Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • “Oh, honey. Who do you think they’ll come for when they’re done with us?”

    Photo from Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria via the GLBT Historical Society

    I wrote a piece for Metro about the religious right’s wedge strategy to roll back equal rights legislation.

    The religious right knows it lost the equal marriage battle. But it thinks it can win the war against LGBT equality and women’s rights by using trans people as a proxy.

    Scratch an anti-trans bill, of which there are currently dozens, and you’ll usually find – surprise! – that it just happens to give bigots the right to discriminate against LGBT people of any description, and against women too. Some bills are specific to healthcare; others extend the permitted discrimination to housing, employment and adoption too.

    For example, the legal protections for the “religious freedom” of healthcare workers recently announced by the Trump administration (and linked in the Metro piece) would protect the following:

    • Ambulance crews refusing to help trans people who’ve been in a car crash.
    • Nurses refusing to help women with post-abortion complications.
    • Clinics refusing fertility treatment to lesbians.
    • Pediatricians refusing to see kids who have two mums or dads.
    • Doctors refusing to see, let alone treat, anybody who’s LGBT.

    This is mainly, but not exclusively, happening in the US. It’s becoming cause for concern in the UK too.

    My article is part of LGBT history month, commemorating a history that often featured LGBT people of every stripe uniting against a common enemy. But that history also included some people trying to throw trans people under the very same bus they helped to start, and it’s something that’s become quite the talking point among newspaper comment trolls and right-wing gay men.

    Writing in New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan says that the problem [of growing anti-LGBT sentiment] is “a reaction of many ordinary people to the excesses of the social-justice left”. Further LGBT equality is “a battle none of us need to fight. Especially after the real war was won.”

    Oh, honey. Who do you think they’re going to come for when they’re done with us?

  • 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?

  • A disturbance in the force

    I took the kids to see the latest Pixar movie, Coco, yesterday. It’s a great film with a typically Pixar emotional punch (yes, I cried) and some truly exceptional CG, and it’s notable for being set in Mexico and based on Mexican folklore.

    It’s interesting to discover what went on away from the computers. The film was initially greeted with great concern by Latino commentators, not least because Pixar’s owner Disney initially attempted to trademark “Día de los Muertos” – Day of the Dead. The thought of the House of Mouse appropriating Mexican culture wasn’t exactly a happy one.

    Pixar responded to the concerns in a very Pixar way: it hired its most vocal critics, not for PR gloss but to ensure that it didn’t screw up. A group including artist Lalo Alcaraz, playwright Octavio Solis and former Mexican Heritage Corp. CEO Marcela Davison Aviles acted as cultural consultants for the film.

    The result? It quickly became the second-highest-grossing animated film in the history of the Mexican film market (the first was Toy Story 3). And it’s a really good film.

    While I was waiting for it to come on, there was a trailer for the forthcoming A Wrinkle in Time, a live action fantasy with some serious star power among the inevitable CGI. And it took me a moment to realise what was unusual about the trailer.

    It had people of colour in it.

    Not as a statement — for example, something like Black Panther, which is also being trailed in the cinema at the moment, is a film specifically about a black superhero — or as sidekicks. But as the main characters.

    As Latonya Pennington writes:

    Not only do we get a Black female protagonist played by Storm Reid, but we also get Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling in prominent roles.

    …When the trailer for “A Wrinkle in Time” was first released, my eyes grew wide, my heart swelled with excitement, and I smiled so big. I’ve loved fantasy fiction since I was a kid and seeing that trailer reminded me of the joy I felt as I devoured book after book. Although I’ve never read the book the film is based on, I’ve always longed to see more fantasy films with Black female leads.

    With the release of “A Wrinkle In Time”, young Black girls will get to see someone that looks like them be a hero.

    That’s great, obviously. But you have to wonder why in 2018 it should be in any way remarkable to see women of colour in lead roles, why kids still don’t see people like them on screen as the norm rather than the exception. It shouldn’t be notable to have actors such as Kelly Marie Tran in a Star Wars film or Tessa Thompson in Thor: Ragnarok.

    And then you read the first (and so far only) comment on Pennington’s piece.

    Are non white women really that pathetic that they need to see someone who looks like them succeeding in a fictional setting in order for them to feel better about themselves? You do realise that all your examples are fiction right? It’s not real. Quite frankly, your either a bigot for wanting to see less whites in film, or a self-hating loser whose self esteem needs to be stroked by fictional characters in order to feel better about themselves.

    Guess what colour and gender the poster is.

    Such posts are a gift to bloggers, of course, because a single “your a bigot” illustrates the problem better than 1,000 words of carefully crafted argument.

    Some people — and by people I mean straight white men people — are so used to seeing themselves on screen that when a film dares to feature people who aren’t straight white men people, or when someone who isn’t a straight white man dares to write about how great it is to see a film that isn’t written from the perspective of a straight white man, they lose their tiny little minds.

