying, spews hate, or advocates for violence against Jewish people in any way.

    You’ll note that the words “Holocaust denial” aren’t in that statement. Facebook continues:

    While we do not take down content simply for being untruthful, many posts that deny the Holocaust often violate our policies against hate speech and are removed.

    And many posts that deny the Holocaust do not violate Facebook’s policies and are not removed. I’ve seen this myself: I’ve given up reporting Facebook hate speech, including posts containing Holocaust denial videos, because every time I did Facebook came back and said that the content did not violate their community guidelines.

    When historians write about our era, they will conclude that Mark Zuckerberg was one of the bad guys.

  • You’re not a bigot

    Or at least, it’s highly likely that you aren’t. That’s according to the latest survey of UK people’s attitudes to trans people. While there’s clear evidence that three years of anti-trans scaremongering have had an effect, there’s also clear evidence that the scaremongers do not reflect wider public opinion.

    Stonewall:

    When the public is asked to choose words that describe their feelings towards trans people, we see a really striking picture.

    Overall, positive feelings dominate, particularly for women – half of us feel ‘respect’ and more than a quarter ‘admiration’ for trans people. We can also see that women are much more likely to feel respect and admiration for trans people, while also being less likely to feel disgust, pity, fear or resentment. This is important to bear in mind, as it undermines the common narrative which seeks to turns cis women and trans women against each other.

    But alongside these positive feelings, quite a lot of us aren’t sure and that’s OK. Some of these people may not be comfortable expressing negative feelings, many of these people are likely to be those who genuinely don’t know how they feel, or simply see trans people as … people.

    However, the people who hate us really hate us.

    Very few people indeed selected negative feelings such as disgust, fear or resentment. But when we look at the views of the minority who describe themselves as prejudiced (16% of us), this transphobic minority feels very strongly: a third said they felt disgust (33%) and one-quarter said that they felt resentment (25%). This means that while the group of people who are transphobic, and would describe themselves as such isn’t large – 16% is in line with other forms of discriminatory attitudes to oppressed groups – the views of that minority are much stronger.

    Those are the views most often platformed by UK newspapers, current affairs magazines and broadcasters, and they are the views most commonly expressed on social media.

    The British public in general, and British women in particular, feel pretty positive about trans people. If our media coverage and social media discussions simply reflected this reality, the lives of trans people would be immeasurably improved overnight. Instead of this, the drip, drip of negative and distorted media coverage may be manufacturing a creeping sense of discomfort around shared spaces.

    …[the survey] shows that we have a small, but vocal group of people with extreme anti-trans views in Britain, and that should worry us all.

    …

    If the majority of us simply sit by while the transphobic minority shout their harmful views from the rooftops, our warm feelings mean nothing, and we are part of a problem that is ruining trans folks lives.

    Please, don’t be part of the problem.

  • “Perhaps we could give good faith a try”

    Writing in The National, Andrew Tickell notes that while there are valid criticisms of the Scottish government’s proposed hate crime legislation, “conspicuous by its absence in the first wave of criticism Holyrood’s Hate Crime Bill has received is any morally serious reflection on why hate crime might matter, and might merit being talked about in a careful, thoughtful way.”

    If you are racially abused on a routine basis at work, who could blame you for deciding to pack the gig in? If churches or synagogues are trashed or graffitied with hateful slogans, it is a message to every worshipper. If a same-sex couple is abused in public because they have the audacity to hold hands, they are never the only victims of the treatment meted out to them. To borrow a phrase from the late Lord Rodger, gay people who hope to share “the small tokens and gestures of affection which are taken for granted between men and women” are put on notice that it may not be tolerated.

    …We rightly worry about chilling effects on free expression, but routine intimidation and banal harassment create their own social deep-freeze, as people censor themselves, adopt avoidance strategies and live their lives constantly exposed to how they’re perceived, and the potential prejudices of those perceiving them..

    …You may not have experienced this in your life – but talk to people who are consistently on the receiving end of this kind of social treatment and you might not talk about “hate crime” in such a sneering and condescending way, or present the issue as a self-indulgent cartoonish enterprise in “woke” identity politics.