Tox Report 58. The future is written in trash

Letby, hardcore, Jade

It’s paperback week for Toxic! The Sunday Times made it a paperback of the week, and called it… well, you can read the nice things Jane Mulkerrins said below. You can order now from Amazon using the buttons, or from your bookshop of choice; and if you’ve already read Toxic, I would be incredibly grateful if you could take the time to leave a review. They really do help other people to discover the books you love — so you’d be doing a favour not just to me, but to future readers who might enjoy Toxic as much as you have!

When I wrote Toxic, I wanted to do more than just excavate the horrible past: I wanted to explain how it helped to create our baffling present, and this week I had a real vindication of my approach. It looked like this:

That’s is WWE wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the Republican National Convention. If you’ve read Toxic, you’ll be very familiar with Trump’s long involvement in wrestling, and with the story of how Hogan brought down the Gawker Media’s gossip kingdom — with secret funding from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, who had long nursed a grudge against the Gawker sites after one of them outed him.

When Gawker published a sex tape featuring Hogan (and made without his consent or knowledge), Thiel saw the chance to destroy his old enemy: the exemplary damages eventually awarded against Gawker were the end, not only for the blogs that had epitomised the snarky outsider tone of the internet, but also for the celebrity sex tape industrial complex.

It signaled a decisive shift in power, too. From the journalistic tastemakers, to the wealthy techbros who ran and profited from the internet’s infrastructure. From the New York liberals of Gawker, to the Florida men and women of the jury who knew that Gawker held them in contempt. From the provocation of the blogs, to the crassness of wrestling.

From Donald Trump playing a version of himself in WWE, to Donald Trump being president — thanks to a campaign that was heavily bankrolled, again, by Peter Thiel. In the trash of sex tapes and sports entertainment in the noughties, America’s future (and hence, the world’s) was being written. And that, essentially, is what Toxic is about.

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Listened

The Trial of Lucy Letby (via the Mail)

I wrote about the doubts over the Lucy Letby verdict for UnHerd this week, which led to a lot of people who are very certain that Letby is innocent telling me I was being hoodwinked because I didn’t come down hard for team miscarriage. My main feeling about this case is that anyone claiming to be sure is probably out of their depth — I’m still surprised that Letby’s defence didn’t do more to attack the forensics and the statistics, but there’s also testimony from some of the parents which is extremely difficult to reconcile with the image of Letby as a devoted nurse turned scapegoat. The possibility that’s hardest to think about, of course, is that she might have both had an unfair trial, and harmed babies.

The line between “care” and “callousness” is not very thick in healthcare: I think a lot about the surgeon who removed my appendix, and then on a ward round proudly displayed his stitches in my belly to his students, barely acknowledging me as he did so.¹ This podcast is simply very good court reporting, straight and unsensationalised. If you’re struggling to understand how Letby was convicted, it’s worth listening to — there are still reasonable questions about the evidence, but this makes it very clear how the jury could reach the conclusions they did.

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Watched

Hardcore (limited release)

It’s a Paul Schrader movie about a man trying to save a girl from the sex industry! But it’s not Taxi Driver! Structurally and thematically, this is so close to the earlier work that it’s hard to understand why Schrader made it — but where Taxi Driver draws on Schrader’s Calvinist background, Hardcore is about it. The best scenes, I thought, were the early ones of life in the conservative midwest, which have the richness of a secret world being opened up to the viewer. The porn industry sections, which are Hardcore’s real attraction, feel much less revelatory, although they still have their moments of sharp observation. (I enjoyed the porn director in the UCLA shirt getting stressy about the lighting.)

There are two problems with Hardcore. The first is that there are no female characters. There are female actors, yes, but none of the parts they play amount to what you’d call a character. Why does Kristen run away? There’s little sign of her being dissatisfied at the start, so her decision seems to stem from nothing but the needs of the plot. Why does she come back at the end? Also impossible to say: she simply accedes to her father, Jake (George C. Scott) at the end.

The other is that the Jake, though brilliantly played, has if anything too solid of a character: he doesn’t change, except inasmuch as he becomes even more determined to get Kristen back. He is neither corrupted nor tempted by the porn underworld he must journey through, though the film is clearly fascinated by the sex and the filth. To be fair to Schrader, he later acknowledged this was one of the film’s faults — it’s driven by an impulse towards the sordid that comes from him, not the character.

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Read

Eve Smith, How Was It For You? (Picador)

Sign of Elon’s Twitter: the wokescolds who would once have accused me of wanting sex workers dead for writing this review have all hopped it to Bluesky. Instead, I got a few men wondering whether it wasn’t really the punters who were being exploited in the sex industry, and the inevitable *P*U*S*S*Y*I*N*B*I*O* bots. This is an exceptionally unhappy memoir, in which the pseudonymous author’s experiences (grifting pimps, drug abuse, trafficking, a client nicknamed “rapist”) insistently contradict the pro-decriminalisation case she’s trying to make.

Though I’m personally sympathetic to the “end demand” model (criminalise clients and pimps but not the women who sell sex), I’m not heedless to its problems (not least who you get to police it, given everything we know about the actual police). But at least its advocates are honest about the problems they’re trying to address. For someone like Smith, I suspect the vitriol towards feminists (who she describes as sexless prudes in M&S cardis) is really about one thing: it’s easier to be angry at women than at the men who might actually kill you.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• Some of you might remember that, back in 2015, I wrote about the abuse of suicide as a campaign strategy by trans activists, and how dangerous that could be for vulnerable people. (Yes, of course I was accused of wanting trans people to kill themselves for a piece arguing exactly the opposite.) For that reason, I was very pleased that the government advisor on suicide prevention published a sober assessment of some wild and reckless claims lately made about the suspension of puberty blockers causing a spike in suicides; relieved, too, that the review found these claims were false. It would be very welcome if that people who claim to care about trans youth could now follow the review’s advice.

• For the Times: why tradwives are the perfect freakshow in a hostile environment to women with children.

• Speaking of court reporting re. Lucy Letby: a brilliant feature about the men keeping the last embers of the art flickering. When I was a local paper workie, sitting in on the magistrate’s court was a regular duty for the journalists. That’s been depleted along with the papers, and it’s strange how much of our civic life was hanging on the small ads section.

• Charli has spoken: kamala IS brat, and I am into it (I reserve the right to be embarrassed about this later).

• My friend Becca promised that after watching this three times it would make sense and I would be obsessed. I’ve watched it twice and still feel like I’m having a stroke while looking at a Lady Gaga poster, but there’s still time for Becca to be proven right:

1. There wasn’t even anything wrong with my appendix! So while he was praising his own surgical work, I was still deeply sick with an infection, and recovering from an operation, with no idea whether I would ever get better. And he used non-dissolving sutures rather than the dissolving ones he claimed to have done, so after the wound had knitted, I had to pull them out myself in the bath. Thanks, man. Great job.