The Bluestocking, vol 150
Spelunker of the dankest beef.
Happy 150th Bluestocking!
This week, I went on the Deliciously Ella podcast to talk about how women’s behaviour is scrutinised, not least because newspapers love to illustrate trend stories with fit twentysomethings.
And sorry: I had planned more hoopla for the 150th edition of The Bluestocking; unfortunately, all my energies this week were concentrated into not boiling to death. Instead, the only treat I can offer is this arguably NSFW remix of Ben Shapiro reading the lyrics to “WAP”.
Helen
The Fight For Fertility Equality (NYT)
While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because until early April, paying a surrogate to carry a pregnancy was illegal in New York state.
The change to the law, which happened quietly in the midst of the state’s effort to contain the coronavirus, capped a decade-long legislative battle and has laid the groundwork for a broader movement in pursuit of what some activists have termed “fertility equality.”
Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.
“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers L.G.B.T.s face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”
It’s a Yikes from me. This piece is a glowing account of “breaking down barriers” to “everyone” being able to have the family they want. Except “everyone” here means rich people, and breaking down barriers means commercialising the life-threatening process of pregnancy and childbirth. This story treats as a side-issue the “carriers” (women) on whom this equality will depend, and doesn’t really delve into the fact that once you allow economic incentives into surrogacy, what you get is rich people paying poor women for the use of their bodies.
That’s a hard and (to some) grotesque thing to face, and so what happens? If stories like this are anything to go by, the progressive answer is: Barely mention the “carriers”, because they might complicate this upbeat story of LGBT liberation. It’s great that more gay people are having families - I write in Difficult Women about Jackie Forster, who ran a guerrilla fertility programme setting up gay men from the Campaign for Homosexual Equality with lesbians who weren’t allowed to adopt because of discriminatory policies at local councils - but there is no human right to have someone else bear you a child, and rightly so. It’s a situation ripe for exploitation.
Incidentally, Britain is currently considering relaxing its ban on commercial surrogacy, with a commission reporting in 2022.
Check Yourself Before You Rec Yourself
I was recently asked on Twitter for newsletter recommendations, so here they are.
The Ruffian. Ian Leslie’s weekly digest leans heavily into music, psychology and the science of communication.
Singal Minded. Jesse Singal, spelunker of the dankest internet beef. If you secretly enjoy the madder fringes of Twitter, but worry that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you, this is what you need instead.
The Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Taibbi, cover American culture wars/politics from the awkward right and the awkward left, respectively.
The OK, Karen. Glosswitch, also known as Victoria Smith, has always been one of the most interesting radical feminist writers around. Her latest newsletter, on how we deal with anorexia, and the concept of the “symptom pool”, is thoughtful and challenging.
Invisible Women. Caroline explained nine newsletters ago what she means by starting each newsletter with “Hey GFPs” but I’ve forgotten and am now too scared to ask. Features loo queue of the week.
I also subscribe to the Politico morning email (comprehensive), Stephen Bush’s Morning Call, Paul Waugh’s evening newsletter the Waugh Zone, and Axios’s weekly media briefing. Plus Caroline Crampton’s sporadic No Complaints, Sarah Ditum’s The Stacks, and Gia Milinovich’s My Apophenic Haze.
Man, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters.
Quick Links
I thought I’d seen everything, but the resignation of the editor of Poetry magazine for publishing this poem is a new frontier. To be honest, the poem’s real crime is that it takes up 30 pages of the magazine despite only being about 100 lines long. (More background here.)
“The most militant internal opponents of Corbyn’s leadership, who defected in February 2019 to form something called ‘Change UK’, then the ‘Independent Group for Change’, are now finding new careers in lobbying and consultancy after losing their seats in last year’s election. Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger have joined the communications firm Edelman UK, while Chris Leslie has become chief executive of a trade association for debt collectors. The party they believed to be dangerous and no longer able to accommodate them is now rebranding itself as a kind of democratically elected management consultancy.” (LRB)
Reader feedback, from E, commenting on my concerns that writers who aren’t white men get the “identity treatment”. “It was one of the things that annoyed me about the coverage of Queenie — yes, it's a great insight into the black female millennial experience, a subject that was long overdue to be represented in literature, but it's also a clear update of Pride & Prejudice via Bridget Jones’ Diary, with a strong influence from Adrian Mole.” OK, this sounds like a book I’d be into.
