The Bluestocking, vol 134: Never follow a hippie to a second location
Happy Friday!
I've finally cracked and cleaned off the garden table today, causing enormous distress to the spider population of south London. Our "garden' is actually a paved rectangle, bordered by three enormous weeds and some kind of white flowering bush that four years of total neglect has failed to kill off. This is the kind of fighting spirit that allegedly protects you from dying of Coronavirus. I expect it to be appointed to the Cabinet soon.
I don't know about anyone else, but I found this week in lockdown* really tough. The monotony, the limits, the vague irritation that everyone else seems to be cooking sourdough. Where is all this free time coming from? I'm still doing the same job, but with an extra 47 minutes of bellowing "No, I can't hear you! Are you muted? Are you sure you're not muted?" every day.
Still, you take your consolations where you can get them. I'm still watching 30 Rock, and have now reached Series 3. Great joy lies within, particularly in my favourite episode, about Liz Lemon's high school reunion. She doesn't want to go, because she was a bullied nerd at school. Except, as she discovers when she gets there, she wasn't. She was the bully. It's a brilliant reversal of a dusty cliche which has taken hold because ALL writers think that school was an unfair contest between jocks and nerds, and they were on the losing side. Even though, self-evidently, the modern world is ruled by nerds. Anyway, I haven't seen a show so good at packing themes, characters and punchlines into 20 minutes since Frasier. And you know I don't say that lightly.
Also, thanks to a continuous propaganda campaign by India Knight and Paraic O'Donnell, I spent the weekend reading Dodie Smith's novel I Capture The Castle. (Yes, the Dodie Smith who wrote 101 Dalmatians.) Published in 1948, it would now be described as a YA novel, but it's really a clever riff on Pride and Prejudice, interspersed with descriptions of the English countryside that will probably make anyone trapped in a city totes emosh. Remember the colour green? Isn't it great? No idea where this soppiness about nature will end; I watched the cherry blossoms flowering earlier this year and realised that I probably only have 40 springs left, based on the latest actuarial information**.
If you're terminally bored, watch Sarah Ditum tell me off for talking too much about men when I'm supposed to be focused on feminism in this video chat.
Helen
* A reader who is an actual epidemiologist, not a fake one on Medium, got in touch to say that "lockdown" is not the best word to use: "The problem is that this is going to take a longer time than most people realise and the 'we have to get out of lockdown' [stuff] will [be] harmful. Elements of the present will have to remain to prevent future catastrophic surges." Any suggestions for a better phrase are very welcome.
** I nearly wrote a poem about it, but didn't because I couldn't get anything to rhyme with "actuarial".
What AOC Gets that Bernie Didn’t
MCELWEE: It was smart of AOC to identify as a Democrat, because most Democrats do believe the things that progressives believe. And most Democrats have quite intense party loyalty. One of the biggest misunderstandings on the left is the idea that the Democratic brand is bad. In fact, the Democratic Party brand is one of the strongest brands in the country. It’s something millions of Americans trust. That includes the African-American and Latino voters who are sympathetic to progressive ideas, and are voters we need to persuade to support our candidates. Running as an independent outsider would have helped Sanders in a general election, but it was definitely a problem in the primary.
Like Corbynism, Bernie-ism really suffered from a small number of outriders, mostly on Twitter, who confused being rude to people with Sticking It To The Man. That affected its perception by journalists, and therefore became an image problem. McElwee here also demonstrates another difference from some of the Corbyn supporters I've seen on Twitter in the last few weeks, which is that he wants to be honest about where the left went wrong, so that it can do better next time.
If your aim is a leftwing government, that's a more useful exercise to undertake than writing a big list of all the meanies (Iain McNicol, you're not my real dad!) who deprived you of the victory which would otherwise have surely been yours. With Corbyn (as with Ed Miliband, incidentally), it's perfectly reasonable to say that lots of his ideas were popular and it was great to get them into the public debate, but voters were worried about both the leader himself, and his ability to pay for and deliver them.
While we're talking about absurd outcrops of the left, please enjoy this piece about woke men being reluctant to put their money where their, er, mouth is. "As two trans girls who keep leftist male hotties in their company and turn tricks as a side hustle, Violet and I have both observed that our peers can’t get their politics straight. For one, these guys support decriminalizing sex work because they’re feminists, but they also seem to not pay for sex because they’re feminists." One of the replies to Jesse Singal's tweet on this subject captured the rebuttal more succinctly than I can: While I think drugs should be decriminalised, I don't think everyone should try crack.
