Everyone keeps asking ‘what happened to Musk?’ But it’s really very simple, he’s using hard drugs every day, I know of what I speak on this subject and not from academic papers or books
People keep banging on about his Ketamine use but I’m more and more convinced it’s opiates, maybe benzos but more likely opiates
The total lack of a filter, the obsessiveness, the laziness, the belief that whatever he discovered that second is the most important thing in the world, sounds like straight up heroin to me, but maybe it’s just Oxys or Oxys plus benzos
Heroin and the amount of Money Musk has means he can lazily sit there ferrying high and after each hit go on a burst of posting, I’ve quit Twitter but let me guess, his posts aren’t spread out evenly over the day but come in manic bursts every few hours.
It also wouldn’t shock me if he got in furious back and forths with people who criticise him in the replies, sometimes insignificant people where you’re shocked he even saw the reply
A national inquiry would reveal certainly reveal things that are not already known. Maybe not the generalities (e.g. profile of the victims and abusers, cowardice on the part of local services), but the specifics would be and that is reason enough. All the councillors and police officers who helped the abusers by action or inaction should be named, particularly as many will still be in positions of power.
Seems like if you are against a national inquiry, for consistency you should be against local inquiries too. Should Oldham not have an inquiry? Should Keighley and Bradford be allowed to refuse one, when they have a vested interest in not having one? Would nothing be gained from these places having an inquiry now?
It is irrelevant if all of the people calling for an inquiry are cynical. The question should be taken on its own merits.
Hmm, what specifics? The various trials revealed a lot of details of how the abuse was perpetrated, and the police’s failure to prosecute.
I suppose my prior is that I don’t think inquiries deliver what you want — individual people held to account. The Wayne Couzens inquiry had some good recommendations but the only person to get fired was the female police officer who didn’t investigate his indecent exposure offence. I’m not convinced the Grenfell inquiry will do that, either. What about Leveson?
Inquiries tend to be the very definition of “deputy heads will roll”. Where they are worthwhile is in giving victims a chance to be heard, and (hopefully) producing concrete policy recommendations that change faulty systems.
I also don’t understand why being against a new national inquiry right now means you have to be against local ones. That’s like saying “if you’re against a national inquiry into litter in public spaces, you have to oppose your council reviewing its own practices”.
Accounts of these crimes read like war crimes committed against British girls on British soil. Nobody who has engaged with the true evil of what transpired, along with the scale of these crimes and the implications as to how many people were in some way complicit can possibly think that anything like justice has been served.
These were crimes committed by men brought to this country against the wishes of the native people who they came to live among, people who were told by their supposed betters that their prejudices were irrational. Again and again the state conspired to suppress the truth of what was happening.
But it is difficult to get a woman to understand something when her social position depends on her not understanding it.
So Elon Musk's justifiable horror can only mean a man acting in bad faith. And a full inquiry is unnecessary because a proper one could well lead to a national reckoning and a regime change.
The male flight thing is fascinating and deserves much more investigation. I'm a man who has always been drawn intuitively to female company (I mean in a non-sexual way, though I am sexually attracted to women) and female-majority environments, as long as they're not cliqueish. I tried so hard to be a boy and even won a scholarship to a private boys' school, and then hated it - and it hated me. Men's talk and horseplay make me very uncomfortable. But I'm not 'trans' and am gender-critical, one reason why I read your blog, Helen.
I think I am very marginal in this respect, but I do observe a range of male responses to increasing female presence in my workplace and other environments. Some men seem comfortable with it, others less so. Some have become more comfortable with it over time. Is much work being done on this?
I think lots of men are like you, I'm not sure it's marginal at all. But definitely some others are very strongly homosocial -- they like the rugby club banter and the group bath and all that.
In my own experience I had grown up with sisters and had to seek out male companionship outside of home, mainly through friends I made in school and in extracurriculars like Boy Scouts. I myself never found "Men's talk" and "horseplay" to be a draw for me, but having companionship with those of the same sex was something I always appreciated growing up and having male adult role models in addition had helped me strive for the maturity level I would want to attain as I grew up.
