The Bluestocking, vol 63: Opera, Digital Blackmail and Goats
Happy Fri . . . oh.
Yes, sorry, my newsletter schedule was interrupted by the Baillie Gifford (formerly Samuel Johnson) Prize. The winner, David France, gave an extremely emotional speech - he lost his partner to AIDS - about his book How To Survive A Plague, on how activists campaigned for proper medical and social recognition of HIV. In a fairly bleak time for politics, it is amazing to remember that in just three decades, humans turned HIV infection from a death sentence to a chronic illness with only small effects on life expectancy. That's extraordinary.
Also this week, I saw Network at the National Theatre. My review is in next week's magazine, but the tl;dr is - great, innovative production, brilliant central performance by Bryan Cranston, but all the changes from the film are to turn it into a star vehicle, which I think is a shame.
I also went mad and bought a ticket to the opera for the first time in my life - because of this profile of its director Katie Mitchell. The production was Lucia di Lammermoor, and while I didn't think the score was much cop (apparently this is a supportable opinion, not just evidence of me not knowing anything about opera), I thought the staging was beautiful.
It's all done in "split screen", putting Lucia on stage doing household tasks, or getting dressed, even while men sing about her on the other side. It was a thoughtful response to the problem of an artwork constantly treating its central character as an object rather than a subject - this is supposedly Lucia's story, but she's constantly at the mercy of men telling her what to do, and her only option for agency in the end is to go mad and kill her husband. #operalife
It reminded me of what Kate Maltby pointed out about the Almeida's Hamlet - that Ophelia was onstage a lot more than is usual. And, fittingly, last year Katie Mitchell directed a play called Ophelia's Zimmer, which "does a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" on a character who too often ends up feeling like a drippy, peripheral pawn. Given the enormous dominance of Shakespeare in theatre productions, and a few dozen canonical works in opera, it's a proper feminist project to rethink and re-imagine the women in those works within the tradition of performing them.
Until next time,
Helen
Tone Deaf Big Tech
Google’s inability to imagine that a cupcake calorie counter you can’t opt out of might offend — or Twitter’s failure to see how verifying a white supremacist would read like it was conferring legitimacy on his movement — suggests that these companies are emotionally stunted, frozen in an era when their intentions were rarely questioned and their ambitions lauded as novel and almost universally pure. They’re stuck in the circa 2014 model of “delight” — but Easter egg–y doohickeys like calorie counters and VR demos simply land differently when they’re coming from companies that many believe are at least partially responsible for the toxic political and cultural climate of the internet.
BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel is doing really interesting work around the intersection of big tech, society and democracy (sorry John Herrman). I enjoyed this on the bafflement of the Big Beasts at how public opinion - or, at least, the mainstream media - has soured against them.
It's the Budget this week, but Tumblr doesn't have any Philip Hammond gifs (ikr), so please enjoy his Flood Chic instead.
How One Woman's Digital Life Was Weaponised Against Her
It was “one of the worst moments of my life,” she said later, hoping that help was coming but instead “having to lift up my son’s shirt and show them my son’s body to make sure he had no bruises.” When the detectives asked for her phone number, she realized she didn’t remember it—she had just changed it in an attempt to evade the endless calls. She found herself sobbing in front of the detectives. The harassment was so creative, so relentless, so unpredictable. Around the same time, at least 15 of her neighbors received a “community alert” in the mail warning them that they were living near a dangerous abuser, Steven Allen. It was postmarked from Arizona.
There's a phenomenal quote in this story, from a privacy expert: "McDonald suggests thinking of the internet as a backward-facing time machine that we are constantly loading with ammunition." If you do one thing, put 2-factor authentication on your primary email and social media accounts (so they require a code texted to your phone to log in, as well as a password). The next step up is to make sure your password recovery email (the one that any password reset requests get sent to) is not an account whose name you ever give out publicly. Some people are really into password managers, but these do occasionally get compromised. To be honest, better to have a printout by your desk of all your passwords, and make them properly complicated, than rely on using the same one that you can remember across multiple accounts.
