The Bluestocking, vol 262

the blog had simply gotten ‘too weird’

Happy Friday!

A quick programming note: there will be no Bluestocking next week. In the meantime, here’s a link to the new Spark, featuring Stuart Ritchie on open science. And on Tuesday at 11am on Radio 4, I’ll be talking to former professional poker player Annie Duke about knowing when to quit. (Professional poker players fold a lot more than amateurs; they’re less afraid to cut their losses.)

Helen

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What You Can’t Say On YouTube (The Atlantic)

Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible, but I don’t know what it was. The main subject of discussion—my reporting on the power of online gurus—was not intrinsically offensive. It might have been something about the comedian turned provocateur Russell Brand’s previous heroin addiction, or child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. I know it wasn’t the word Nazi, because we carefully avoided that. Whatever it was, it was enough to get the interview demonetized, meaning no ads could be placed against it, and my host received no revenue from it.

“It does start to drive you mad,” says Andrew Gold, whose channel, On the Edge, was the place where I committed my unknowable offense. Like many full-time YouTubers, he relies on the Google-owned site’s AdSense program, which gives him a cut of revenues from the advertisements inserted before and during his interviews. When launching a new episode, Gold explained to me, “you get a green dollar sign when it’s monetizable, and it goes yellow if it’s not.” Creators can contest these rulings, but that takes time—and most videos receive the majority of their views in the first hours after launch. So it’s better to avoid the yellow dollar sign in the first place. If you want to make money off of YouTube, you need to watch what you say.

But how?

It’s me, hi, taking a little dive into an under-explored content moderation problem—the absolute grind of trying to appease the YouTube algorithm and its finickety rules.

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this is what any three women will do, if left alone

What Is The Longhouse? (First Things)

In certain corners of the online right you encounter a term that is at first glance puzzling, “The Longhouse.” Maybe you have heard this term. Maybe you have wondered what it means. Maybe this term means nothing to you. Even for those of us who use it, the Longhouse evades easy summary. Ambivalent to its core, the term is at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in-joke; its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles. It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the “progressive,” “liberal,” and “secular” values that pervade all major institutions.

[…] The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.

I’ve been noodling around in the Manosphere the last few weeks for a project, and I kept coming across this term: “the longhouse,” or “longhousing.” So I went looking for the source. Like most internet slang, its use oscillates between deeply ironic and deadly serious, but this anonymous piece gives a flavour of the argument behind it, which is (essentially) that wokeness is coded female. Instead of good old-fashioned manly competition, where you got to be CEO by slapping other big lads in an honest fashion, today’s workplace runs on feminine passive-aggression and “weepiness.”

This argument slots very nicely into lots of heterodox intellectual themes, such as “today there are more points to be won by playing victim than by seeming strong” and “too much feminism has made women unhappy” and “modern culture has strayed from the light by pretending men and women are the same.”

I don’t think all this discourse is bullshit—people are out here arguing male puberty doesn’t give you a sporting advantage, such is their terror of anything that could be termed “essentialism,” and that stuff should be challenged. But the longhousing discourse also reveals how people (Americans in particular, judging by their politics) are still very uneasy about female authority, which they can experience as hectoring and prissy. “Hillary Clinton . . . epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite,” wrote Joan C Williams in the Harvard Business Review in 2016. “Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect.”

But, at the same time, I have to concede: I wouldn’t want to work in an all-female office any more than an all-male (except for me) office. I went to an all-girls’ school and that was enough single-sex group dynamics for one lifetime.

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Quick Links

1. “Upon reading the ‘primitive root wiener’ post, the donor funding Rod’s entire salary decided the blog had simply gotten ‘too weird’.” Just an incredible media story. First, the US rightwing pundit Rod Dreher gets into trouble for accidentally reporting off-the-record remarks by Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban saying that he would like to leave the EU, when Orban’s public position is that he loves it (or at least loves the cash it brings in). Then Dreher gets the funding pulled for his blog on The American Conservative—which was paid for by one donor, a truly bizarre arrangement—because he keeps writing weird stuff about sex instead of rightwing politics (Vanity Fair).

2. Paul Waugh did a good primer on what is and what isn’t being taught in British schools as sex and relationships education (i paper).

3. “‘Labouring your whole life’ in journalism is less glamorous and certainly less lucrative. But it allows you to live with yourself, to retain your self-respect, to know you are trying to make things better, rather than flooding the zone with shit to grow your audience.” Hugely enjoyable machine-gunning of Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald etc by George Monbiot (twitter). Also: freelancers, linked in the thread are Monbiot’s full financial disclosures, which are very useful for working out what to charge for eg literary festival appearances etc.

4. “And, to clarify once again; a MAWG [middle-aged white guy] script is not a script written by a MAWG, it is a genre all its own; out of touch, unaware of the contemporary world and culture, a story that seems to have been preserved in amber, from a time when men were (white) men and women were silent arm-candy. It is a script that pats you on the bum and tells you that you look prettier when you smile.” Julian Simpson identifies something important here: that some of the reason the Big Beasts aren’t getting their projects commissioned any more isn’t politics so much as commerce: “the audience you're writing for no longer exists in sufficient numbers to justify making your story.” (Development Hell, Substack)

5. I largely opted out of all Covid discourse—I write about enough inflammatory subjects—so I have not had an opinion on the lab leak until now. But the new Decoding The Gurus episode has convinced me that animal spillover is far more likely based on the currently available evidence. DTG got three leading epidemiologists on, one of whom encouraged more research into the lab leak theory back in 2020. All three say the same thing: yes, it looks like a huge coincidence there was a virology lab near Wuhan, but that’s what it was. A coincidence.

6. This is the most convincing AI deepfake yet—although very NSFW: Tucker Carlson explains why Vaporeon is the sexiest Pokémon (YouTube).

7. Philosophers are such a menace. They can’t even leave their spouse for a grad student without trying to claim it reveals something about the perpetual restlessness at the heart of existence (New Yorker).

8. American racial discourse has come for Welshness. Do <clap> not <clap> appropriate <clap> close-harmony singing <clap> (twitter).

9. “When the family is together, the YouTube channel is what they talk about. Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss. “It’s a lot of pressure,” she said. When Claire turns 18 and can move out on her own, she’s considering going no-contact with her parents.” tfw your parents farm you for content (Teen Vogue).

10. “The Fosbury flop gave an advantage to athletes who start with a high center of mass. In just eight years after Fosbury won gold in Mexico City, the average height of elite male high-jumpers increased by four inches! Technical and technological innovations often alter the characteristics of top performers, and that is especially easy to measure in sports.” (David Epstein, Substack)

See you next time!