The Bluestocking, vol XXI: brains, skin and blue tarantulas
Afternoon,
Apologies for patchy newsletter service, as I was in Granada in the first week of December (it was nice - sunny!), and the week after, I went up to Aberdeen to visit a morgue, wrote about my love for Angela Merkel, and pre-recorded a Christmas quiz for Women's Hour. This is exactly why I became a journalist - who could get bored with that kind of schedule? This week I wrote about Jimmy Krankie in yellowface, the second series of Serial, and started watching Jessica Jones on Netflix, which is great.
Merry Christmas!
Helen
An Unbelievable Story of Rape
An 18-year-old said she was attacked at knifepoint. Then she said she made it up. That’s where our story begins.
Hot DAMN reading this made me so angry. When I think of how many women I know who have been raped, and how few have reported it . . .
In Rachel Dolezal's Skin
"[Her identity is] a real thing for her—in the same way someone that's transgender is wrestling with not fitting in with the skin they were born into," Charles says. "I was really angered, frustrated, and saddened to see the way that people and the mass media projected all these assumptions about her motives. They were really not in line with what her motives really are."
This Broadly profile of Rachel Dolezal makes a good case that she is not a self-aware fraud or an opportunist, but someone who sincerely believes that she is, in some ways, black.
Sexism on the brain
"Every generation of scientific sexists disclaims the errors and biases of its predecessors and assures us that today’s science is different. Yet in one fundamental respect it isn’t different at all: contemporary scientists may be offering a new explanation for sex-differences, but the differences they’re trying to explain are the same old collection of stereotypes and myths. Occasionally one of these does fade into obsolescence (no one today suggests that education shrivels the ovaries); but many are in the category of ‘zombie facts’ which have been around forever (sometimes they’re older than science itself), have never been supported by good evidence, and still refuse to die."
Deborah Cameron was my favourite academic writer when I was at university, and now she's started blogging. Joy!
Quick links: When Vogue starts running pieces about mass shootings, you know it's bad. Who wants a hipster funeral? Tell me I'm not the only person who thought this piece was deeply average, and that the author just wanted a little clap for writing it in Italian. A woman's life in small acts of violence. Our hot take culture in a nutshell: "I spoke to several philanthropy experts who told me it was too early to pass judgment on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. But nothing is too early for the Internet." Why are so many tarantulas blue? The cool Christian church that baptised Justin Bieber (tbh, they remind me of the funky vicar in the gilet from Rev). I've always thought that being famous but poor would be the worst of all worlds, and turns out I was right, as this longread on the economics of YouTube stardom demonstrates. Bad internet arguments - enjoy. Jeremy Paxman and Jeremy Clarkson have lunch together like the bloody great blokes they are, yeah (while eating pear salad and drinking rose) and all I can think is #masculinitysofragile
Quote of the week: "It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction." (I love Rebecca Solnit. even if it's "truth" not "fact" and she has misspelled Lizzie Bennet's name /pedantry)
Argh:
(The guy who does Dilbert is an MRA. Someone has superimposed his blog posts on to Dilbert comics. It's horrifying.)
All I want for Christmas . . . is to be able to dance like Tom Hiddleston.
I'm taking a festive break from the newsletter. See you in January!