The Bluestocking, vol XXIII: Long arms, and the long arm of the law

Afternoon,

This week, I upset men (sorry, men) by suggesting that unpaid domestic labour falls more heavily on women. Apparently this is a "very 1985" viewpoint, which is odd, because I could have sworn the BSA stats I was looking at were from 2013.

Also, I watched The Big Short, which I thoroughly recommend, even if you will feel like torching a few banks afterwards. For once, I thought a film justified failing the Bechdel test - because part of the eejit hothouse atmosphere of the banks, pre-crash, was their ultra-competitive macho atmosphere, complete with who-has-the-best-car and look-at-my-dustbin-lid-watch bragging.

Until next week,

Helen



The Trials of Alice Goffman

It’s true that ethnography has come somewhat back into fashion since the 1970s and that no contemporary sociologist would agree with the call, tweeted by a Buzzfeed writer and echoed elsewhere, to ‘‘ban outsider ethnographies.’’ As one sociologist put it to me, ‘‘If Alice Goffman isn’t allowed to write about poor black people, then sociologists who come from poor communities of color, like Victor Rios, aren’t allowed to write about elite institutions like banks or hedge funds, and that, in the end, hurts Victor Rios much more than it hurts Alice Goffman.’’

Until now, I hadn't heard of Alice Goffman, a white, middle-class sociologist who has come under fire for writing about a poor urban black community. There's lots to chew over here, including journalism's claims to uncover a single "truth" about a situation, imposed in retrospect. I thought it was particularly striking how, while Goffman is being "called out" for being a privileged tourist, the people she's writing about don't see it like that at all. (It fits in with the argument over that internet activism trope of being told to "stay in your lane", or not to write about things of which you don't have "lived experience"; while I understand there's a problem with the default male/white/western/middle-class gaze, the solution can't be people only writing about themselves... as the quote from the piece suggests, that will disproportionately benefit the people with all the power already.)

Trying to Break Hollywood

Fogelson had concerns. Gary Oldman, who would play the head of the space program, was a terrific actor but not a star, and neither was Asa Butterfield, who would play Gardner. But he told his team, “What interested me was the ‘Starman’ of it, that he’s a human alien who grew up apart from the world, so he sees everything fresh and clear. The sell would be if we could show that visually, by making Gardner’s arms five per cent longer.”

Trying to make a film is exactly as horrifying as you think it is, according to this New Yorker piece on a couple of guys who are trying to launch a film studio to compete with the big beasts. Every star has a hovering price tag attached, and studios are willing to lop key bits off their films so they will sell to homophobic and racist countries. (To cheer you up, read this NYer profile of Damian Lewis, who nailed his character's gait in The Escapist by wearing a woman's thong throughout the shoot. Ah, actors.)


To Catch A Rapist

That afternoon, as Cuddy and Landisio ate lunch in front of their computers, Landisio read the files for two new cases that had landed on the already-toppling pile on his desk, muttering in singsong, ‘‘Punch me in the face, punch me in the face,’’ while Cuddy made out an arrest-warrant application for the suspect in the child’s rape.

Kudos to the writer of this profile, who got extraordinary access to a special victims' unit, and reported on the macabre humour that gets its employees through days of (often unsuccessful) attempts to catch rapists and child abusers.


Quick links: A badly written profile of very interesting psychology researcher. The adorable way to weigh a hedgehog. A music video that shows just how much we are all cliches. Don't domesticate gifs. I love profiles of tech bros, and this one has added Tiger Mom. It's pretty sketchy reporting on drug cartels if you're not Sean Penn. The revengeporn guru who repented. More on the problems with eyewitness identification.

Quote of the week: There is no virtue in being kicked in the face. The virtue is all in what you do after. (Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bill Cosby's enablers.) Gif of the week: Off to work like . . .

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