The Bluestocking, vol XXVII: Cults, Hoaxers and Groupies

Hey all,

Sorry for the break in service last week, I spent Thursday evening writing the script for Week in Westminster instead of catching up on my reading list. This week came something I've been looking forward to for ages - recording a podcast about 18th century women writers with a couple of excellent academics. (The 18th century was the best century, and I will fight anyone who says differently.)

If you are also a historical nerd, I'd welcome any suggestions for topics we should cover in future, and questions we should address. I can EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL we did cover Jonathan Swift's "Lady's Dressing Room" - where a poet sees what women's bedrooms are really like and has a conniption that his flawless love-goddess needs to blow her nose sometimes - and the response to it attributed to Mary Wortley Montagu, where she reframes his complaint as being from a punter who suffered erectile dysfunction and therefore asked for a refund. Frankly, not enough modern poetry features lines such as:

The reverend lover with surprise Peeps in her bubbies and her eyes, And kisses both, and tries--and tries.

On a similar note, I saw Deadpool last week, and loved it. Happy International Women's Day, indeed.

Helen


A Polygamist Cult's Last Stand


In the late Nineties, Jeffs started spending more time in Short Creek. His father had become the prophet in 1986, but a series of strokes had left him mentally incapacitated, and over time, Jeffs became his father's most trusted counselor, and eventually his mouthpiece. At a meeting shortly after his father's death, Jeffs sat near the podium in the FLDS chapel, peering down at the congregation with a large portrait of his father propped up on a chair beside him. He explained that Rulon wasn't dead at all – he'd been "renewed," or reincarnated, and was standing before them. In other words, Jeffs was Rulon, which is why it was perfectly acceptable for him to marry his dad's wives.

Yeah, sounds legit.


The Internet Hoax Buster

Wright, a dark-haired woman with precisely arched eyebrows, has long been drawn to stories of serial killers, serial liars, and cult leaders. (A few years ago, she and her sister pledged to stop bringing up the Jonestown mass suicide on first dates.) She had obsessively followed the twisted stories of several women who had been caught creating elaborate fake personas online in the early days of the internet. There was Kaycee Nicole, a teenager dying of leukaemia who turned out to be a healthy middle-aged woman. And Jesse Jubilee James, a cowboy-fireman-poet with suicidal tendencies and liver cancer, who was actually the creation of a woman in her mid-50s. Now Wright found herself in the heady position of being the detective, uncovering a hoax of her own.

This has everything you want: internet vigilantes, Munchausens by Internet, and a social group afflicted with whale cancer.


How Should We Feel About David Bowie and Lori Maddox?

There are no precise enough words or satisfying enough conclusions to fully account for her story, or any like it. It’s easy to see what Bowie represents here: a sexual norm that has always appallingly favored men, and the abuse that stems from and surpasses even that. It is easy to denounce the part Bowie played in this, even with any number of purportedly mitigating factors: the political context, Maddox’s story, the fact that he lived with generosity and openness, the less generous fact that his synapses were perpetually blitzed with cocaine. It is less easy to turn over what Maddox evinces in this narrative, from the late 1970s to her account of it now—which is that women have developed the vastly unfair, nonetheless remarkable, and still essential ability to find pleasure and freedom in a system that oppresses them.

There was just so much to think about in this essay by Jezebel's Jia Tolentino about David Bowie's sexual encounter with a 15-year-old fan in the 1970s: the relationship between the art and the artist; how the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s gave men another way to make women feel guilty for not wanting to have sex with them; how those hag-ridden old "sex negative" Second Wave feminists were shaped by that context. It doesn't offer any easy conclusions, which I like. We can't possibly cleanse the artistic record of anyone who ever did a "problematic" thing, but we should also resist the temptation to airbrush out our heroes' flaws.

On a related note, this piece from the Pool on why adult men like teenage girls really spoke to me. For a certain kind of insecure man, it seems obvious how having a "protegee" is more attractive than dealing with a full-blown adult women with desires and needs of her own. Last year's film The Diary Of A Teenage Girl dealt with this subject too: you start off thinking, "Yeah, at 16 I'd have been pretty flattered if Alexander Skarsgard had been interested in me, too", and end up thinking, "Oh lord. This is a bit tragic." Applying the word "victim" to that kind of relationship seems like it flattens it.

Quick links: All these Women in Business Summits - are they doing any good? Did an 1851 meeting of the Explorers Club really serve mammoth for dinner? Everybody hates Ted (Cruz): interesting experimental article format here. A 2007 New Yorker profile of Garry Kasparov when he had just decided to enter Russian politics (inevitably, he now lives abroad). I have wanted to write this email so many times. An astute piece about getting sucked into a self-promoting tosser's media strategy. How to win an argument on the internet. This Justin Bieber profile makes a good argument for not giving young people money.

Guest gif: Are the shades of this newsletter to be thus polluted????

That's all! Tell your friends!