The Bluestocking, vol 222

Lily time in Giverny

It’s Friday—not the happiest one, with the unprovoked Russian aggression in Ukraine.

One consolation is that the Commons debate yesterday was sharp—with useful questions about Russian money in London and options for escalating sanctions. Barry Gardiner also decided that now was the time to worry about the International Space Station, which, I’ll be honest, I would classify as a B-list problem.

Foreign affairs isn’t my area of expertise, so there’s no commentary here, but I recommend the Atlantic’s coverage: Anne Applebaum’s on Ukraine’s spirit; Franklin Foer on the country’s history and why it’s not “The” Ukraine; and Prashant Rao’s interview with David Petraeus about what a Ukrainian insurgency might look like.

Helen

---

Inside Pornhub (The Verge)

In the mornings, I would sit down at my desk with a cup of tea, open the three inboxes I handled for Tube8, Keezmovies, and Spankwire, and start removing videos. Reading the dozens of emails I received every day provided a window into the real-world impact of the tube sites; I was already beginning to see the long shadows cast by their glittering facades. 

I’d hear from regretful couples who, in the haze of a Friday night, uploaded a video of themselves going at it, only to be horrified at their decision in the cold light of morning. Please, they would beg, take down the video! We’re so sorry! I’d happily comply, write them back, and be thanked profusely. 

[. . .]

Tougher to deal with were videos uploaded by verified Manwin partners and flagged for review by users showing young women who looked to be of questionable age. “Verified” meant that the producers of the videos had attested to the performers’ legal ages, absolving Manwin of responsibility for scrutinizing the content. As far as I remember, I wasn’t allowed to remove videos from partners. (While it’s fair in retrospect to ask how closely porn producers scrutinize their performers’ IDs, it’s equally fair to note that many porn performers of legal age do their best to look younger than their years.)

Well, that was illuminating, if relentlessly bleak: One man’s story of his time as a content moderator for free adult sites.

---

Breast Milk is Not For Men (Unherd)

NeoKare, meanwhile, Europe’s first breast milk processing plant has been going strong in England since March 2020. It offers, according to its website, “safe and screened breast milk products for when a mother’s own milk is not available. Invest in your baby’s future today.” However, at £45 for six 50ml bottles, it doesn’t come cheap. At two months of age, a baby should drink 120-150 ml every 3-4 hours, which means feeding will cost £112 per day. 

Development economists and feminists have long been interested in how the use of GDP as a metric distorts our view of the world (see my Spark interview with Ehsan Masood for more). Here’s a good example. Look at the market cost of breast milk! On these numbers, if you breastfed for six months, the amount recommended by the NHS, that’s about 20 grand’s worth! The costs of commercial surrogacy—around $200,000 in the U.S.—also show how valuable, in strict economic terms, women’s bodies are. And yet, at the same time, a woman having a baby is widely regarded as a drain on the economy, because she requires maternity leave, even though she is making a huge personal donation towards creating the workforce of the future.

Maybe I’m a commie after all, but I think there are some places the market shouldn’t go, and this story suggests one of them. Breast milk banks were set up as a nice, altruistic gesture, to help new mothers who couldn’t produce enough, but introduce money to the equation and you end up with poor women being milked six days a week in a lab.

---

Would anyone like a Russian-language copy of Difficult Women? The publisher sent me six yesterday, and I don’t need them all. Maybe I’ll send one to Vladimir Putin. That should make him see the error of his ways.

---

Quick Links

1. Peter Thiel has got to be pretty high up the list of the world’s most dangerous people. My absolute favourite piece of his biography isn’t even the time he argued for seasteads in international waters to get around labour laws, but the fact he funded a load of hard-right anti-immigration candidates while not only being an immigrant himself (from South Africa) but then getting New Zealand “citizenship at large.” Then, at the National Conservative Conference in October, he said, “nationalism was ‘a corrective’ to the ‘brain-dead, one-world state’ of globalism.” Ah yes, nationalism. Just not the kind where you obey the laws of the country, even if you don’t like them. The kind where you keep a sidepiece citizenship in case of emergencies.

2. “[me torching Claude Monet on Twitter in 1917] It’s not the art that’s bad lol but the blithe presumption of normalcy. Half the young people in this country are *literally* traumatized rn but it’s still lily time in Giverny? ‘6,000 people died today, have another wet flower’ Lmao”. I want to frame this tweet.

3. “I’m going to be dead soon, so good luck with it all.” Margaret Atwood is always good value. (Guardian)

4. “My entire life, I’ve felt too sensitive for this world. I’ve often described my capacity to feel emotion as infinitely deeper than the average human's, envisaging a rainbow-like spectrum of colours dictating emotions that are nonexistent for most people. My ability to fluctuate between serenity and incandescent rage is eternal.” A piece about “rejection-sensitive dysphoria.” (Refinery 29)

5. “[Tom] Holland is more of a utility player. He’s recognizable enough and audiences that liked him as Spider-Man might be inclined to like him as Nathan Drake. Rather than the draw, Holland is a hedge, and that leaves him in a bad place as an actor because the IP comes first.” This blog makes an interesting case that it actually sucks to be Tom Holland (Matt Goldberg, Substack).

6. “As a traumatised adolescent slapped with a label, I recall endless ‘handover’ meetings in which I struggled to work out the best way to respond to the latest incident of ‘normal behaviour being re-interpreted as weird’. Should I agree that yes, maybe I do seem a bit obsessed with Madge in Neighbours, even though I think I’m not? Or do I deny it, in which case I become someone who is not only obsessed with Madge but, when challenged, refuses to defer to authority?” Victoria Smith reviews Jessica Taylor’s Sexy But Psycho, and asks whether feminism is compatible with psychiatry (The Critic). I have Some Thoughts on this, but I have a related piece coming out soon, so let’s return to this subject later.

7. Putin’s terrified spy chief stammering at the press conference is probably Exhibit A in “you’ll get better advice if people aren’t worried you’ll kill their families.” (Twitter)

8. This piece makes the very good point that we should treat This Is Going To Hurt as what it is—one man’s story—not least because one of the most popular series on TV, Call the Midwife, already tackles birth from the female perspective.

9. The words “ukelele mash-up” do not promise a beautiful music experience, but this tweet reminds me how beautiful Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World is. (I think I first heard it when Dr Green dies in ER.)

10. “This is just to say that we have roughly the kinds of outcomes that would have been generated by a federal Habsburg Empire, except that absent World War I, it’s likely German rather than English would be the dominant international language on the continent.” Matt Yglesias on the case for the Habsburg Empire (Substack).

See you next time!