The Bluestocking, vol 30: The Phenotype Lottery
Happy Friday!
Last week, I published a piece on the gendered effects of the Coronavirus - domestic violence, more difficulty accessing maternity care, a potential return to old-fashioned breadwinner/caregiver divides among dual-earner straight couples. It did pretty well, by the standards of these things: one of the most interesting outcomes was the number of requests to translate it (Turkish, Spanish, Italian) or republish it.
The piece also received the accolade of a Quillette hatchet-job, which is a hoot. ("Lewis seems to find it somehow intolerable that women are asked to make professional or personal sacrifices in a time of national crisis—that it is unfair to impute to women the heroic ability to put others’ needs before their own self-interest.") To me, though, the most intriguing part of the response was the FURY it generated in a handful of men, who took to my inbox to air their thoughts. A selection:
"In Britain, Stabbings and Bombings go on, yet you profess hatred of men? Maybe Mohammedan men, but that being said, you'd suck the toes of Mohammedan women if they ordered you. The Kaffirs and Carpet kissers rape white Swedish women. I understand your Feminist howls, but you women control the government using emotions."
I would like to put on record that I have a race-blind approach to sucking toes. It's always a hard no.
How fucking egocentric and narcissistic do you have to be to blame a VIRUS (who gives no fucks who it infects) for affecting womens "independence". Seriously, people are out there dying in the world, others are risking their lives treating sick people, while you sick back in your living room writing about the woes of women. Go fuck yourself.
This one ended "Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE device" which was a nice touch.
"You are anti male and should be removed from the Atlantic. Which I am sure is the only crap media outlet that would pick up such a pile of rubbish. Get over it! Women are equal. Just as equal as the rest of the genders and races. Don’t care what your statistics say. Feminism is sexist towards men. I am sure you don’t feel such a way about homosexual men. Just straight men."
I have preserved the poetic structure of this one, which came with an auto-signature offering "culinary regards" and the name of the man's restaurant in Canada. Note here the intriguing clash between conservatism of arguing against feminism and wokeness of "the rest of the genders". Glad to know that Mr Culinary Regards is thinking of the pangender and non-binary at this difficult time.
"One sandwich please".
This one apparently came from 2004, when this joke was last funny. No, sorry, I'm hearing through my earpiece - yes, that's right. It was NEVER FUNNY.
"Helen, You lost the phenotype lottery in life. You're as plain & homely as they come. So instead of accepting your lot in life and soldiering on you believe you can improve your mating outcomes in life via this hysterical & crazed ideology called feminism.
Helen you will never have dominion over the vast majority of men including men such as myself. There just isn't even an infinitesimal amount of interest in you. Feminism won't change that. And here's the kicker, Helen: you can't sculpt or change society in any way to change that.
Please do your part by not reproducing--I think we can both agree the world could do without you passing on your poison. And if, spinstress Helen, you're lucky enough to wind up in an old folks home one day I hope you wind up with someone like me who will mercilessly bully you for your absolutely terrible ideology and life decisions."
This guy emailed from his main Gmail account, meaning that his real name and a profile photo were appended. I hope it's not overstepping the line to say that the phenotypical lottery was a rollover on the day he was born.
I could go on. (These men certainly did.) I reckoned that people who write about other subjects, or write under male names, might appreciate an insight into the black, howling void my inbox becomes every time I write a reasonably successful piece about feminism. Suddenly, my entire life and my personal appearance are up for grabs. But what intrigues me most about this latest outbreak of misogyny is how RIGHTEOUS everyone involved seems to feel in scolding me, as if they've momentarily looked up from their job as an intensive care doctor to fire off an email. I need to be chastised for my own good.
Anyway, as I write in Difficult Women (still on sale!!!!!), misogyny is engaged in an arms race with feminism, like antibiotics and bacteria. It keeps mutating. One very successful evolutionary adaptation is to take the form of "correction". No, I don't hate women, they just need to be kept in line! No, I don't hate women, this one has simply erred! And so on.
