The Bluestocking, vol 275
a greased wafer
Happy Friday!
Pretty sure this is the week that the Bluestocking tops 14,000 subscribers, which is not bad for a side-hustle to my side-hustle. If you know someone who might enjoy this regular Friday links digest, please do forward this on. Or post about it on Mastodon, lol.
Helen
Inside The Mind of RFK Jr (The Atlantic)
“I think the evidence that the CIA murdered my uncle is overwhelming, I would say, beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “As an attorney, I would be very comfortable arguing that case to a jury. I think that the evidence that the CIA murdered my father is circumstantial but very, very, very persuasive. Or very compelling. Let me put it that way—very compelling. And of course the CIA participation in the cover-up of both those murders is also beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s very well documented.” (In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson said: “The notion that CIA was involved in the deaths of either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy is absolutely false.”)
Two years ago, hundreds of QAnon supporters gathered in Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK’s assassination. They were convinced that JFK Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, would dramatically reappear and that Donald Trump would be reinstated as president. I asked Kennedy what he made of all this.
“Are you equating them with people who believe that my uncle was killed by the CIA?” he asked. There was pain in his voice. It was the first time in our conversation that he appeared to get upset.
This John Hendrickson interview with RFK Jr is worth reading, particularly for this moment when the Democratic presidential challenger appears pained to be lumped in with Team Crank.
RFK Jr is all over the internet at the moment because he went on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently. A pro-vaccine doctor called Peter Hotez criticised that decision, and the Bad Boys of Antiwoke Twitter—Rogan, Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, plus their assorted beta fans—then tried to bully Hotez into doing a debate with RFK Jr, offering him cash and saying that the only reason not to do it must be that he was SCARED.
Personally, I think that Hotez was right to decline Joe Rogan’s invitation, because RFK Jr has an extreme aptitude for connecting the dots in a plausible but incorrect way. That’s very hard to deal with in the heat of the moment. You talk about peer-reviewed science, he tells emotive anecdotes and compelling half-truths.
The Man Trying to Make Condoms Sexy (The Guardian)
The central challenge of Wilson’s professional life is that condoms remain a tough sell: an article in the Harvard Business Review, The Marketing of “Unmentionables”, once declared that the condom shared “marketing characteristics with napalm, drugs for terminal illnesses and funeral arranging”. People don’t want to talk about them. Worse, as Wilson put it: “No one wants to use a condom.” They interrupt the moment; they get in the way. People loathe the things. It’s not hard to understand why. For centuries, condoms were made from the lining of sheep guts, and there is still something distinctly intestinal about the condom now. Open the foil packet and you discover a gelatinous membrane, an object that seems to ooze, as if it might have been recently alive or only just been born, a large yellowish grub that should have been left alone to germinate into something more beautiful. Martin Amis once called it “a greased wafer”. And that’s before you even reach the hurdle of getting the thing on, or “donning”, as they call it in the trade. Amis: “You seem to need three hands.”
It will never stop being funny to me that my ex-colleague Sophie Elmhirst, one of the least TMI people I’ve ever met, consistently gets commissioned to write longreads on smut. (I can’t find the piece where she went to a sex dungeon in San Francisco anywhere online, but I still think of it fondly.)
Who’s Bonkers Now? An occasional feature devoted to unexpected journeys down the rabbit hole.
My main memory of Matt Le Tissier until now has been the time David Baddiel did a paean to him on Fantasy Football. WELL. These days he’s a vaccine sceptic and keen proponent of groomer discourse, who spends a lot of his time selling CBD products.
How has this affected his punditry career, you might ask? He was let go as an “ambassador” for Southampton FC for denying the Russian massacre in Bucha, and now his Twitter bio suggests contacting a man with an Outlook email address for any “work enquiries”.
Quick Links
Tom Whipple tells a cautionary tale about the Facebook party-crashers of 2008, and what happens when you pay for interviews: you get a story, not the truth (twitter).
Sometimes I feel like I’m being a bit of a cow to be anything less than fully supportive of other writers on feminism (I get over it, the reader comes first). But now I’ve watched Susan Sontag on Camille Paglia and vice versa, I feel a lot better.
Enjoyable pisstake of hustle culture. Thanks to Bluestockinger (and author of two excellent books) Andrew Hankinson for the tip.
“Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their problems are not their own fault, but rather the product of various systems beyond their control. These systems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly, they are medical.” Interesting provocation from Gurwinder Bhogal on why liberals have worse mental health (Unherd).
It’s wild to me that American leftists think there should be a market for everything, and that anyone who questions that must be a HATER, but I guess when you gaze into the neoliberal abyss, it also gazes into you (twitter).
See you next time!
Wow, that Gurwinder piece is amazing. I’d often wondered where Taylor Lorenz found all the people she RTs who have desperate long Covid. Now I get an inkling.
🕵️♂️👏