Other stuff to think about: are your tweets or Instagram posts giving away your location? Do you have Find My Phone switched on, and if so, are you happy with your location being broadcast to your contacts? What photos do you have backed up in your iCloud? (That's where all the celebrity pictures got hacked from).
I've been much more militant about this stuff since a couple of years ago, when I stumbled upon a guy who several people had told me was a notorious woman-hater talking to his Twitter pals about what they could glean from the public version of my Facebook page. When you look at everything you've put on the internet through the eyes of someone with obviously malign intent, it does feel instantly more exposing. (Hence I'm considering deleting all my past tweets. Also, they're hardly Swann's Way.)
Breitbart's Coming Exploitation of the "Believe Women" Movement
Breitbart is notorious for amplifying hyperbolic and fabricated stories meant to undermine Democrats, pluralism, the entire liberal project, but they tend to specialize in fostering conspiratorial paranoia and racial panic (think Benghazi, and Shirley Sherrod). Their situational obsession with sexual misconduct isn’t typically built on fabrication, but deployed in the midst of real scandals to portray liberals as hypocrites and to damage Democrats (think Anthony Weiner, and Weinstein) or to portray minorities and immigrants as degenerates.
I've previously got into trouble for saying that, as a journalist, I don't "believe her" (as the feminist saying goes). I don't reflexively disbelieve those with testimonies of sexual violence - and I regard the testimony itself as evidence - but I would always treat allegations with caution, and try not to imply more certainty than there is. To do otherwise is a) unfair to the tiny minority who are wrongly accused; b) playing into the hands of disruptors and provocateurs who have no interest in the issue, except to try to make feminists and progressives look like hypocrites for not immediately and thunderously condemning any rumour or claim which floats by.
This piece outlines the cynical deployment of the women who accused Bill Clinton against Hillary Clinton, which shows how clever the tactic is. Yes, Bill Clinton got a pass from liberals, both because they liked him and because the 90s had a very different media culture (the misogynist smearing of Monica Lewinsky as a gold-digging tart is now shockingly obvious in retrospect). But was Steve Bannon's intention to right a feminist wrong? No.
Kate Harding bravely tacked this whole mess in an article for the Washington Post, where she explained why she didn't want Al Franken, a Democratic senator, to resign. (tldr; because a Republican facing a similar allegation wouldn't). It's a nuanced, knotty argument I would rather chew my leg off than make in public, but she has a point: Franken immediately admitted joke-groping a sleeping female soldier's breasts over a bulletproof vest and agreed to co-operate with an investigation. Donald Trump has simply refused to engage with multiple accusations of assault, beyond retconning his admission of how he likes to grab women to "locker room banter". There can't be harsher sanctions for men who admit their past behaviour, and apologise, than those who sail merrily onward without giving a damn.
Quick Links:
How Tina Brown remixed the magazine (New Yorker).
A proper bit of reporting from the FT on Blackpool on its problems with unemployment and reliance on intermittent benefits, which is bleak but not depressing: there are plenty of people there trying to make a difference.
The vet who operates on wild animals. Includes great photos, and the revelation that hedgehogs can suffer from something called "balloon syndrome", where they swell to the size of a beach ball.
"The goats are a major part of the vision, story-telling and images in this extraordinary play". The Royal Court's statement on the goats in its latest play gets progressively better with every use of the word "goats".
"A lot of left men didn’t like consciousness-raising because they suspected we were talking about all the bad things they did to women. Which was absolutely true." Well, thank god we've left THAT sort of thing in the past, eh? (Quote from an oral history of the New York second wave.)
I rewatched When Harry Met Sally.
See you next time! Thanks to some bellend tweeting bits of the NS podcast out of context, and earning me a pile-on from king of the sealions Glenn Greenwald, this newsletter is now my only remaining outlet for long, rambling thoughts on difficult topics without having to measure every word for "can I be arsed with the backlash" ratings. So why not encourage your loved ones to sign up? The address is tinyletter.com/helenlewis