    It’s the kind of privileged thinking that leads to some clown making a version of Star Wars: The Last Jedi without “Girlz Powah and other silly stuff”. Among other things the edit removes “female officers commanding people around/having ideas”, scenes where a woman “is making some important statement” and “Leia’s nitpicking”.

    I do like Last Jedi director Rian Johnson’s Twitter response:

    (Inevitably and rather brilliantly, another user has trolled the trolls by making an edit without the men, an edit that substantially cuts down on “characters whining about not getting their way”.)

    If you can suspend your disbelief to watch films set in far-flung galaxies, films featuring people with impossible powers or films full of CGI characters but have a problem with people of colour or women in decent roles then maybe, just maybe, you’re on the dark side.

  • “When I arrive in Hell, the Devil will sound like a headline”

    I’m indebted to my old friend, the inimitable Professor Batty, for telling me about this excellent essay on the internet and reality and our feelings and quite a lot of other things too.

    Do it now. Fight the new pace of thinking designed to keep us in Facebook fights and make Facebook more money. Resist getting so wound up by every story that you accelerate off a cliff into apathy. Lengthen the circuit between a candid thought and your anticipation of how it will be received, a circuit constantly shrinking in fear. Try your ideas out with people you are not desperate to impress, so there’s less ego clouding your discussion.

  • 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.

  • Don’t expect wisdom from a baby

     

    I’ve belatedly realised that the time when the media really wants to talk to trans people – the “baby trans” phase when they’ve just come out – is both the easiest and the worst possible time to talk to them.

    That’s certainly true in my own case. I was interviewed by a few different people when I first came out, and I was so pleased of the attention that I didn’t bother to check whether I was spouting a load of nonsense. With hindsight, I was.

    Everything I knew about trans people was based largely on the opinions of non-trans people and a handful of unrepresentative but visible people I’d encountered on the internet. I’d spent many years being told that a handful of extremists and idiots were representative of all trans people, and when I came out I was keen to distance myself from them.

    Please like me! I’m not like those other ones! I’m Audrey Hepburn, not Waynetta Slob!

    In the many months since I did those interviews I’ve come to realise that when I talked about anybody who wasn’t me, I was talking out of my arse.

    As I’ve read more and listened more I’ve discovered how distorted a picture I’d been seeing and how few voices I’d been hearing. My opinions weren’t based on hearing the experiences of trans people; they were based on the opinions of the people who wrote about trans people in newspapers and magazines or talked about them on radio and TV.

    As I’ve since discovered, many of those people are biased or even bigoted against trans people; others just don’t do their homework and regurgitate long-discredited arguments. And some just have bad opinions for money.

    I thought I knew it all, but now I realise I didn’t know a damn thing.

  • Men, don’t let your friendships fade

    I wrote about male friendships for Metro with a little help from my friends.

    Even when we do have friends, we’re loath to tell them our troubles. Some 84 per cent of men admit to bottling up their emotions. That’s not doing anybody any good.

  • 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.

  • The final Fred show

    Tomorrow morning, BBC Radio Scotland will broadcast the last ever MacAulay & Co programme after nearly eighteen years on air. I’m going to miss it, and the people who make it.

    I was a listener long before I became a contributor. In 1997 and 1998 I had a real job, and when I was late for work – which I often was, sometimes deliberately because I didn’t want to switch off something particularly funny – I’d listen to the show, laugh like a drain and think: it must be a right laugh to be on a show like that.

    I’m not quite sure when I became a contributor – 2003 sounds about right – but I can honestly say that it’s been one of the best things in my life for a very long time. Without exception the people working on the programme – not just the voices you hear on the radio but the people who put the whole thing together and make it work more or less smoothly – are among the nicest, funniest, most talented people I’ve ever worked with, and it’s been a real joy to be part of the team. I’ve met pop stars and actors, comedians and authors, done some very silly things on air and been part of all kinds of tomfoolery, and the crazy buggers paid me to do it.

    Fred’s moving on to bigger and brighter things and I’m sure the team will shine elsewhere too. As for me, I’m sure I’ll keep turning up here and there but I doubt I’ll ever be part of something quite like the Fred show ever again.

    If you’ve ever listened to the show and thought “it must be a right laugh to be on that show,” man, it was. It really, really was.

  • All the small things: a little writing app that makes a big difference

    UL-iMac-overlay-01
    In the old days, writing for magazines was easy: you’d write a piece, send it as a Word doc or a text file, and that was it. Now, though, everything’s online and in a CMS. Creating content for that is often a pain in the backside, especially if you use apps designed for print rather than pixels.

    Hurrah, then, for Ulysses. It’s a genuinely great app that’s already saving me stacks of time – not just in terms of creating copy I don’t then need to tweak, but in terms of the massive time savings that come from the way it does things. At £31.99 it’ll pay for itself in no time.

    Here’s the obligatory video.

    If you need to write words of any kind, it’s a great app. There’s a free demo too.