Recently, Boy Scouts of America made the fateful decision to include young women into the fold, effectively replacing it as a single sex space (which Title IX allows for social organizations). This was due to fledging membership across the country for decades, mainly due to societal changes and the unfortunate legal suits that were taking place within the organization. Because of this, I have no real desire to volunteer my time or money to an organization where you have to be inclusive of another sex that I have no real experience of teaching and interacting within the confines of a male only space. Young women had Girl Scouts (which is still single sex) but this forced inclusion for the sake of "saving" the organization seemed more of a cop out then a genuine decision to include the other sex in this century old group.
If I were of the age again to be able to be a full participant of the organization I would probably be disinterested in even joining as I would want to be around and learn from being around other men such as myself. And I think this is largely a result of positive male spaces being scrutinized as "problematic" and forcibly made co-ed which in turn leads to men seeking spaces that are actually problematic (think MGTOW).
Yeah, the feminist argument against male-only spaces is that they were a way of perpetuating privilege (think of the business getting discussed in the strip club, or the male UK Supreme Court judges all being members of the Garrick, but the female one couldn't be). But they're not inherently bad in other circumstances.
I find the male-only college plan really intriguing, because it would probably attract some boys who otherwise wouldn't go. But (I think) it would also inevitably become more prestigious and hoover up the best male professors because of that. Which would then make the rest of the sector, the bit open to women, worse.
The grooming gangs are the biggest sexual abuse scandal in British history, but no one here ever talks about it. Up until Musk focussed on this, if I mentioned the grooming gangs it was like I’d broken wind in an elevator. And I was grossly exaggerating the scale of it up. And I was a racist. So I really am grateful that Musk has raised the profile of this issue which is essential for us Brits to work through if we’re to create a multicultural society that works for the poor as well as the rich. He is also a very flawed man. But I’m still grateful!
However: the Rob Hutton parliamentary sketch that you link to describes how Farage asked for an enquiry specifically about white girls abused by pakistani men. So "credit" might be a somewhat relative term here...
Let me shock you: I also don’t think he’s putting a lot of work into surgeries in Clacton. But in Germany, the party that Musk is promoting is the AfD, which is a lot more unsavoury. So yes, I’m giving him relative credit! But then all political credit is relative.
If people think Elon is obviously bad faith here, suffering sort of social media or drug-based meltdown I am afraid to say this only serves to indicate how much we are contending with an ideological divide. (More than shades of resorting to accusations of transphobia.) Bringing up faith is pertinent indeed. This strikes at the very heart of our liberal progressive secular order. And when it deals with dissent it comes knocking on the door, or it invokes its own form of epistemological sacrilege. Some way or other, we should not sit back peaceably, we must intervene. You make no explicit call for his cancellation, or neutering, as such but the anger, as elsewhere in the media, and in the comments above, would like to see him put in his place.
Certainly Elon gets easily into "foul trouble", he can be an online bully, he enables an irrational element - you refrain from the F-word. But if he was committing such calumny why is there such a strong case for a reexamination of this scandal? While the BBC covered it (Three Girls) there are examples that vindicate Elon. A victim blaming account no less from Katie Razzall, retweeted by Elon. (No admission of this on a recent Media Show where Nazir Afzal and Andrew Norfolk were guests, or from Ros in his own motivated takedown for BBC Verify.) An episode of the BBC 3 debate show, Free Speech shows exactly where the censorious compass lies after a girl in the audience speaks out on there being a problem with gangs of Muslim men and sexual exploitation. Countless examples of denialism in The Guardian and more recently even, from Rory Stewart. And it turns out there are serious questions of accountability, and how incompetence was covered up for expressly political reasons. Did IICSA even begin to probe this matter?
To call this an eternal historical present is one way of putting it. Worth pointing out this originated in an area of X that is concerned about crime and would, I suspect, bridle at a music app analogy (made by Ben Smith). That Elon highlighted the transcript and further stayed with the story follows after a campaigner's heart. I think there is shock. If the takeaway is the shock at Elon sometimes shitposting I would suggest that shock is falling into a trap.
This is such a beautiful synthesis of a central point of thought, so insightful. Your validation of the insights is not just borne of today’s need, but also is attentive of the historic contexts that you say are missing in most of what is on the internet.
