The Bluestocking 351: Woodchippers, male flight and Fred-Fred
"This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened"
Happy Friday!
I spent most of last week muttering to myself about Elon Musk’s obviously bad-faith and sudden interest in grooming gangs, and how the British right immediately danced to his tune. Update regarding foreign billionaires interfering in our politics: it is good, actually. Sarah Ditum summed it up perfectly here: “It is a strange thing that Musk thought he was buying Twitter to run it for the benefit of the right, and what has happened instead is — inevitably — is that the right is being run for the benefit of Twitter-now-X.”
As I see it, what happened here is that former Democrat and political normie Elon Musk didn’t read the press reports about the trials and inquiries in the 2010s (which even reached the New York Times, if he had cared to look) because he was too busy leading his companies and fathering children. And so —presumably sincerely—he now thinks that no such press reports ever happened.
The scale of child abuse in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere was diabolical, and there’s no doubt that the victims were disbelieved, both because of who their abusers were, and because of who they were. But it’s sick to dismiss the efforts of so many people to bring the perpetrators to justice as if none of that ever happened. As with Spotify, social media has created an eternal ahistorical present.
Also, on X, Musk has built himself a hall of mirrors where rightwing influencers, like the Malaysian rando Ian Miles Cheong, are only too happy to spoonfeed his own narrative back to him. Of course the MSM covered this up. Of course Keir Starmer failed to prosecute this as director of public prosecutions. Of course Gordon Brown was involved somehow. Before reading a word of the sentencing reports, Musk already “knew” that the media could not be trusted, and that liberals won’t talk about race, and so this scandal had been buried. His clique fed him more juicy morsels to support those existing opinions.
As my colleague Charlie Warzel just wrote about the social internet:
“Misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one.”
In the Financial Times, Stephen Bush made another good point. The data on ethnicity that Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, and Alicia Kearns, the shadow safeguarding minister, have been loudly demanding all week? . . . It already exists. Labour started to publish it in November, in line with recommendations made by Alexis Jay in her 2022 inquiry into child abuse. The data is undoubtedly partial, but it’s definitely not being covered up.
As for the calls for a new inquiry . . . well, Baroness Jay doesn’t want a new inquiry. The prosecutor Nazir Afzal doesn’t want a new inquiry. Andrew Norfolk doesn’t want a new inquiry (although he does want more research into the causes of such abuse). A new inquiry does not automatically equal justice for the victims. It might just as well mean three years of lawyers’ fees to move us no further forward.
This was Stephen’s conclusion:
“Once we have a few more years of records, we may end up drawing quite different conclusions from what the data currently suggests, and it may well be that at that point, with the Jay report’s recommendations implemented, a fresh inquiry is both necessary and effective. But I can see no basis, having read Jay’s report and the government’s November data release, to think that the British state is in a position to learn or improve anything with a fresh inquiry in 2025.”
The only person who came out of this saga with any credit was, to my surprise, Nigel Farage. He refused to be bullied by Elon Musk, who was demanding that everyone agree that “Tommy Robinson” is a political prisoner1. Farage has built multiple successful parties of the radical right by refusing to admit overt white nationalists and racists: he has always banned former BNP members from his parties. Farage’s Reform party got four million votes last year. The last time Robinson ran for office, to be an MEP in 2019, he lost his deposit2. You can be mealy-mouthed about the extent of this cordon sanitaire, but it is undoubtedly a good thing for British politics that Farage has maintained it.
As for the Tories’ approach to this issue, to quote Mugatu, I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS. The Liberal Democrats won 72 seats in last year’s elections, off the back of centre-right voters who are open to closer co-operation with Europe and keen on lower taxes. That’s only 49 less than the Conservatives. I don’t understand why Kemi Badenoch is showing no interest in winning back those seats — and is instead entirely focusing her strategy on anti-establishment Reform voters. As Rob Hutton wrote on Wednesday, her PMQs attacks ignored issues like Labour’s anti-corruption minister being investigated for corruption to use all six questions on grooming gangs, a subject that Starmer is a literal expert in: “Badenoch denies that she is only pursuing this cause because Elon Musk has been tweeting about it, but it’s hard to escape the sense that she has outsourced her research effort to Captain Ketamine.”
