Tox Report 48. Done with niceness

Charli XCX, 3 Body Problem, Vampire Castle

A sad week, because on Wednesday I went to say farewell to Bristol Ideas — the cultural partnership that my friend Andrew Kelly has run for over 30 years, offering events, screenings and publications in the city. Two things made Bristol Ideas stand out compared to other initiatives like it, and though many excellent people contributed to the project, you can really track those qualities to Andrew personally: a voracious interest in pretty much every imaginable topic, and a simple and principled commitment to free speech.

The latter meant that Andrew made several choices not necessarily compatible with an easy life over the difficult last few years in public discourse, but whatever battles he fought, he never fell into the vanity of casting himself as some kind of hero. He just did his job, and it’s been a pleasure to be a tiny part of that. I’m also glad to say that two successor strands — Festival of Economics and Festival of the Future City — are going to continue.

For the Times on Saturday, I wrote about the snobbery that means evangelical Christians (specifically Kate Forbes) are treated with more suspicion than other religious groups, and the importance for democracy of making room for unpopular opinions — even the ones I don’t share (generous of me, I know). (Sonia Sodha’s column in the Observer the next day, about the assisted dying debate, is a kind of accidental partner piece.) I also recorded an episode of The Story (the Times’ podcast) about my Baby Reindeer-adjacent encounter with a stalker. And finally: my Critic column about the grave disappointment of Beyoncé’s “Jolene” (and the completely amazing Loretta Lynn revenge song she could have sung instead) is now online.

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Listened

Charli XCX, “Von Dutch”

Two months after passing my test, I’ve discovered my driving personality, and it’s zipping around in my black Mini listening to this and bellowing: “I’M YOUR NUMBER ONE I’M YOUR NUMBER ONE YEAH I’M JUST LIVING THAT LIFE.” (What is that life I am just living? Usually going to the M&S foodhall to buy something for dinner. “IT’S OK TO JUST ADMIT THAT YOU’RE JEALOUS OF ME.”)¹ I love the swaggering aggro of this song — and the swaggering aggro of the video. It’s ugly, in a good way, as my friend Grace pointed out on Instagram.

In an interview with the Face, Charli XCX said something that strikes me as pretty astute:

“I kinda miss the time when pop music was really volatile and crazy. I miss the Paris Hilton days. Everybody is so worried about everything right now, how they’re perceived, if this art they’ve created is going to offend anyone.”

Charli’s career started right at the end the “long noughties” I write about in Toxic. Her breakout came in 2013: she’s of the generation who watched celebrity culture happening, and learned the rules of engagement before she became a participant. She’s been papped drunk a couple of times, but not often, and for someone who’s had massive chart success, she maintains an aloof, cult-y vibe. She’s clearly been very conscious of the potential for cancellation at various points. So I enjoyed her prediction that “we’re about to be done with niceness being currency”.

I know this newsletter has been the TTPD hate bulletin lately, but that album really does feel like the limit of civility as a pop music aesthetic, and even Taylor seems to know it — the mean girl persona that lashes out on “But Daddy I Love Him” and “thanK you aIMee” bristles uncomfortably against the sweetheart image she’s straining to preserve. Deep down, I suspect Taylor would love to be the kind of public figure who could date “problematic” Matty Healy without it turning into a reputation management issue that has forced her to schedule indefinite public hang time with the people he insulted.² (Charli, incidentally, is unapologetically engaged to Healy’s bandmate, 1975 drummer George Daniel, and seems very happy.)

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Watched

3 Body Problem (Netflix)

I was gently taken to task (hello Caroline) for calling this “mildly disappointing” so I should probably expand my thoughts and point out that “mildly disappointing” means “mostly not disappointing”. The good things about 3 Body Problem are: a constantly shapeshifting story that moves into high-concept sci-fi without becoming dustily cerebral; some excellent cast (Benedict Wong as a laconic detective is my favourite, but Rosalind Chao is also superb); and aliens that feel really very alien indeed.

The bad things are: some clunky concessions to TV storytelling that could maybe have been more graceful (John Bradley as non-book character Jack is basically there to do exposition and then get fridged, which I suppose at least gives a traditionally female job to a man); a few plot holes that take concerted effort to overlook (not to spoil, but I do think the aliens would have come up against the concept of “fiction” a bit sooner than suggested);³ and, most of all, Salazar.

Salazar. I have an overwhelming urge to say that name the way Jerry Seinfeld says “Newman”. I haven’t read the books, so I can’t make any comparisons to the way Auggie Salazar’s progenitor is written. Maybe the character in the book really is as weirdly passive as Salazar in the show, who is constantly doing things while protesting vehemently that she doesn’t want to do them.

This may be intended to supply drama (the obstacle to be overcome is her own resistance!) but as she never appears to be resisting very hard, it doesn’t work. It just means that the exceptionally hot Eiza González, who plays her, spends a lot of time pouting. I don’t want to wail on González, who really doesn’t get a lot to work with, but it is basically bullying to put her in the same screen as Wong and Chao.