In the past 50 years we have taken away nearly all male spaces, claiming they are unfair to women. I would like to point out that, now that trans women are taking away female spaces, we are getting a taste of our medicine.
The truth is, men and women need separate spaces. Maybe not as separate as they used to be, and maybe they won't be equal or fair. I don't have a solution for that. But I know they are necessary.
I don't think we need to say "boys will be boys" and throw up our hands at the worst innate behaviors of the sexes. But claiming that everything is socialized (even behaviors that appear across cultures around the globe) and that we can somehow argue those behaviors and needs away, is not helping anyone either.
We need to create some society where we can acknowledge that men and women on average have differences, even if we don't rigidly enforce those tendencies on everyone.
Maybe I'm wrong but presumably the details about schools, councillors and social services wouldn't appear in the trials but would in an inquiry; similar to the details about Jahangir Akhtar in the Rotherham report.
There is legal accountability and social accountability. Rotherham councillors resigned due to their reaction to the report, and have had been deselected. With Leveson, everyone is now aware what the journalists were like. Couldn't an inquiry because performed in such a way as to make sure people are held accountable? Doesn't seem impossible, even if previous inquiries have not been like that.
My point about local inquiries is that the argument is that a national inquiry won't yield information. But if that was the case, a local one wouldn't either, or am I missing something about the nature of a national inquiry?
No worries. I suppose the nub of my issue is that the inquiry that's being demanded is, to paraphase Nigel Farage, "why did Pakistani men rape white girls?" And my answer is: because they wanted to, and they found a way to get away with it.
My position is that child abuse rings happen among all ethnicities, but their *expression* is culturally dependent. You need a few evil men, a self-justification and a reason they get away with it.
In the case of the Pelicot trial, the self-justification by the perpatrators was "she's pretending to sleep" or "her husband has consented on her behalf" and the reason Dominique Pelicot got away with it for so long was that none of the 50+ men who knew what was happening reported it. He was only caught because one police officer took a report of him upskirting women in public seriously and checked his hard drive. (There's an obvious policy recommendation that emerges from this: take even "minor" sex crimes seriously.)
In the case of the lay preacher and child flogging enthusiast John Smyth, the pretext was "masturbation is a sin" and the reason he got away with it was people in the C of E moved him to Africa to flog boys there instead because "we can't besmirch the good name of the Church of England".
In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, it was "these girls are getting a trip to an island and some cash, they've made a bargain" and the reason he got away with it for so long is that he was extremely rich and well-connected. (Isn't it amazing that the only person currently in prison over that sex ring is a woman?)
In Rotherham, the justification was "these white slags are common property" and the reason the ringleaders got away with it was, again, male solidarity (none of the men involved had qualms of conscience and went to the police); a fear of appearing racist by social services and officers; a sense that these girls were "tearaways" who knew what they were getting themselves into; and the police's universal general reluctance to prosecute any sex crime where the victim is less sympathetic than a nun getting stranger-raped in broad daylight with 15 witnesses.
At PMQs, Badenoch was calling for a national inquiry to "join the dots" but I think those dots have already been joined.
I agree with you that an inquiry would be valuable if it uncovered new information on culpable individuals. But I'm not sure whether it would, at this distance? Maybe I'm wrong.
"the police's universal general reluctance to prosecute any sex crime where the victim is less sympathetic than a nun getting stranger-raped in broad daylight with 15 witnesses."
Why is this? Do you think it's another version of "male solidarity" or something else?
"You can be mealy-mouthed about the extent of this cordon sanitaire". Day by day, I'm more and more surprised to discover the extension of French words in the English vocabulary.
'Glowered like a bulldog sucking the piss off a wasp' will keep me happy all day.
The Scottish version I grew up with was ‘He had a face in him like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle.’ Nettles are more Scottish than wasps.
I subscribe to a lot of things and wondered why I subscribed to Bluestocking then I read all of it and knew why.
Helen is one of our best journalists.
