The Bluestocking, vol 273
The “Brenda befriending” manual
Happy Friday!
What a phenomenal week in politics we’ve had since the last newsletter: Trump indicted (for . . . showing Kid Rock “secret maps” and asking him “What should I do about North Korea?”). Boris Johnson flounced. Nadine Dorries denied a peerage. Nicola Sturgeon arrested. Silvio Berlusconi expired.
Helen
PS. I’m off to Dalkey Literary Festival this weekend, if you’re in the Dublin area. Oh, and I’m on Have I Got News For You tonight.
He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy (The Swingometer, Substack)
The Conservatives did not win in 2019 due to a surge in their support; they won bcause Labour collapsed, hobbled by a leader who had become toxic and a lack of credibility on Brexit. Johnson deserves credit for consolidating Leave support with a winning message - “Get Brexit Done” - but he also benefitted greatly by running against a tired and toxic opponent. The 2019 election was not a personal triumph for a popular Johnson. It was, like most elections, an outcome with many authors.
Johnson’s talents as a campaigner and communicator no doubt delivered gains at the margin, but he was a polarising figure from the outset. And Theresa May’s previous gains, Corbyn’s post-2017 decline, and the dominance of Brexit in voters’ minds all mattered just as much, if not more, in delivering the victory Johnson’s allies claim as his.
Rob Ford here, not so much preaching to the choir as holding the choir (me) back from applauding too enthusiastically.
Chaser: Robert Saunders also had a good thread on why so many Serious Men fell for Johnson, often because they thought he was Winston Churchill in a wig. “Johnson’s critics pointed to the things he’d done. His admirers pointed to the things someone else had done.”
Befriendly Heavy Breathers (Wellcome, 2020)
The Samaritans, which offers support to anyone in emotional distress, was founded in 1953 by Chad Varah (1911–2007). But only two years after the phone helpline was set up, a significant number of men were calling to masturbate. As the problem grew, it became apparent that a system was needed to deal with these obscene callers.
Varah appropriated a special phone number that had been used for direct calls between the Brent and central London branches, and specific volunteers were trained to take these calls. If one of these volunteers had to be fetched to take a call, they were asked to come and take a “Brent call”. The volunteers at the Brent branch were horrified: they didn’t want their branch name associated with this filth!
To placate them, Varah switched the name to “Brenda”, and from then on, obscene callers were referred to as “Brenda callers”. The “Brenda befriending” manual that we acquired was written by Varah and given to the volunteers to provide guidance on how to handle different types of heavy-breathing caller.
People often accuse feminists of being hysterical about the risk that men can pose. So it’s useful to remember that their fears are often shaped by working in contexts like rape crisis lines and other support services, which are flypaper to pervs.
Lara Logan’s Break with Reality (The Atlantic)
All of which seemed to culminate in an appearance on Fox News—in November 2021, as the country battled COVID—during which Logan compared Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Fox stayed silent about the remarks but ultimately did not pursue a new season of Logan’s streaming show.
[…] Logan was undeterred. The stakes, as she had come to see them, were simply too high. This is what she tries to communicate to people at the various local speaking gigs that now constitute much of her career, events such as the Park Cities Republican Women Christmas fundraising lunch in Texas, which she keynoted last year. “We had to cut her off because she was going too long,” one member who helped arrange the lunch recalled. The message was: “The world is on fire” and “your kids are being exposed to cats being raped” and “elections are stolen” and “we’ve lost our country.” The woman added, “It’s a Christmas lunch, mind you.”
How the respected CBS reporter Lara Logan fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole.
Who’s Bonkers Now?
Talking of which, I’ve been meaning for ages to introduce a new recurring segment to the newsletter, dedicated to people in public life who you could swear were normal five minutes ago. This week: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who outed himself as a big fan of vaccine skeptic and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr because he’s “focused on peace.”
Quick Links
‘“The entire industry,” says the director Steven Soderbergh, who has been navigating structural changes in Hollywood since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, “has moved from a world of Newtonian economics into a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time: You can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue. It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.”’ (Vulture)
Why everyone is watching TV with the subtitles on (The Atlantic).
“The implicit request of the critics is to suppress such reporting: ‘It may be true, but, because it can be misused, we don’t want it out there.’.” Arthur Sulzberger Jr, publisher of the NYT, talks to the New Yorker’s David Remnick about the paper’s newly tough attitude on covering controversies (New Yorker).
“He recently worked on a one-step deal, but to deliver it, he was cajoled into completing seven drafts based on producer and studio notes. Meaning, six free passes on the project.” A good explanation of why US screenwriters are striking (Cole Haddon, Substack).
“The idea that MrBeast might show up in your life at some point and arbitrarily hand you a pile of money is so widespread online that the first rule on the MrBeast subreddit is ‘No Begging for Money’: ‘Mr beast will not give any money through reddit.’” Max Read profiles MrBeast (New York Times).
See you next time! If you enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to someone else who might like it. There are now nearly 14,000 Bluestockingers reading this every week.
Many years back I spent a couple of years volunteering on a telephone crisis line. As part of the selection weekend, we had to do quite a few role plays, where the would-be volunteers played caller and volunteer. You can see where this is heading.
Having to role play an obscene phone caller to a lovely woman while being watched by a bunch of other people was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. If I did it badly, she would not have been able to demonstrate her skills. If I did it well...not sure I could have looked anyone in the eye after.
That Brenda Befriending manual is really shocking. I’m surprised the Wellcome Trust weren’t more critical. Were any women in similar professions (mental health nurses, therapists) placed under the same expectation to “help in the best way you know how?” And did Varah check in with any other experts when he created his taxonomy of telephone masturbators? Sounds quite cultlike.