Tox Report 72. PinkNews and the economics of the cause

Plus: Father John Misty, The Holdovers and Dorothy Parker

This is your last Tox Report until 2025, so I’m going to start by wishing you all a very happy Christmas and New Year. Sorry to be gross and sincere for a moment, but I feel really fortunate that Substack enables me to write to you about my weekly (ish) enthusiasms, most of which this year have been for Charli XCX. I feel even more fortunate that you choose to share them, or at least to be benignly interested, even when receiving the sixth Charli-themed Tox Report in a row. (Speaking of which, my Critic column this month is about how Charli defined the vibe of 2024.) Coming up: Father John Misty (or “FUCKING Father John Misty and his FUCKING beard”, as my husband consistently refers to him), The Holdovers (which I have watched belatedly, but also seasonally) and Dorothy Parker (I’ve been reading two biographies of her and reviewed one). But first, let’s talk about PinkNews:

Source: BBC News.

One week ago, PinkNews was the subject of a very depressing report from the BBC, alleging that staff had been subject to sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct from CEO (and founder) Ben Cohen and COO Anthony James. Cohen and James are married, which I think we can all agree is the sign of a very healthy corporate culture where no one would struggle to raise concerns about the behaviour of a senior member of the company.

Ben Cohen’s hinterland as a nineties/noughties web entrepreneur is not that different from that of, say, Milo Yiannopoulos: both acted with a “move fast, break things” ethos as they founded websites and grabbed at the potential riches of new technology, and both were very comfortable if the things they broke proved to be social norms or even the law (contract in in Yiannopoulos’s case, copyright in Cohen’s). Cohen’s early acceptability-skirting japes included a site called Hunt4porn and an attempt at URL squatting on the UK iTunes domain.

From those insalubrious beginnings, he ascended to become Channel 4 New’s technology correspondent, much as Yiannopoulos hustled his way into the Telegraph; both recognised the legitimacy a “mainstream media” post gave them, but both understood the power of an independent platform. Since then, Yiannopoulos has spiraled off to become an anti-woke warrior, and Cohen has strapped himself to the social justice dollar. But they were both responding to the same economic imperatives in a polarised online environment. The problem Cohen faces now is that he was doing this while presenting himself as virtuous.

Since launching in 2005, PinkNews has styled itself as the voice of the UK LGBT+ community. From about 2013 on, however, PinkNews has become better known as the premier home of British anti-feminist sentiment. I don’t mean to brag, but the site has written about me on ten separate occasions, and (spoiler!) none of those have been complimentary. And I am a mere minnow when it comes to hate targets: a domain search for JK Rowling returns 31 pages of results. Thirty one! Even allowing for a few false positives, that is a lot of articles about one woman.

You can track the rise of this strand of content pretty directly to the rise of social media and outrage-driven traffic: the earliest use of the word “transphobic” I found on the site was from 2009, and in an article titled “Katy Perry in trouble over ‘transphobic’ tweet”. It’s revealing, I think, that this is a story about a pile-on. It shows that social media had become a driver of scandal, and that canny outlets had begun looking to that scandal to push their own engagement. The ouroborus had sunk its teeth in.

In classic 2009 Twitter style, the tweet does not appear to have been transphobic by any reasonable definition (PinkNews).

The more this kind of material succeeded in driving angry clicks towards the site, the more integral it became to PinkNews. Yet the staffers who were producing it largely believed that they were engaged in a righteous political struggle, not clickbait. A significant motivation for the whistle blowers now breaking cover is a realisation that PinkNews did not, in fact, reflect their “values”. “I understand it’s a business, but it kind of became the sole focus,” complained one disillusioned ex-employee of the pressure to win traffic, which I regret to say has quite strong Withnail and I “I’ve joined a commercial entity by mistake” vibes. PinkNews was never intended to be an enclave of purity. Cohen had launched it to do two things: to make him money, and win him influence.

The second of these was fulfilled through the PinkNews Awards, where politicians (including Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Sadiq Khan, Keir Starmer and James Cleverly) lined up to have their progressive credentials burnished in exchange for making madcap policy commitments about self-ID. “I didn’t love some of the politicians they invited, I’m not going to lie,” said the same ex-employee. “I didn’t agree with a lot of the policies.” Which, again, does make me wonder what this person thinks lobbying entails. (You’re not supposed to agree with the politicians. You’re supposed to get them to agree with you.)

Still, I can’t bring myself to be too judgmental about this person’s delusions, because they were deliberately cultivated by PinkNews. Recruiting people who believe they are joining a cause rather than a company is a great way to keep wage demands down.¹ When Cohen told his staff in 2023 that “things that relate to trans and non-binary remain incredibly contentious” and “there is significant brand and partner nervousness around that topic”, he was signalling that the company and the cause were going their separate ways. For the staff who had never imagined there was any distance between the two, this was devastating. They thought they were writing hit pieces about feminists to make the world better! Hahahahaha no.

