Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Queer Eye for the lobster guy

    This, by Adam Ramsay in Opendemocracy, is magnificent. It’s about toxic masculinity, male depression and the siren call of bad actors, and it’s endlessly quotable:

    The event was a sort of rally for far Right forces hoping to storm the European elections. But the combination of speakers seemed a bit incongruous: Catholic bishops and alt-Right YouTube stars; Italian far Right politicians and American evangelical pastors. While most started their speeches by announcing the enormous number of children they had fathered – as though success comes with the capacity to ejaculate – they were otherwise an odd mix.

    It also heaps deserved derision on Jordan Peterson.

    [we] watched in horror as the alt-Right Canadian psychology professor conquered YouTube. Like an addictive substance, he lured depressed young men back to the toxic behaviours and power hierarchies which crushed their souls. And he won fame.

    …He encourages fans to accept their place in a world where we almost all suffer from collective and unconscious racism, sexism and snobbery, rather than seeking to change it.

    Grifters’ amplification of toxic masculinity is a key factor in the rise of the far right.

    The attraction of these movements shouldn’t be surprising. If you are the sort of person who is accustomed to being given power by social hierarchies – white, male, straight – then those who tell you to wield that power with pride, that doing so will make you feel alive, will always be a source of temptation.

    One reason that openDemocracy’s Tracking the Backlash project focuses on the war on women’s and LGBTQI rights is that toxic masculinity is a key ingredient in the cocktail that has intoxicated so many young men in recent years, and drawn them into far Right movements.

    Just as we can’t fully understand the rise of Trump without understanding Gamergate, incels, and the 4Chan community, we can’t understand the elite institutions driving us to authoritarian capitalism without understanding the sociology, psychology and social movements of toxic masculinity.

    Ramsay’s references to the Queer Eye programme will no doubt annoy some readers and make others conclude that this is an unserious article, but it’s a useful device to talk about masculinity (because masculinity itself is absolutely not a bad thing; the problem is with regressive, reactionary, repressive ideas of what men should and shouldn’t be).

    I thought this was insightful:

    Wages have been stagnant in the US for decades, and millions who believed that by now they would have entered the middle class have discovered that they are very definitely working class.

    For Jordan Peterson, the solution to this situation – and the reason he is beloved of the powerful – is to accept it. The sixth of his famous ‘12 Rules for Life’ – the title of his bestselling 2018 book – is “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” In other words, ‘know your place’.

    And his implicit message goes a lot further than that. The prominence that he – and so many of his fellow travellers – give to their refusal to accept trans people only makes sense when you understand that for them, there is no greater sin than refusing to accept your place in the social hierarchy. After all, if you endlessly work hard to accept your rank in a world which makes you miserable, you resent no one more than those who refuse to follow. To be trans is to transgress against their world order, and they can’t stand it.

    Peterson’s message isn’t just “Don’t change the world.” It’s “Don’t change who the world tells you that you are.” And it does profound damage.

  • Paper tigers

    Nesrine Malik in The Guardian on fearmongering and culture wars:

    It is about order. The threats to order are always present, and always held at bay, just barely, by conservative leaders valiantly fighting the imminent deluge. This authoritarian populist strategy is founded on an essential fiction: the pretence of powerlessness among politicians, and their voters, who are very much in charge. The weak and the marginalised, and especially their fragile movements for racial and economic equality, are cast as a terrifying force, influential and deeply embedded – a shadow regime that will bloom into tyranny the instant the Democrats are elected.

    In Britain, we watch this American political horror from behind our fingers, with the bewildered bemusement of a country far from this madness. But we are there too. The right in the UK now is following the same playbook.

    Malik focuses on the fictional Black Lives Matter ban on singing Land of Hope and Glory, entirely invented by the Murdoch press. There are many more, all of them designed to distract you from the incompetence and corruption of the people running the show.

    Things are bad now, and they’re going to get worse: we’re apparently going to get not one but two new broadcasters who hope to bring Fox News-style partisan reporting to the UK in order to combat the supposed lefty wokeness of the BBC.

    Journalist Mic Wright:

    While Sky News has become more pluralist and delivered higher quality output since it slipped the yolk of Murdoch, these new outfits will likely push the impartiality rules to their very limits, enabled by a government that looks certain to abolish those restrictions altogether for commercial channels, while keeping the BBC firmly leashed to them.

    …Like Times Radio, TalkRadio, and LBC, the new UK Fox News-style channels will succeed. Not simply on a ratings level — that matters less — but by pushing the overall discourse in the direction of their right-wing owners and forcing BBC News into ever more difficult corners.

    In the culture war — constructed whole cloth by the right-wing news operators and their associates in the think-tanks — the BBC has a pop-gun and the right-wing broadcasters and newspapers have heavy artillery.

  • It just gets worse

    Today in the Telegraph, a once serious newspaper:

    Lots of people on the internet is reading this in Darth Vader’s voice. But while that’s funny, the article isn’t. The right-wing press, when it isn’t telling us that racist murderers love their mum, is increasingly resembling the state media of far-right dictatorships.

  • Sympathy for a devil

    The Times would never write something like this about a murderer if they were Black. “Found purpose as a vigilante” makes him sound like Batman, not a white supremacist with an illegally acquired weapon who murdered two peaceful protestors in cold blood and injured a third.

  • “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.