In the case of coronavirus, the anti-feminist backlash is part of something wider. The crisis has provided lots of petty dictators with the opportunity to scold other people under the cover of righteousness, cf "Why are all these people stockpiling???" (Most people aren't; as I wrote this week, the surge in demand was from households who have not been used to keeping much in the fridge or cupboards) and "Why are all these selfish bastards on the tube???" (They've reduced tube services dramatically; there are lots of "key workers"; some non-key workers had to stay in work or starve).
People are great at finding flattering excuses for indulging their worst instincts; we shouldn't expect a moment of national crisis to interfere with that; in fact, for some it provides perfect cover. I will therefore leave you with this extract from Rob Hutton's Agent Jack, about the forgotten fascists of England during the Second World War:
In 1943, Nancy Brown sat down in a flat in London to tell her friends about a daylight bombing raid she’d been caught up in in Brighton a few days earlier. “I’d no sooner sat down in Ward’s to have my coffee when suddenly: ‘Crack! Crack! Crack!’ And everybody dived to the back of the shop because they felt quite sure the bullets were coming in at the windows. And then ‘Boomp!’” – she banged the table – “’Boomp! Boomp!’ And the windows blew in and out and the doors blew in and out. And when we came out we could see great columns of smoke coming up.”
Though dramatic, Brown’s experience was commonplace enough. What made her perspective unique was that she thought the attack was the result of her work. Brown, a council worker in her early twenties, believed herself to be a Nazi spy. Some months earlier, she had handed a list of targets in the town to a man she knew as Jack King, on the understanding that he would pass them to Berlin.
Brown had given [King] hand-drawn maps of Brighton, and picked out the places to attack. Now that an attack had happened, was she horrified by the result? Were her friends? Quite the opposite. “I looked in vain at the faces of these three women for any signs of contrition,” [King] wrote in his report afterwards. “Nancy Brown looked a fine, healthy specimen of an Englishwoman, but it was obvious that the deaths of these people meant absolutely nothing to her. She sat there pleased and happy to think that the news she had given me resulted in the deaths and damage of that last raid.”
Until next time....
Helen
Flatten the Curve of Armchair Epidemiology
Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) is a phenomenon where people lack the ability to understand their lack of ability. While strains of DKE typically circulate seasonally, a new and more virulent strain called DKE-19 is now reaching pandemic proportions.
Signs of DKE-19 generally appear 3–5 days after learning that the word “epidemiology” is not the study of skin diseases. Symptoms vary, but include extreme claims, making charts, and publishing on Medium. Although most cases are mild or even entirely asymptomatic, the recent outbreak indicates that severe DKE-19 primarily affects men ages 24-36 working in tech, for reasons unknown to scientists who are unaccountably also men.
I hope many people on my Twitter timeline feel SEEN.
How Do You Write About People When You Can’t Be Near Them?
I’ve been picked up from airports by people I’m interviewing and been left to find Ubers back from places that definitely don’t have Uber. I’ve watched subjects shop for records and for clothes and for books, record songs, shoot movie scenes, get drunk, sob. One time, I was in the middle of a long conversation with someone when they abruptly stood up and walked out of the room, only to return with a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to their back. Another time, a subject not so furtively began to text under the table; within minutes, a whole parade of other people began to “spontaneously” appear and join us at the table—interview over. The weird thing is, it doesn’t really matter what they’re doing, I’ve found. It’s just that they’re doing it. In motion, in the world, how you move through it, what you do and how you do it: that’s you.
Loved this piece on the impossibility of profiling people without meeting them in person. It's so true; I hate it when people offer a "phoner". It makes you realise (as conducting job interviews also does) quite how much information you silently suck from someone within a minute of meeting them. That information might not always be accurate, sure; and it's certainly open to all kinds of bias. But as humans, it's completely natural to hoover it up.
Aaron Sorkin on how he would write the democratic primary (NYT)
But you couldn’t do a show like “The West Wing” now, could you? Yeah, I could.
