31. I'm calling it: 2024 is the Year of Girl
Mean girls! Brave girls! Girls and girls! But not for Taylor!
Thanks so much to everyone who got in touch about weightlifting after last week’s post and to the new subscribers who’ve arrived via Caroline Criado Perez (holla my GFPs!) — it was great to hear from so many people who are either weight training already, or felt inspired to try it, or who just appreciated reading me on something I love. And I had a good week in the gym last week (70kg squat, 40kg on the bench, not that anyone should care about bench, but I do) — more newsletters to come on this subject.
It’s now just two weeks until the US launch of Toxic! I’ve had some fantastic early reviews (“Top-notch pop-culture commentary,” thank you v much Kirkus) and it’s also an Apple Books pick of the month! Here’s what they said (I think that link only works in the US):
Toxic will change the way you look at early-2000s female celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. In her exquisitely researched work of feminist critique, journalist Sarah Ditum investigates the ways these prominent women, and others, were wronged by voyeuristic gossip media. Ditum covers the reign of cruel gossip bloggers like Perez Hilton and high-profile stories like Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” along with edgier stories that only made cultural waves on snarkier sites like Gawker. With her wonderfully conversational writing style, Ditum holds a mirror up to the media world’s misogyny, examining how blogging, social media, and traditional news coverage all played a role in destroying the lives of several famous women. If you’re curious about pop culture or 21st-century feminism, don’t miss Toxic.
I would totally buy that book. Speaking of which: I’ve got some signed copies of the US edition available directly from me for the cover price (£22, half of which will be donated to the Centre for Women’s Justice) + P&P. If you’d like one, reply to this email and I will sort out the details. If you’ve already read it (and ideally loved it), please consider leaving an Amazon review — we are all the servants of the algorithm and reviews can really make a difference.
Finally! I’m on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row this Thursday (11 January, 7:15pm), talking about two very good and very different things: the new Hisham Matar novel My Friends (I say “new” like I’ve ever read a Hisham Matar novel before in my life, although I intend to read a lot more of him after this — the wonderful critic John Self, of course, was way ahead of me), and the Mean Girls musical (more on that below). Catch it live or on BBC Sounds.
Listened
Reneé Rapp feat. Megan Thee Stallion, “It’s Not My Fault”
I have a theory that 2024 is going to be the Year of Girl: following on from the triple triumph of Barbie and the Taylor and Beyoncé tours, girl culture is going to take over the world. Nicki Minaj has brought Pink Friday back, Pink Pantheress will be huge and Olivia Rodrigo’s tour will be visible from space.
And this is going to be 2024’s anthem. No shade on Rachel McAdams, but I think Reneé Rapp might be the canonical Regina George — and I love that this relentlessly catchy song is a straight-up celebration of the character, who per Chappell Roam in “Naked In Manhattan” is exactly the kind of girl who girls crush on (great choice to have Megan on reiterating her brag about being “the black Regina George”). Being hot and mean is bad! But also, you know, pretty fun!
Watched
Such Brave Girls (iPlayer)
Wholehearted recommend on this sitcom, which actually is a sitcom and not one of those sad dramas with occasional bits that make you do a light smirk in recognition of something that’s structured like a joke (yes Dreamland, I do mean you). It’s centred on two damaged sisters — suicidal Josie and narcissistic Billie (Kat Sadler and Lizzie Davidson, real-life sisters who also created the show and put their real-life catastrophes into the characters) — and their low-key monstrous mother (Louise Brealey).
It works because it’s got sympathy for the characters (you are on Josie and Kat’s side, if only because the people arrayed against them are so spectacularly terrible), but it also does not give the tiniest bit of a fuck about making them likable (I knew I was going to love it after Josie delivered an absolutely disgusting line about being “wet for trauma”). I don’t want to say “Peep Show for girls with mental health” because that sounds reductive, but also, it’s Peep Show for girls with mental health, and that is a brilliant idea.
Read
Anna Marks, “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do” (New York Times)
My first observation on this: that’s a lot of words for a fan theory that belongs properly in a Twitter thread or a TikTok. “Taylor Swift is a secret lesbian communicating in secret lesbian code” is one of those conspiracies that are fun to get into on WhatsApp, and pretty embarrassing once you hold them up to the light in the form of a 5,000-word essay, and even moreso when Taylor’s associates start briefing the press about how “invasive, untrue, and inappropriate” it is. (I wonder what Anna Marks thought was going to happen — Taylor would read it, declare it a fair cop and move to Hebden Bridge?)
There are actually two different, potentially good, essays in here: one about the stifling cultural conservatism of country music, and one about the obsessive nature of fandom and the urge to write your own story about the artists you love. But they are welded to a flimsy rune-reading about Taylor’s sexuality, which is the source of the outraged response (and also the interest).
A song released on lesbian visibility day? Bisexual flag coloured hair? Rainbow dresses? This is weak sauce. And if you’re going in on the Gaylor theory, why not mention “Welcome to New York” with its joyous declaration: “And you can want who you want/ Boys and boys and girls and girls”? (Because that song is on 1989 and Marks is wedded to the theory that Taylor’s furtive self-declaration begins after the break with Big Machine records, which happened five years later in 2019.) Anna Marks, you need to calm down and read up on Donovan v The Face.
Here’s the thing though: however dumb this is as a longread, the processes contained herein are absolutely part of the experience of being a fan, and there’s something faintly mealy mouthed about the defensiveness from Swifties. Let she who has not constructed an elaborate narrative about REDACTED being REDACTED cast the first stone.
Gimme, gimme more…
OM literal G Lil Nas X is back and I am very excited! (Can I make this fit into the Year of Girl thesis? I can sure try! Umm, Lil Nas X is the Madonna de nos jours? That will have to do!)
Could watch Richard Osman mildly confronting Frankie Boyle about his horrible material for hours. Oh, was your incest rape joke about a disabled child a good incest rape joke about a disabled child? Tell me more about “kindness”, please!
This review of Toxic by Glosswitch made me deeply happy — I don’t think any of the others have got the book as completely as this.
The most chilling bit of this thorough, and thoroughly deserved, piss on John Pilger’s grave by Oliver Kamm? The story about how Pilger got his job purely because an executive thought he’d be handy for the cricket team. Truly, the men have a lot to answer for.
Tom Scocca has a special place in my heart (well, my book) because of his 2013 essay “On Smarm”, which is one of the reasons I made that year the end of my Upskirt Decade. This essay on his recent professional and health struggles is impressively frank, but I’d be even more impressed if he’d considered whether his horrible time contributed to the remarkably horrible (in fact, smarmy) online personality he developed.
