The Bluestocking, vol XX: Bigots, blowhards and bad books

Hello,

An unproductive week, because I now want to do nothing with my free time except play Fallout 4, even though it's Minecraftish mechanic is, objectively, rubbish.

This week, I wrote about the Isis propaganda we don't see - all hugging jihadis and earnest promises to fix your plumbing. Plus, there is still time to come to my feminist fundraising event on Wednesday, featuring Bridget Christie, Suzanne Moore and many other fab women.

Helen

Conversion via Twitter

"She had a hard time believing in aspects of the future foretold by some church members, like the idea that they would soon be living in pink caves in Jordan. “We were making specific predictions about things without having, in my mind, sufficient scriptural support,” she said. Many other members shared her bewilderment, she found, and so she turned to Twitter for answers. Most of the prophecies centered on Jews, so she found a list, published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a syndicated news service, of the hundred most influential Jewish Twitter users. She created an account under the pseudonym Marissa Cohen and followed many of the people on the list, hoping to learn if Westboro’s prophecies were coming true."

There's a fair amount of research about how effective social media is for radicalising people; the story of a daughter of the Westboro baptist church (of "God hates fags" fame) shows that it can deradicalise them too.


Tinder's CEO is so tindery

“She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen but it doesn’t mean that I want to rip her clothes off and have sex with her. Attraction is nuanced. I’ve been attracted to women who are ...” he pauses “... well, who my friends might think are ugly. I don’t care if someone is a model. Really. It sounds clichéd and almost totally unbelievable for a guy to say this, but it’s true. I need an intellectual challenge.”

He continues: “Apparently there’s a term for someone who gets turned on by intellectual stuff. You know, just talking. What’s the word?” His face creases the effort of trying to remember. “I want to say ‘sodomy’?”

Sometimes you just have to treat yourself to a good old-fashioned irony-free techbro interview. (Sorry, Fast Company on Mark Zuckerberg's future plans for Facebook. You just weren't weird enough.)

80 Books No Woman Should Read

"Norman Mailer and William Burroughs would go high up on my no-list, because there are so many writers we can read who didn’t stab or shoot their wives (and because one writer everyone should read, Luc Sante, wrote an astonishingly good piece about Burroughs’s appalling gender politics 30 years ago that was a big influence on me). All those novels by men that seem to believe that size is everything, the 900-page monsters that, had a woman written them, would be called overweight and told to go on a diet. All those prurient books about violent crimes against women, especially the Black Dahlia murder case, which is a horrible reminder of how much violence against women is eroticized by some men, for other men, and how it makes women internalize the hatred. As Jacqueline Rose noted recently in the London Review of Books, “Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.”"

I realise that I have pre-endorsed this message by reading very, very few of the books on Rebecca's no-read list. Well done, me.


Quick links: Barack Obama consistently gives the most interesting interviews about what politics is like of any politician. His memoirs are going to be boss. Vice's documentary on Islamic State is . . . well, it is exactly what you'd expect. How one man's face became another man's face. This piece on how Gawker treats female journalists (either as workhorses or expendable confessional writers) is interesting. This Zayn Malik profile expertly captures how weird it is to be famous in your early 20s: women throwing themselves at you, but your best friend is actually your mum. The Verge is reviewing animals now, and I like it. An interesting Tumblr post about Sherlock, age and gender. The non-disclosure agreement you have to sign to have sex with Charlie Sheen.

Guest gif: Some days are better than others.

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