I’m going to tell you why you couldn’t. And then I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. I don’t even need to hear your reason. I think you’re wrong.
Everything about “The West Wing” was based on the moral and ethical excellence of these hyper-competent characters. In this political atmosphere, the show would just look like liberal wish fulfillment. Unfortunately, I think you’ve made the only point in the universe that you were talking about that could be right. Which is, yes, people would see the show as a response to the Trump administration. So what I would do if I was going to do “The West Wing” today is put my friends who are smarter than I am — that’s all of them — in a room with me and say, “Guys, how do you get over that problem?” But what you’re describing — and you’re right, so you would be one of the people I’d want in that room — I don’t think is an argument that people can’t handle idealism now. If anything, I think that we’re thirsty for it.
Look, I enjoyed Studio 60. I will never resile from this opinion.
The Deadliest Flu Ever (New Yorker)
If something like the Spanish flu ever came back, this is the system we are relying on to protect us. Right now, virtually all the flu in the human population is either h1n1 or h3n2, so the road map presented by the C.D.C. at the Flu Meeting was almost entirely an account of genetic drift within those two families. The minute that the C.D.C. or a W.H.O. laboratory received a flu that didn’t fall into the h1n1 or h3n2 families, it would sound the alarm. The surveillance system is also specifically focussed on those parts of the world where flu is prevalent and the interspecies movement that creates pandemic strains is more likely to occur. That means China, where there are as many ducks as people, and where pigs are often raised on farms in close proximity to wild and domestic poultry. China has been the source of the last two pandemics, and most observers think it likely that the next will be from there as well, possibly arising out of the marshy resting sites for ducks both along the nation’s eastern seaboard and inland in an arc extending from Gansu Province to Guangxi, on the southern coast.
Oh, Malcolm Gladwell of 1998, how prescient you were. (Thanks to Ian Leslie, of the Ruffian newsletter, for the link.)
Why Did The Coronavirus Start In China? (NYT)
A second cultural factor behind the epidemic are traditional Chinese beliefs about the powers of certain foods, which have encouraged some hazardous habits. There is, in particular, the aspect of Chinese eating culture known as “jinbu,” (進補) meaning, roughly, to fill the void. . . . Bats, which are thought to be the original source of both the current coronavirus and the SARS virus, are said to be good for restoring eyesight — especially the animals’ granular feces, called “sands of nocturnal shine” (夜明砂). Gallbladders and bile harvested from live bears are good for treating jaundice; tiger bone is for erections.
After all this is over, the Chinese government needs to have a gentle word with its citizens about the advisability of eating bat shit.
Quick links
"The one exception was the city of Hull, where the government sent a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to study why the populations apparently panicked after heavy raiding. The subsequent report, The Mental Stability of Hull, was based on interviews with hundreds of survivors. These case studies showed that people developed serious psychosomatic conditions, including involuntary soiling and wetting, persistent crying, uncontrollable shaking, headaches and chronic dizziness; men were found to indulge in heavy drinking and smoking after a raid, and prone to developing peptic ulcers." Actual Historian Richard Overy on "Blitz Spirit".
Nice piece on Zoom, which is keeping me sane.
"I look down at the shrimp in her buggy, this milk bully, this angry fleshy lump of my heart, and I wonder what’s scarier: death, or life?" Ed Cumming on becoming a dad in the middle of a pandemic.
Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog have started a podcast, Blocked and Reported, to discuss internet madness. At 20 minutes in, Katie talks about being "cancelled" and how it made her question her left-wing beliefs: If they can be wrong about this, what else are they wrong about? I feel the same: that any journalist worth a damn should loudly be a heretic occasionally, because it's a small inoculation against unthinking tribal sympathies.
Hundreds of Covid cases across Europe might be traceable back to a game of beer pong in an Austrian ski resort.
The last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade only died in 1940. In 1940! Which reminds me that there is a television programme from the 1950s where the guest is the last person alive who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
See you next time! Why not berate a friend until they sign up to this newsletter? The link is: tinyletter.com/helenlewis