Everyone keeps asking ‘what happened to Musk?’ But it’s really very simple, he’s using hard drugs every day, I know of what I speak on this subject and not from academic papers or books
People keep banging on about his Ketamine use but I’m more and more convinced it’s opiates, maybe benzos but more likely opiates
The total lack of a filter, the obsessiveness, the laziness, the belief that whatever he discovered that second is the most important thing in the world, sounds like straight up heroin to me, but maybe it’s just Oxys or Oxys plus benzos
A mayor of a small town in Denmark got hooked on opiates and followed much of the same trajectory. (Though I don't think the cocaine helped either.)
Heroin and the amount of Money Musk has means he can lazily sit there ferrying high and after each hit go on a burst of posting, I’ve quit Twitter but let me guess, his posts aren’t spread out evenly over the day but come in manic bursts every few hours.
It also wouldn’t shock me if he got in furious back and forths with people who criticise him in the replies, sometimes insignificant people where you’re shocked he even saw the reply
I call the male flight concept "the cootie principle."
A national inquiry would reveal certainly reveal things that are not already known. Maybe not the generalities (e.g. profile of the victims and abusers, cowardice on the part of local services), but the specifics would be and that is reason enough. All the councillors and police officers who helped the abusers by action or inaction should be named, particularly as many will still be in positions of power.
Seems like if you are against a national inquiry, for consistency you should be against local inquiries too. Should Oldham not have an inquiry? Should Keighley and Bradford be allowed to refuse one, when they have a vested interest in not having one? Would nothing be gained from these places having an inquiry now?
It is irrelevant if all of the people calling for an inquiry are cynical. The question should be taken on its own merits.
Hmm, what specifics? The various trials revealed a lot of details of how the abuse was perpetrated, and the police’s failure to prosecute.
I suppose my prior is that I don’t think inquiries deliver what you want — individual people held to account. The Wayne Couzens inquiry had some good recommendations but the only person to get fired was the female police officer who didn’t investigate his indecent exposure offence. I’m not convinced the Grenfell inquiry will do that, either. What about Leveson?
Inquiries tend to be the very definition of “deputy heads will roll”. Where they are worthwhile is in giving victims a chance to be heard, and (hopefully) producing concrete policy recommendations that change faulty systems.
I also don’t understand why being against a new national inquiry right now means you have to be against local ones. That’s like saying “if you’re against a national inquiry into litter in public spaces, you have to oppose your council reviewing its own practices”.
Accounts of these crimes read like war crimes committed against British girls on British soil. Nobody who has engaged with the true evil of what transpired, along with the scale of these crimes and the implications as to how many people were in some way complicit can possibly think that anything like justice has been served.
These were crimes committed by men brought to this country against the wishes of the native people who they came to live among, people who were told by their supposed betters that their prejudices were irrational. Again and again the state conspired to suppress the truth of what was happening.
But it is difficult to get a woman to understand something when her social position depends on her not understanding it.
So Elon Musk's justifiable horror can only mean a man acting in bad faith. And a full inquiry is unnecessary because a proper one could well lead to a national reckoning and a regime change.
The male flight thing is fascinating and deserves much more investigation. I'm a man who has always been drawn intuitively to female company (I mean in a non-sexual way, though I am sexually attracted to women) and female-majority environments, as long as they're not cliqueish. I tried so hard to be a boy and even won a scholarship to a private boys' school, and then hated it - and it hated me. Men's talk and horseplay make me very uncomfortable. But I'm not 'trans' and am gender-critical, one reason why I read your blog, Helen.
I think I am very marginal in this respect, but I do observe a range of male responses to increasing female presence in my workplace and other environments. Some men seem comfortable with it, others less so. Some have become more comfortable with it over time. Is much work being done on this?
I think lots of men are like you, I'm not sure it's marginal at all. But definitely some others are very strongly homosocial -- they like the rugby club banter and the group bath and all that.
In my own experience I had grown up with sisters and had to seek out male companionship outside of home, mainly through friends I made in school and in extracurriculars like Boy Scouts. I myself never found "Men's talk" and "horseplay" to be a draw for me, but having companionship with those of the same sex was something I always appreciated growing up and having male adult role models in addition had helped me strive for the maturity level I would want to attain as I grew up.
