Tox Report 69. The woke wars have left primetime

God that's a relief, isn't it?

Dr Purnam Krishan and Gorka Marquez in Strictly

Greetings Tox Nation!

Back in September, the Economist reported that Peak Woke has passed — and, being the Economist, this was not the kind of vibes-y take you might find elsewhere (hello), but a quantitative analysis. How many times were specific “woke” terms (like “white privilege” or “intersectionality”) used in print or on TV? How often were academics disciplined or censored for expressing non-woke views? What did polling say about the public’s views on racism, sexism and trans issues?

In every case, the pattern was the same: a rise from 2015 (when Trump declared his presidency) to 2021-2, and then a falling off. The analysis looked specifically at America, but it mirrors my impression of the UK situation.

And though you could criticise it for being a blunt implement — it can’t differentiate between positive and negative usages, so the term “white supremacy” counts the same whether it’s used by the Race 2 Dinner women or Coleman Hughes — I think that actually makes it more useful. What it captures isn’t just the degree to which wokeness was embraced, but the degree to which it was salient. Woke was something worth fighting about.

I remembered the Economist article while I was watching Strictly this weekend (and before we get into this, I should say here that I’m not using “woke” here to reflect my own value judgements, only that this is broadly how these things would be coded.) Saturday’s episode featured, in no particular order:

• a spectacular Bollywood-inspired dance after which celebrity Dr Purnam Krishan tearfully used the phrase “you can’t be it if you can’t see it” (woke!)

• Craig Revel Horwood dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow as played by Johnny Depp (not woke!)

• two drag queens from Drag Race UK delivering the terms and conditions for the phone vote (woke!)

• a Viennese waltz to the Harry Potter Theme followed by professional dancer Vito Coppola actually crying about how much he loves the movies (not woke!)

• and, most significantly of all, the feeling that I might be the only person in the audience keeping count

A reminder that my book Toxic is now available in paperback! It’s the story of how the internet drove everyone crazy in the noughties, told through the lives of nine celebrity women and the battle to control their own images. Helen Lewis called it “a Molotov cocktail hurled at the feet of celebrity culture”, and Paris Hilton liked it so much she bought the TV rights. Click the button below to buy from Amazon, or head to your bookseller of choice.

And if you’ve read and enjoyed Toxic, please use those links to leave a review! It really does make a difference, and I appreciate everyone who’s done this already.

Now, I’m sure that if I decided to trawl Twitter/X, I could find some — even several — people complaining about PC gone mad in the ballroom or how terrible it is that ACTUAL FASCIST JK Rowling has been normalised through the inclusion of her intellectual property here. Whatever. I don’t think those people matter very much, and more pertinently, it seems that the programme makers don’t think they matter much either.

Twitter itself doesn’t matter. You can pin peak woke on a lot of things, including the return of normal life after the febrile boredom of covid lockdowns, and a realisation on the part of the part of institutions that they had options besides simply being rolled over; but I suspect the most important factor is that Elon Musk broke microblogging, and the age of the pile-on is over.

For many years, shows seemed to adopt a defensive crouch ahead of anticipated social media backlash. You don’t get so much of that now. The woke wars have left primetime, and this is exactly as it should be. I can’t tell you how relieved I am about this.

The politicisation of every single thing has helped to make the last almost-decade one of the most exhausting times to be a consumer of media, as every aesthetic experience had to be put through the great ideological grinder, and a lot of it has arrived pre-ground, heavily seasoned with political priors. (And yes, I do appreciate the irony of me saying this as someone who has written quite a lot about the great awokening, and written for a lot of the outlets that have emerged in response to it.)

Both woke and anti-woke culture have tended to result in joyless and doctrinaire productions — David Chappelle’s Netflix specials are on the whole funnier than Stewart Lee’s Snowflake/Tornado show from 2022, but you couldn’t honestly say that either of them were working at full stretch, and to me, both their sets from this time have already aged fairly dismally.¹ As the context of the woke era disappears, there’s nothing to anchor the responses to it from either side.

Now imagine that you are someone who has, in fact, invested a lot of personal capital in the concept of wokeness — either pro or anti. For those who wore their involvement relatively lightly, the last 12 to 18 months has been a time to shrug their attachments off. For those who were a little more, um, involved, it’s been a time of getting weirder.² The rest of us, though, get to enjoy the dancing again for a bit.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• “Historical ignorance is not moral clarity. It’s narcissism, laziness and stupidity. And, as the war continues, the ignorance mushrooms, perhaps to simplify a conflict that is so complex.” Hadley Freeman, one year on from October 7. (The Sunday Times, registration/paywall.)

• “At Berlin Fashion Week in June one label, Namilia, even showed a model in a vest with the slogan ‘I ♡ Ozempic’.” Fashion editor Anna Murphy on the unwelcome revival of sick-skinny on the catwalk. (The Times, registration/paywall.)

• (Btw, I had a look at Namilia’s clothes and they’re all indescribably horrible.)

• “Slop” is such an evocative term for the AI influx turning the internet into a useless tide of something that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike information. (New York Magazine, paywall.)

• “He certainly saw the production as a nut to crack, just as an athlete is looking to under 10 seconds for 100m. His approach was scientific and it was like an elite sportsman.” I loved this profile of Leonard Rossiter, who had a career path — working class, late bloomer, discovered his vocation via am-dram — that simply doesn’t exist anymore. After reading this, Kubrick’s passion for him no longer struck me as charmingly incongruous but as right and inevitable: two exacting craftsmen (and, let’s be honest, occasional bastards) seeking perfection together. (The Guardian, free.)

• To mark what should have been Kirsty MacColl’s 65th birthday, BBC2 ran a concert film and a fantastic Kirsty at the BBC compilation. Here she is on French and Saunders doing what might be my favourite song of hers:

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1. I actually saw Lee do this on tour, and thought it had aged quite badly while he was doing it live.

2. One of the disturbing forms of that weirdness: people pitching themselves very, very hard into being antisemitic.