The sly sexism of the Karen Meme
There’s a defence of the Karen meme which claims that it originated with black American women as a way to talk about their aggravating white peers. Consequently, pushing back against it can be framed as entrenching white privilege by denying black women a vocabulary to describe their own oppression. Which is all very lofty considering the way the name is actually used: look at who’s engaging in the Karen discourse on social media, and you’ll find that politically engaged black women are mysteriously outnumbered by angry white men.
If you’re female, and like Bindel you make the error of suggesting the Karen thing is transparent sexism, then you’ll meet those men in your mentions — deeply aggrieved by the suggestion that you, a Karen, should presume to tell them how to speak. It’s impossible to unpick the origins of the Karen meme from the morass of the internet, but if it really were a cherished piece of racial justice rhetoric, it seems likely we’d be having a wider conversation about how these angry white men have culturally appropriated it. The fact that we’re not doing that suggests how flimsy the defence is.
Of all the absolute blinders in that sex work piece above, the references to "boomer moms" and "white feminism" were my absolute favourites. (OK, I lied. The phrase "ass is better slow-cooked, not microwaved" is my absolute favourite. Chefs pls advise.) An honest pro-sex work position argues that decriminalisation and bringing the practice into the open, reducing stigma, will also reduce violence, physical and economic coercion and trafficking. The modern woke argument against sex work is that any feminist who opposes it is a dried-up old prude. And probably white! That fact isn't relevant to the discussion, of course, but it's a useful way to kneecap your opponents from the start. What if not paying for sex is . . . racist? Ssh, just accept it and move along.
Sarah Ditum's excellent piece on the "Karen" meme shows the same dynamic in action. Wherever it started, "OK Karen" has now become a very convenient retort to any woman saying things you'd rather she didn't say, or even speaking at all. But by gesturing its to the idea's origins as a racial critique, these new users are able to pretend that their own non-racial use of it - white men shouting at white women - is somehow a valuable piece of activism. I'm totally OK with black women talking about the way white women can play-act vulnerability to get what they want. That's a piece I want to read: it'll be uncomfortable, but I can feel there's truth there that needs to be explored. Some dude with a beard tweeting "OK Karen" at a woman doing Unapproved Feminism . . . yeah, nah.
Sarah is also right to point out that "Karen" is a finger-trap: questioning it is SUCH a Karen thing to do. It's a demonstration of female solidarity, which is always dangerous. So instead we get: Cool Girls are fine with it! We also love strip clubs! Ugh why are feminists so angry! I love being on a podcast with three guys who talk over me! I find their jokes about my breasts validating! You know what they say: a man who respects young, hot women who agree with him is DEFINITELY a feminist ally!
Kenneth being like 38 and still being trapped as an intern is the quietest 30 Rock shade of the media.
I Read Woody Allen's Apropos of Nothing So You Don't Have To
I read the rest of Apropos of Nothing in a numb daze, which is how it appears to have been written. I do not know what to make of the fact that after his no-stone-unthrown account of “all of these people running helter-skelter to help a nutsy woman carry out a vengeful plan” (an experience that “I must say was very amusing”), he jumps backward to amiably recap the movies he and Farrow made between 1983 and 1992, writing things like “Purple Rose of Cairo … coming off [Broadway] Danny Rose gives you a good idea of Mia’s range and she got better picture after picture … Mia’s range was very flexible.” (If you’re confused, by “Mia” he means the woman he just accused of causing her children to kill themselves.) This abrupt pivot to bland reminiscence puts the “mental” in “compartmentalization” and also suggests that its writing took place in a series of wildly differing moods without much attention to continuity.
Every review of this book vindicates the decision to publish it.
Quick Links
Oh, just the Pope being told off for cussing out bats.
Spectator writers getting dragged by their partners is enjoyable. Come for Toby Young's wife outing him as a hypochondriac, stay for the princess who married Taki explaining how homespun and simple their new life is without their staff.
Peonies are the best flower (fight me) and here are five pure minutes of a woman cupping them as she explains why they are great.
If you liked this newsletter, please pass it on to a friend! Or share its existence on your social channels! Obviously, do not mention the Karen meme bit, because I cherish the relative calm of my @ feed and do not need a hundred dudes making the same unfunny OK KAREN joke at me! Not least because I am contractually obliged not to raise customer service complaints on Twitter so I literally cannot ask to speak to the manager!