Yours annoyedly,
Helen
The Male Flight From College (Matriarchal Blessing)
White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
[…] A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
*
Super-interesting piece about how male college enrollment has risen much more slowly than female college enrollment over the last few decades—suggesting that the problem is not only high fees or the lack of a career bonus from attending, or even school practices that turn off boys, but something simpler and harder to deal with. Straight men don’t like being in female-dominated environments.
That chimes with something that Laura McInerney has often said to me about the discussion about “not having enough women in STEM subjects”, which is that we are looking at this the wrong way. (I’m paraphrasing here, so get mad at me for the generalisations, not her.) Maybe it’s not that girls don’t want to study science and tech, per se, but that boys don’t want to study anything else. They have “bunched” in STEM.
The author of this piece, Celeste Davis, has a controversial and intriguing proposal: “If you actually wanted a solution for boys to want to go to college, bring back male-only colleges. Watch college suddenly become really popular for boys again.”
Quick Links
Insane property listing of the week: come for the slide, stay for the Bitcoin symbol (Rightmove).
“There is, I think, something intrinsically valuable in having that glimpse of humanity in a slightly different configuration—different values, technologies, economic structures—that widens your perception of your own moment. No doubt traditional history books (and period film/TV narratives) can transport you to an even more accurate rendition of the past. But the novel gives you the best glimpse of what it really felt like, from the inside, to live through those earlier ages.” A compelling argument for why you should read Tolstoy and Dickens (Steven Johnson, Substack)
Courtesy of Bluestockinger Chris Blaine, here is Danny Dyer in a bath, for all you Fred-Fred fans out there (Vimeo).
“What’s the purpose of putting yourself in there? Do you represent something – and, if so, what? Are you there to be right while your interviewees are wrong?” Jon Ronson is doing a series of posts about how to make yourself a character in your writing, without being annoying. I think he nails an important point here: if you put yourself into the narrative, put Dumb You in there. Help the reader by asking obvious questions, and don’t be afraid to make yourself the butt of the joke. (Substack)
“If you bring up this scene to anyone who has seen the movie, they won’t refer to this as the climactic scene, or the showdown scene, or the arrest scene. They won’t discuss the dramatic charge of a life-or-death situation. No, this is the woodchipper scene.” Tony Tost uses Fargo to explain his theory of writing a great scene — “the shape and the juice”. (Tony Tost, Substack)
Martin Robbins has a Substack! Another one of the people I used to commission at the New Statesman back in the day (see also: James O’Malley, Ian Leslie, Sarah Ditum). His very good first post is about why new cars have got more expensive.
My colleague David Frum’s piece on how lots of people are now downplaying January 6 (gift link) quoted a line from Don Draper in Mad Men: “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” I think that applies to lots of the last few years: people rarely do mea culpas. Instead, they sidle away from the scene of the crime, with their eyebrows furrowed that such a thing could ever have happened.
See you next time!
PS.
The Financial Times looks ahead to June 19, when The Genius Myth will be published in the UK by Jonathan Cape (with American publication hopefully happening soon after).
Pre-orders are now open: these really help me because they send a signal to the publisher and retailers that there is demand for this book, and they should a) print enough copies in the first run, and b) put it on a fancy little table.
Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Paul Harris, has been jailed for contempt of court after making a libellous film about a Syrian teenager who got beaten up, and continuing to push the false allegations after losing a court case. This adds to Robinson’s extremely long history of encounters with the law, several of which—something that always bleakly amuses me—are immigration offences. In 2012, he tried to go to the US, to lecture people on how illegal immigration by violent criminals was destroying their society, using a friend’s passport. (He wasn’t allowed into the US on visa-free travel because of his previous convictions for violent offences.) That time, Robinson got rumbled at the airport when they took his fingerprints. He seems to have tried something similar in Canada last summer.
Because I am a petty and unworthy person, I highly enjoyed this clip of Piers Morgan confronting Robinson’s number one fan, Jordan Peterson, with his idol’s extensive criminal history and the fact that he nearly collapsed a grooming trial. Six minutes of Piers Morgan outlining verifiable facts while Peterson glowered like a bulldog sucking the piss off a wasp turned out to be exactly what I needed in this freezing January slump.
'Glowered like a bulldog sucking the piss off a wasp' will keep me happy all day.
I subscribe to a lot of things and wondered why I subscribed to Bluestocking then I read all of it and knew why.