The Bluestocking XXXIII: High bars, trans toffs and defending the bubble

Evening - hope the Olympics is distracting you from the Labour party. It's mostly doing that for me.

Helen

Women's Gymnastics Deserves Better TV coverage

One of the factors preventing Americans from appreciating just how difficult it is to do what an Olympic gymnast does is the fact that competitors are expected to perform their routines without betraying any evidence of effort. Watching LeBron James drive into the lane, bounce off multiple defenders, and then rise above them seems so impressive in part because James grimaces along the way. Serena Williams growls with every shot. The effort is obvious. A gymnast, meanwhile, is expected to risk life and limb with a smile on her face. “You’re never supposed to show that it’s difficult,” O’Beirne said. She pointed out that there is no such requirement for male gymnasts.

Who doesn't love the gymnastics? Weird people, that's who. But I'm deeply ambivalent about all the pageant hairdos and plastered smiles, which you don't get in other women's sports. (Extra: there's a great New Yorker profile of Simone Biles here.)

Corbynism: not ‘turning Labour into a socialist movement’, but turning a ‘socialist movement’ into Labour?

Few of the ‘ex-comrades’, I would suggest, ever really settled intellectual accounts with their ‘revolutionary socialist’ flings. They voted overwhelmingly for Blair in ’97 and tolerated the ‘Third Way’, to the extent they thought about it at all between school-runs, but not enthusiastically.

It is this mass of vaguely ‘socialist’ middle-aged ex-Trots – and there are an awful lot more of them than they or anyone else probably realized until recently – that might explain a lot of the ‘Corbyn’ phenomena. Disillusioned with Blair (mainly over one single issue – Iraq), despondent of Labour ever winning again anyway, they have turned to Corbyn as the political equivalent of going out and buying a Harley.

Interesting perspective from a former member of the International Marxist Group.

Liz Kendall defends the Bubble

I make the mistake of suggesting that Nigel Farage cut through in the campaign because he didn’t live inside the Westminster Bubble. “I think this bubble stuff is crap. Do you have to knock on people's doors randomly, apart from when you choose to, or in the high street to get their vote? Go along to community meetings, invite people along to hear about planning estate? No you bloody don't, I do. And I do it because I want to, because it's my job. I do not live in a bubble. I speak to more people across different walks of life, I would bet than most people. And I tell you what, I'm going to defend it, because look at what’s happening in the states here, and Donald Trump, so the Republicans for years and years and years, were massively critical of the government, of Washington, of the tea party movement, they pandered, pandered, pandered. And Trump is the bastard child of the tea party, you reap what you sow, if you criticise everybody in a bubble from not understanding, are you surprised when something like that happens. So I am going to defend politicians for not living in a bubble.”

Something I've been thinking for a while. People in the media and journalistic establishment railing against the establishment is a cheap way to buy credibility. It poisons public discourse, though.

Transgender toffs

It's true that a sex-change duchess would represent the overlapping of two teeny tiny circles on a Venn diagram - the nobility and the transgender community. But were it to happen, nothing could raise the profile of these very different minority groups better.

Tatler always delivers the answers to the Big Questions: what happens if an aristocrat changes gender? (Side note: Michael Dillon had a pretty wild life. Someone write a biography STAT.)

Quick links: Craig Oliver on the impossibility of managing the news cycle. The BBC's 360-degree video from Rio. I did not know that women were more likely to experience motion sickness than men; that might be a problem for VR manufacturers. Interesting account of the Labour party meeting in Corbyn's own constituency. The Atlantic collects more than 100 great pieces of non-fiction from the last year.

See you next time!