Recently, Boy Scouts of America made the fateful decision to include young women into the fold, effectively replacing it as a single sex space (which Title IX allows for social organizations). This was due to fledging membership across the country for decades, mainly due to societal changes and the unfortunate legal suits that were taking place within the organization. Because of this, I have no real desire to volunteer my time or money to an organization where you have to be inclusive of another sex that I have no real experience of teaching and interacting within the confines of a male only space. Young women had Girl Scouts (which is still single sex) but this forced inclusion for the sake of "saving" the organization seemed more of a cop out then a genuine decision to include the other sex in this century old group.
If I were of the age again to be able to be a full participant of the organization I would probably be disinterested in even joining as I would want to be around and learn from being around other men such as myself. And I think this is largely a result of positive male spaces being scrutinized as "problematic" and forcibly made co-ed which in turn leads to men seeking spaces that are actually problematic (think MGTOW).
Yeah, the feminist argument against male-only spaces is that they were a way of perpetuating privilege (think of the business getting discussed in the strip club, or the male UK Supreme Court judges all being members of the Garrick, but the female one couldn't be). But they're not inherently bad in other circumstances.
I find the male-only college plan really intriguing, because it would probably attract some boys who otherwise wouldn't go. But (I think) it would also inevitably become more prestigious and hoover up the best male professors because of that. Which would then make the rest of the sector, the bit open to women, worse.
The grooming gangs are the biggest sexual abuse scandal in British history, but no one here ever talks about it. Up until Musk focussed on this, if I mentioned the grooming gangs it was like I’d broken wind in an elevator. And I was grossly exaggerating the scale of it up. And I was a racist. So I really am grateful that Musk has raised the profile of this issue which is essential for us Brits to work through if we’re to create a multicultural society that works for the poor as well as the rich. He is also a very flawed man. But I’m still grateful!
I rely on you more and more Helen to help me make sense of the chaos, thank you!
However: the Rob Hutton parliamentary sketch that you link to describes how Farage asked for an enquiry specifically about white girls abused by pakistani men. So "credit" might be a somewhat relative term here...
Let me shock you: I also don’t think he’s putting a lot of work into surgeries in Clacton. But in Germany, the party that Musk is promoting is the AfD, which is a lot more unsavoury. So yes, I’m giving him relative credit! But then all political credit is relative.
If people think Elon is obviously bad faith here, suffering sort of social media or drug-based meltdown I am afraid to say this only serves to indicate how much we are contending with an ideological divide. (More than shades of resorting to accusations of transphobia.) Bringing up faith is pertinent indeed. This strikes at the very heart of our liberal progressive secular order. And when it deals with dissent it comes knocking on the door, or it invokes its own form of epistemological sacrilege. Some way or other, we should not sit back peaceably, we must intervene. You make no explicit call for his cancellation, or neutering, as such but the anger, as elsewhere in the media, and in the comments above, would like to see him put in his place.
Certainly Elon gets easily into "foul trouble", he can be an online bully, he enables an irrational element - you refrain from the F-word. But if he was committing such calumny why is there such a strong case for a reexamination of this scandal? While the BBC covered it (Three Girls) there are examples that vindicate Elon. A victim blaming account no less from Katie Razzall, retweeted by Elon. (No admission of this on a recent Media Show where Nazir Afzal and Andrew Norfolk were guests, or from Ros in his own motivated takedown for BBC Verify.) An episode of the BBC 3 debate show, Free Speech shows exactly where the censorious compass lies after a girl in the audience speaks out on there being a problem with gangs of Muslim men and sexual exploitation. Countless examples of denialism in The Guardian and more recently even, from Rory Stewart. And it turns out there are serious questions of accountability, and how incompetence was covered up for expressly political reasons. Did IICSA even begin to probe this matter?
To call this an eternal historical present is one way of putting it. Worth pointing out this originated in an area of X that is concerned about crime and would, I suspect, bridle at a music app analogy (made by Ben Smith). That Elon highlighted the transcript and further stayed with the story follows after a campaigner's heart. I think there is shock. If the takeaway is the shock at Elon sometimes shitposting I would suggest that shock is falling into a trap.
