The Bluestocking, vol 167
For Your Ice Only
Happy Friday!
It’s approaching the end of the year, and like any good wedding DJ, I am taking requests. Is there any question or topic you’d like the Bluestocking to consider over the holiday season? Hit “reply”.
However, do not ask about:
rocks
troll’s with sticks
All sorts of dragons
Mrs. Cake
Huje green things with teeth
Any kinds of black dogs with orange eyebrows
Rains of spaniel’s.
fog.
Mrs. Cake
Helen
The Crown’s Majestic Untruths (Atlantic)
All truly great historical dramas, memoirs, and biopics are about something greater than their ostensible subject. If they are not, they become a dutiful, forgettable checklist—in the words of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, “just one fucking thing after another.” Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus dwells on the destructive power of envy (as does Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which borrows Schaffer’s framing device of a thwarted rival). Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth explores politics as religion, with Cate Blanchett’s monarch giving post-Reformation England a replacement icon for the Virgin Mary. Hidden Figures asks us to confront how much potential has been wasted because of racism and sexism.
I love historical dramas, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about The Crown.
The Mystery of the Gatwick Drone (Guardian)
At about 5pm, Mitchell was parked at the end of the runway with a colleague when something caught his eye: a red and green light, hovering in the distance. This was it. He reported the drone to police, before jumping out of the car to start snapping. “I thought, we’ve got it, and the idiot flying it,” he said. “That was the money shot.”
But when he opened up the image on his computer, ready to send to his editors, he realised he’d made a mistake. The image did not show a drone. It was a helicopter hovering 10 miles away; between the darkness and the distance, his eyes had played a trick on him. “If I’m making a mistake – and I fly drones two or three times a week – then God help us, because others will have no idea,” he said. He called police to retract his reported sighting.
I love that 21st century Britain’s version of Medjugorje is 170 sightings of a non-existent drone.
Torturing Geniuses (The Point)
I was a difficult child: bossy, obsessive, selfish and hard to get along with. My sister, despite being younger than me, was much better at making friends, and throughout our childhood my parents would force her to take me along on playdates. I can still remember the horrified look on some mother’s face when she discovered my toothmarks in the plastic white hat of one of her daughter’s Smurf dolls. (I knew it wasn’t a marshmallow, but it looked so much like one.) My genius might have been fake, but my weirdness was real.
I had read enough books to pick up on the fact that Genius is a personality-laundering scheme, and I suspect this insight underlay my conviction of possessing it: were I a prodigy, other people would line up to cooperate with me, on my terms, and my “bad” behavior would suddenly get reclassified as charming idiosyncrasy.
tfw someone articulates your book’s thesis better than you have yet managed.
The Children of Pornhub (New York Times)
“Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.
“I’m still getting sold, even though I’m five years out of that life,” Cali said. Now 23, she is studying in a university and hoping to become a lawyer — but those old videos hang over her.
“I may never be able to get away from this,” she said. “I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos.”
“You type ‘Young Asian’ and you can probably find me,” she added.
Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search.
You’ll need a pretty strong stomach to get through this article, particularly the search terms being used to mark underage and non-consensual content. I feel incredibly sorry for the moderators here, because watching user-uploaded videos for 40 hours a week — to weed out what’s real torture and what’s staged, and who’s 14 versus who’s been made look to 14 — must be one of the most soul-destroying jobs ever invented. But I feel more sorry for the people whose videos end up being uploaded, again and again, without their consent.
The irony is that no one wants to attack Pornhub, and other aggregator sites, for fear of a) having to say naughty words in public, and b) being accused of hating sex. But the legitimate adult industry hates these aggregators as much as any radical feminist does. They have HIV tests and consent forms and wages to pay, and yet they have to compete with free user-generated-content where none of those barriers apply. Student feminists should be all over this; it’s women their age who are most affected. So should men, who make up the bulk of the customer base. As Nick Kristof writes, “It should be possible to be sex positive and Pornhub negative.”
Brexit: Was It Worth It? (Unherd)
All the arguments I had previously used to justify leaving, in particular the hope of entering a sort of half-way house with EFTA, I just no longer believed. All that was left was the emotional reasoning; the elephant was in charge, while the rider was basically asleep.
[. . . But] even as I have come to conclude that the Remainers were right all along, I also dislike them more than ever.
Ed West on falling out of love with Euroscepticism. Also, I laughed at this savage subtweet of a certain type of Remain tweeter: “The sort of person who loves Europe but is in reality far more interested in American politics, and almost certainly went to Oxbridge and likes to tweet about ‘the lack of diversity at my alma mater’.”
Quick Links
Call me a basic, but I laughed at several of the names on the Scottish government’s gritter tracker, starting with “Yes Sir Ice Can Boogie” and “Spready Mercury”. (Link)
“Citizen Kane, the ultimate canon title, has itself become proof that canons are there to be exploded.” The rise and fall of Citizen Kane as the “best film ever.” (Vulture)
“On May 13, 1982, at the age of 38, Philip Brickman made his way onto the roof of Tower Plaza, the tallest building in Ann Arbor, and jumped. It was a 26-story fall. The man who’d done one of psychology’s foundational studies about happiness couldn’t make his own pain go away.” (New York Times)
“After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.” TS Eliot, then at Faber & Faber, rejects Orwell’s manuscript for Animal Farm. (Guardian)
“I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world’s manganese supply. Who knew what it meant, but one had to assume the worst. . . [Friedman] has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.” Matt Taibbi reviews Thomas Friedman, 2005. (Internet Archive)
Tom Chivers articulates something that should be obvious, but isn’t, because some people’s brains have been rotted by Twitter’s demand that everything be rendered as a snackable dunk: “it is possible for people to, simultaneously, have a loud and prominent platform, and at the same time for people to be ‘silencing’ them, or at least trying to.” (Unherd)
I love reading people talk about people they love love love: here’s Ian Leslie on Paul McCartney.
“I think that most authorities simply internalize the ruling ideology so deeply that they equate dissent with sin. So in particular, the better you can ground your case in empirical facts, the craftier and more conniving a deceiver you become in their eyes, and hence the more virtuous they are for punishing you.” On Soviet dissidents. (Scott Aaronson)
Chaser: “To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power.” Paul Graham on how you work out what’s unsayable but might be true.
See you next time!
Apropos of glom of nit, we rewatched Going Postal last night. It really is the best of the Pratchett adaptations so far. And knowing that Adorabelle Dearheart was going to go on to be QEII also elevates it.