“So detrimental was the cycle of overproduction and discounting to luxury goods that in 2018, Burberry, the British label, revealed that it had been burning — not metaphorically but literally: burning — $37 million of worth of merchandise per year to maintain ‘brand value.’” Sweatpants Forever, Or How The Fashion Industry Nuked Itself (New York Times)
“As he works his way to the end, [Kurt] Andersen actually does the thing I once told my editor I would do and then just didn’t: propose solutions on the heels of his criticisms.” An enjoyable review of an important-sounding book on American politics. (NYT)
Leon Wieseltier got cancelled for an absolute barrage of allegations that he was inappropriate and weird to female colleagues. Three years later, he’s edited a 420-page magazine about liberalism. There is one aspect of this story which will make you go, hmmmmmmmmm, I guarantee it. (Airmail)
Oh, Frank Luntz has a $1m replica of the Oval Office in his home in Brentwood, that’s so kooky! Oh wait . . . he also has a replica of WHAT now?
“We could simply improve outcomes for everyone just by treating police officers like politicians do teachers: hardworking and well-meaning people who are doing the best they can, but who have plenty of their own prejudices and hang-ups, too.” Stevie B on how to deal with the police. (Standard)
“‘As much as Corbyn didn’t win, he’s very popular among some sections of black voters and leftwing voters,’ said Maurice McLeod, a Labour councillor from south-west London, citing Corbyn’s antiracism work and policies concentrated on deprived communities. ‘He’s kind of like what some people used to say about [Bill] Clinton: he’s as close as you can come to a black candidate.’” (Guardian)
Tactics For Dealing With Twitter
Thanks for all the replies to my callout in the last newsletter. There were so many! It’s amazing that a company has built a business model on a product that a significant percentage of its users actively resent.
“If I get an especially horrible and uncalled for tweet, I sometimes search for the name of the tweeter and a word like ‘job’ ‘life’ or ‘girlfriend’ in their posts,” says one Bluestocking reader. “A reminder that there are a lot of unfulfilled and angry people on social media.”
Here’s Niamh on why she’s still on Twitter: “I think the real reason is basically the same as why I used to go to horrible cliquey parties as a teenager. Because if I didn’t go, I wouldn’t know. Know what?? Who was cool, who wasn't. Who was safe, who wasn't. What to say, and what not to. I'm not proud of this.”
“My solution has been to block Twitter completely on my phone and block my timeline on my laptop,” says James. “That means I can post tweets, see notifications and look at other people’s pages without getting sucked into the pit of despair that comes from scrolling through random fruitless arguments.”
“The eureka moment was replacing the ‘ooh, let’s have a look on Twitter’ with other, less (apparently) harmful outlets that operate in a similar fashion, and inject the same rush. For me, Discord and Substack were the game-changers,” says Chris.
The winner, however, is Debra. “I did something that has turned out to be unexpectedly incredibly useful. I started three twitter accounts relating to my different interests (politics / general, football and books). I did this because I thought it would confuse people if I tweeted about such varied things from one account, but actually it’s had a massive side benefit. If the whole politics / general account is just shrieking people who are angry about The Thing We All Have To Be Angry About Right Now, I swap to the books account and immerse myself in what the latest releases are. If Arsenal are playing I can swap to my football account and watch along with other fans, or if they’re playing dreadfully I can swap to one of the others and avoid all mention.” Bet your other two accounts get a lot of use then, eh, Debra? BANTER! HIGH FIVE! BACK OF THE NET!
There you have it. Maybe the answer to Twitter is . . . more Twitter?
See you next time, and thank you for all the emails. Keep ‘em coming.
Great observations on To Kill a Mockingbird in your Atlantic piece.