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Read

Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (Open Democracy)

Mark Fisher

This extract from Hadley Freeman’s long essay in The Jewish Quarterly on the left’s response to 7 October deserves this slot to itself, but something happened to send me in a different direction. In her essay, Hadley criticises identity politics. “Aha!” said a man online (I paraphrase). “But in a 2016 column you said identity politics is not bad! How the turn tables.” This is silly gotcha-ing even if there was a substantive point, but it also shows a very specific forgetfulness about how “identity politics” as a concept and a critique has creeped and changed over the last decade or so. Specifically, it reminded me of this Mark Fisher essay from 2013.

Fisher, who killed himself in 2017, was a forcefully intellectual presence in the blogosphere. His style of left-wing criticism usually comes with unintelligible diagrams, but Fisher wrote in lucid English. When I heard he had published an essay taking on the wokescolds (not that wokescolds was a term in my vocabulary then — I think I broadly put the phenomenon of aggressive punishment for perceived wrongthink under the label “Rude Twitter”), I was excited. And then I read the essay, and was very, very disappointed.

“Exiting the Vampire Castle” is one of those slightly cursed works that hopes to arrest a coming trend, but actually just precisely identifies the major motif of the next decade, which is the compulsory niceness Charli XCX is currently bridling at:

“‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.”⁴

The main incident this describes for me is the #Girlsgate hounding of Caitlin Moran, which I can’t be bothered to recap in detail but that you can get a flavour of from this Guardian column and which basically consisted of people calling Caitlin Moran a racist because she did not think the TV show Girls was racist.⁵ But the incident Fisher chooses to focus on is the criticism of Russell Brand following his 2013 Newsnight interview:

“For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct — specifically his sexism. In the febrile McCarthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralising left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned.”

Knowing what we do about Brand, it does not reflect well on Fisher now that he found Brand’s performance to be “an inspiration”. Nor does his impassioned defence of Owen Jones (“the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years,” really), although the Jones of 2013 was only in the early stages of internet poisoning. Fisher could not have predicted the future. But his work would have been less vulnerable to events if he’d been capable of listening to women (or even, as some of us did, listening to Brand).

Sexism here is only a bad faith accusation mobilised against left-wing men — the attacks on, say, Caitlin and the sexism that informed them does not figure. The critique of identity politics amounts to this: women’s experience of misogyny is less important than the reputations of men. Which is, of course, precisely the critique of identity politics that has been operationalised against women in the left since forever. (Earlier in 2013, the SWP was revealed to have run its own kangaroo court to address a rape allegation.)⁶ The crude calculation of privilege under the guise of “identity politics” that Fisher attacked, and the moral license it was used to foster, is grim; but grim too is the tendency of men to defend other men by dismissing women’s voices as “identity politics”, while invisibly engaging in their own version of the same.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• I guarantee this is the best podcast you’ll listen to this week. It’s an extraordinary story about a proven medication that could help a lot of people to manage alcohol addiction — if only the US medical system wasn’t hopelessly invested in 12-step programmes as a cure (spoiler, they have a success rate in the single figures). If you listen to

  Blocked and Reported
  you’ll already know Katie Herzog very well, but you’ve never heard her sound as open and vulnerable as this. Did I cry? Of course I cried.

  Episode 1: The Sea Change

• Tom Chivers
  on whether you should trust a good yarn when it’s told by Johann Hari (no).

• While we’re doing factchecks, it is not remotely true that people “spend five hours a week taking selfies” (or if it is true, an ancient churnalism-bait stat to promote a beauty retailer is only going to have got it right by accident), but despite that there’s a good fundamental insight in this post about what social media might be doing to us: “Maybe that funny feeling we get from social media isn’t always anxiety. Maybe sometimes that feeling is shame.”

• “Not a racist” paleoconservative influencer Lauren Southern discovers that actual paleoconservative gender roles suck. I was very sorry to learn she’s been through what sounds like appalling abuse, but also weirdly impressed that she’d chosen to practise what she preached. You wouldn’t have caught Phyllis Schlafly actually submitting to her husband.

• Gia
  on not being dumb on the internet.

• The lab mice are running their own experiments? Uhhhh, guys…

1. I would rather go to Lidl but the parking at M&S is easier and I’m still not 100 percent on a reverse bay.

2. There’s a good odd couple comedy in this scenario: megastar has to make nice with less famous person she has inadvertently offended, forcing the two to spend protracted time pretending to get along for the cameras, each exerting power over the other (the megastar can withdraw her attentions, but the less famous can still get the megastar cancelled). Which I am not saying is what’s actually happening here.

3. Also, the action that is apparently motivated by their discovery of fiction surely started before the show dramatises their discovery of fiction? This is such a weird error that I keep thinking I must have got it wrong, but I don’t think I have.

4. Rather than dismantling what Freddie de Boer later called the planet of cops, of course, this just turned Fisher into its target.

5. #Girlsgate led to the implosion of a not very successful blogging collective I’d briefly been part of after the contributors disagreed on whether or not to denounce Caitlin as basically the Ku Klux Klan. It was, if nothing else, a good illustration of matriphagy in action within feminism: the status (and the traffic! but mostly the status) to be won from dragging an established woman writer over a trivially dumb tweet (which is what tweets were supposed to be!) was too delicious for some people to ignore.

6. This scandal led, indirectly, to my favourite ever intra-hard left beef: the great racist sex chair imbroglio.