Interesting view. I suppose one test of the sincerity of his views is whether he is still talking about this in a week.
This is such a beautiful synthesis of a central point of thought, so insightful. Your validation of the insights is not just borne of today’s need, but also is attentive of the historic contexts that you say are missing in most of what is on the internet.
In the past 50 years we have taken away nearly all male spaces, claiming they are unfair to women. I would like to point out that, now that trans women are taking away female spaces, we are getting a taste of our medicine.
The truth is, men and women need separate spaces. Maybe not as separate as they used to be, and maybe they won't be equal or fair. I don't have a solution for that. But I know they are necessary.
I don't think we need to say "boys will be boys" and throw up our hands at the worst innate behaviors of the sexes. But claiming that everything is socialized (even behaviors that appear across cultures around the globe) and that we can somehow argue those behaviors and needs away, is not helping anyone either.
We need to create some society where we can acknowledge that men and women on average have differences, even if we don't rigidly enforce those tendencies on everyone.
Maybe I'm wrong but presumably the details about schools, councillors and social services wouldn't appear in the trials but would in an inquiry; similar to the details about Jahangir Akhtar in the Rotherham report.
There is legal accountability and social accountability. Rotherham councillors resigned due to their reaction to the report, and have had been deselected. With Leveson, everyone is now aware what the journalists were like. Couldn't an inquiry because performed in such a way as to make sure people are held accountable? Doesn't seem impossible, even if previous inquiries have not been like that.
My point about local inquiries is that the argument is that a national inquiry won't yield information. But if that was the case, a local one wouldn't either, or am I missing something about the nature of a national inquiry?
For some reason that hasn't been added as a reply to your reply
No worries. I suppose the nub of my issue is that the inquiry that's being demanded is, to paraphase Nigel Farage, "why did Pakistani men rape white girls?" And my answer is: because they wanted to, and they found a way to get away with it.
My position is that child abuse rings happen among all ethnicities, but their *expression* is culturally dependent. You need a few evil men, a self-justification and a reason they get away with it.
In the case of the Pelicot trial, the self-justification by the perpatrators was "she's pretending to sleep" or "her husband has consented on her behalf" and the reason Dominique Pelicot got away with it for so long was that none of the 50+ men who knew what was happening reported it. He was only caught because one police officer took a report of him upskirting women in public seriously and checked his hard drive. (There's an obvious policy recommendation that emerges from this: take even "minor" sex crimes seriously.)
In the case of the lay preacher and child flogging enthusiast John Smyth, the pretext was "masturbation is a sin" and the reason he got away with it was people in the C of E moved him to Africa to flog boys there instead because "we can't besmirch the good name of the Church of England".
In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, it was "these girls are getting a trip to an island and some cash, they've made a bargain" and the reason he got away with it for so long is that he was extremely rich and well-connected. (Isn't it amazing that the only person currently in prison over that sex ring is a woman?)
In Rotherham, the justification was "these white slags are common property" and the reason the ringleaders got away with it was, again, male solidarity (none of the men involved had qualms of conscience and went to the police); a fear of appearing racist by social services and officers; a sense that these girls were "tearaways" who knew what they were getting themselves into; and the police's universal general reluctance to prosecute any sex crime where the victim is less sympathetic than a nun getting stranger-raped in broad daylight with 15 witnesses.
At PMQs, Badenoch was calling for a national inquiry to "join the dots" but I think those dots have already been joined.
I agree with you that an inquiry would be valuable if it uncovered new information on culpable individuals. But I'm not sure whether it would, at this distance? Maybe I'm wrong.
"the police's universal general reluctance to prosecute any sex crime where the victim is less sympathetic than a nun getting stranger-raped in broad daylight with 15 witnesses."
Why is this? Do you think it's another version of "male solidarity" or something else?
Yet again Helen, another brilliant Bluestocking, picking out what is interesting and newsworthy.
"You can be mealy-mouthed about the extent of this cordon sanitaire". Day by day, I'm more and more surprised to discover the extension of French words in the English vocabulary.
Great writing, informative, interesting and witty. I admire your work very much…thank you!
Thank you also!