The Bluestocking, vol 141

It’s Friday.

This week I have been watching Dave, listening to the Blocked And Reported podcast, and anticipating the end of journalism. On Sunday night, I am doing Book Club Live at Salon (online) which is free with a purchase of the book.

Helen

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My latest story for the Atlantic looks a phenomenon I’m calling “Potemkin Journalism” (yeah, I’ve got really into coining phrases, what can I say?). In this case, the hollow facade belongs to Nigel Farage, who has found a new culture war meme, “migrant boats in the Channel”. He’s been doing something that looks like investigative journalism, but has none of the safeguards designed to ensure that reports are fair: contextual information, for example, and nuance. If I tell you that a man shoved a pensioner, you think, how awful. If I don’t add “to push him out of the path of an oncoming truck”, then I’ve failed you as a journalist.

There a couple of other things in the story that I’ve been wanting to look into for a while, such as the “just asking questions” style of conspiracy theorism (again, a stylistic form which is stealing the clothes of journalism) and the absolutely exquisite culturejacking that is “publish some absolute garbage, and then insist there’s a sinister conspiracy by the MSM not to follow it up”. Read the full piece here.

I had vowed to myself that I would not comment on JK Rowling’s tweets, because my views on the whole subject are well-known - though often misrepresented - and because I wish she had picked her moment better.

But a) everyone seems to be arguing about Fawlty Towers now, and b) I woke up to something which changed my mind, and c) this is not Twitter. If you think the conversation right now should be focused on BLM, please skip this section and read one of the two very good pieces I’ve linked to below.

When JK Rowling published her long, thoughtful post following her initial tweets, it contained a disclosure of sexual and domestic violence.

“I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.”

My first, unworthy thought was: well, I hope this makes Daniel Radcliffe feel very bad about himself. That’s not the way to think about this story, of course, as a petty personality battle - but it did unlock for me why I’ve found the whole news cycle around this so depressing.

“Gaslighting” is a wildly overused term, but it’s one with a specific application in regards to male violence against women. Why have the police, and the courts, treated domestic violence so differently to an assault in the street? Because of the legacy of laws which said that a man had the right to “discipline” his wife. That has had all kinds of legal ramifications - the use of a “nagging and shagging” defence for men who kill their partners, for example - but it has also had personal ones. We can’t accept that an otherwise “nice guy” might be a monster to the other people in his home. We still shy away from confronting “a domestic”. People are embarrassed when women disclose that they’ve been victims of violence, particularly men. It makes them feel bad. Is she tarring us all with the same brush? Should I feel guilty on behalf of men?

Ultimately, I’ve come to feel, we don’t want to confront the staggering ubiquity of intimate partner violence (including its male victims, and the children who grow up in homes where they feel unsafe) because it would simply be too awful. It is a scar across society as big, and as ugly, and as hard to look in the face as racism.

This compounds the suffering of survivors: the knowledge that they are inconvenient. Everyone wants to be against domestic violence in principle, but do they want to tell off their mate about the way he checks his partner’s phone without her knowledge? About the way he gets drunk and goes home like a tornado? (“Oh, but he’d never hurt her or the kids.”) Do we want to confront the sleeping bear, draw his rage towards us? Do we want to confront the fact that we live alongside the bear, seeing it on the edge of our vision, but defiantly ignoring it?

All this washed over me when I watched the response to Rowling’s blog post. Because I expected there to be, at least, a brief - admittedly, probably insincere, probably self-serving - acknowledgement of her experience, before the inevitable addendum that she was literally killing people with her views.

Ha. Instead, the Body Shop’s social media manager decided this was an opportunity to do a little light brand-based dunking, like everyone enjoys when tea does it.

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Sorry to hear that. Have you thought about taking it out on some women?