One reason Cohen may have decided to leave trans activism behind is the large amount the company ended paying out in legally fees because of some of the egregiously slanted output it produced. (A wholly invented story accusing Julie Bindel of “grooming” a young lesbian into a “gender critical cult” proved notably expensive and embarrassing.) Besides, the political centre of gravity was shifting back towards sensible on gender issues: if PinkNews continued to demand politicians endorse self-ID, the politicians were probably going to stop turning up to give speeches. His decision appears to have led many of his staff to reassess the treatment they had received at the company.

Because the other advantage of recruiting people to a cause rather than a company is that they will feel loyalty. Staff clearly disliked being propositioned by their bosses in the office and touched in a sexualised way; they were not happy about being asked to act as surrogates for their CEO and COO. (PinkNews’s bosses, who deny all this, reportedly did not struggle to tell which staff were male or female when deciding who to hustle into bed and who they wanted to impregnate. So much for trans inclusion, you might say if you felt like being cheap, which I do.) Nonetheless, until recently, they kept a lid on all these things out of devotion to the brand and everything the brand represented.

It’s true that I don’t owe the staff of PinkNews very much — the snide, hostile coverage they did of me put the imprimatur of journalism on some incredibly damaging false claims about me and my work. But no one deserves to be treated the way these people have been, both in terms of the appalling allegations about workplace harassment and in terms of having had their dearest principles exploited for someone else’s profit.

---

Listened

Father John Misty, “She Cleans Up”

I’m enjoying the new Father John Misty, Mahashmashana (it just took me three goes to spell that correctly), and I’m especially enjoying this, which is a jittery seventies-style rock song right down to the “shouting at the microphone from the other side of the room” vocals. Because the lyrics are slightly inaudible, by the time you’ve started to figure the song out beyond snippets, you feel like you’re already complicit — which is smart, because this is a song about complicity, a collage of #MeToo stories from multiple perspectives, some sympathetic and some very much um not.

“What is that one about the female alien/ Scarlett drives the Scottish countryside inside of a white van/ Oh I dreamt about it last night and it did my whole day in,” he sings: a narrator who may or may not have done some regrettable things in the past having a bad case of the horrors at the idea men being the vulnerable ones, per the movie Under the Skin (as covered in January, a Tox Report fave).

---

Watched

The Holdovers (limited release)

Alexander Payne, who wrote and directed this, has said “I just don’t see it as a Christmas movie. It’s a movie that could take place only at Christmas,” which does sound a bit like a distinction without a difference. But it makes sense. A lot of “Christmas movies” set out very cynically to be “Christmas movies”: familial, redemptive, cosy. There’s a point at which these films might as well just be that footage of an open fire flickering away in the corner of the room. What Payne’s quote means is: he used Christmas to create a scenario that forced his characters into relationships of familiarity, redemption and (yes) cosiness.

A bereaved mother, a dejected teacher and an unloved rich kid are pressganged into an ad-hoc unit over the Christmas period at a New England boarding school. What occurs between them is, unexaggeratedly, miraculous. They become loving. They become brave. But not, you know, sentimental, which this film could easily have been with less subtlety. It could also have ended up being a pastiche: from the studio idents on, this is a meticulous recreation of a seventies movie. The most seventies thing about it, though, is its faith in story and acting to reach an audience. I think I might watch this non-Christmas movie every Christmas from now on.

Do you enjoy intense close readings of pop culture? Then you will love my book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, which tells the stories of nine women who navigated celebrity in the 2000s: Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, Jen.

Read

Gail Crowther, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood

I suspect that “discovering Dorothy Parker” is a rite of passage for a lot of women who end up with my career (I once auditioned for a school play with her suicide poem “Resumé”, and thought I don’t now remember the part I won, I do remember the thrilling badness of declaimed a litany of self-destruction in the classroom). This new biography, which I reviewed for the Times, leans heavily on the (great) 1987 life by Marion Meade, What Fresh Hell is This?: what Gail Crowther sacrifices in completeness, she looks to compensate for in focus by zeroing in on Parker’s Hollywood years.

I don’t think it’s Meade’s comprehensiveness that makes her the better biographer, though: I think it’s her comfort with Parker’s badness. Parker lived an extraordinary life, but also — like many alcoholics — a failed, soiled life marred with bad judgement and irrevocable regrets steeped in self-pity. Crowther’s weakness is a desire to turn Parker into one of the good guys by contemporary standards: proto-BLM, a member of “the resistance” avant la lettre. It makes her much less interesting, in the end, than the mess she truly was.

---

Gimme, gimme more…

• For the Times: the feminist trying for a thousand man gangbang.

• For UnHerd: can we talk about Ariana being too thin but not be weird about it? Probably not but it would be good if we could!

• I’ve been thinking about this chunky profile of Tucker Carlson (the Dispatch) since I read it a few months ago. The ability of intelligent people to intellectually deform themselves for praise or money is an endless source of fascination and horror.

• That’s it for this year! Signing out with a song that is in a good shout of belatedly muscling into my faves of 2024, and I’ll see you in 2025. Have a good one, all of you!

1. This isn’t PinkNews specific: you’ll find a similar thing throughout journalism, and wherever ideals meet profit motive.