Tox Report 74. Was I meant to send a telegram

Plus: In Dark Corners, Babygirl and bisexuals

Sorry for the delay on this Tox Report — I’m having building work done at the moment and it’s proving hard to write between the dust and rubble.

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A perennial irritant of this life is people demanding to know why “the mainstream media wasn’t talking about this” when, in fact, the “mainstream media” was “talking about” precisely that thing. Last week, for example, I wrote here about the sudden surge of concern from the right about Asian grooming gangs, and the accompanying belief that this subject must have been assiduously hidden by an institutionally liberal media — hidden in places like, for example, the front page of the Times:

A Times front page from 2011, leading on a report into grooming gangs by Andrew Norfolk.

Then this week, I got myself into an unedifying spat on Twitter with a woman who claimed that she was “still waiting” for a “high profile columnist” to address the rise in gender identity issues among young people. The fact that this was tweeted in a reply to Hadley Freeman, a high-profile columnist who has addressed this exact subject both in her journalism and in her superb book, Good Girls, obviously made it extra gaslighty. What, was someone supposed to send you a telegram?

And after that, New York Magazine published a feature outlining serious and harrowing allegations of sexual abuse against the author Neil Gaiman; cue lots of people being outraged that nothing was said sooner. But it was: last summer, the website Tortoise ran a six-part podcast series on Gaiman, with extensive access to the women who say he coerced and assaulted them.¹ (I mentioned it in Tox Report, so at least members of Tox Nation will have been ahead of the curve.)

The information was out there in all these cases. Apparently it just wasn’t very interesting to a lot of people who have subsequently become very interested indeed. I find this phenomenon absolutely fascinating, as well as almost unbearably annoying, because the belief that knowledge is being concealed by the “MSM” isn’t just an error, it’s an article of faith.

Pointing out to someone that these issues have in fact received mainstream media attention doesn’t make them revise their opinion. If anything, it inspires retrenchment. Oh, sure, maybe it was on that front page at that particular time, but was that the full story? Shouldn’t a scandal of this magnitude have been on even more front pages? Wasn’t the “real” work being done by the brave denizens of social media? (No matter that the information circulated on social media will largely have come from traditional channels in the first place.)

The “why was no one talking about this?” mentality serves two emotional needs. First, it lets the individual who espouses it off the hook for their own ignorance — they’re not ill-informed, they’re underserved by the corrupt MSM. Second, it offers the thrill of secret knowledge: you get to larp as Fox Mulder in The X-Files, diligently uncovering what “the man” has been trying to keep covered. It’s a lot more flattering to cast yourself as a highly engaged investigator than it is to concede that you’re a low-information news consumer who prefers scrolling TikTok to reading the paper.

Obviously the WWNOTAT tendency don’t follow the news, but they also don’t understand how the news gets made. Sexual abuse and medical scandals are difficult things to report: they require careful gathering of facts and sensitive reporting. The only reason these stories are known at all is because of the kind of old-school journalism that ever-fewer people turn to for information: the “mainstream media” is not the main way most people now learn about the world.²

Part of the allure is that there was a historical omertà around these subjects. The girls victimised by Asian grooming gangs really were dismissed as sluts by the police and social workers. Up until about five years ago, it was incredibly hard to cover trans issues. The allegations against Gaiman date back around twenty years, but not one of his accusers felt able to go on the record until very recently. (He used NDAs to ensure his alleged victims kept their stories to themselves.)

These are all stories that fall (or fell) outside identity politics in inconvenient ways. The working class, underclass and looked-after girls exploited in the grooming scandal are not natural objects of concern to the right-wing media; the left-wing media struggled with a story that risked casting Asian men en masse as predators. Gender self-ID harms women and gay people, but the liberal press that would usually be engaged on behalf of those groups was also largely committed to a maximalist version of trans rights. Gaiman was a vocal supporter of #MeToo and feminism generally: anyone accusing him of rape was puncturing a deeply beloved celebrity image.

It is hard for a story to get traction if it makes people feel uncomfortable, and all these stories made people very uncomfortable indeed — until some tipping point was reached, and a collective framework was settled on. And it turns out that the one thing people are always very comfortable with is the idea that they have special access to truths which the supposedly powerful have tried to stifle. That’s not a failure of the “MSM”. It’s just an eternal failure of human psychology.

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Listened

In Dark Corners Series 2 (BBC Sounds)

For the Times last week, I wrote about the parallels between historic campaign group Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), and the more recent hijacking of the gay rights cause by trans activism. That column was inspired by this podcast from journalist Alex Renton. Renton (who has previously investigated abuse in private schools) is a sensitive reporter who balances horror at the subject with care for the victims, and lets the archive material speak for itself. A lot of people responding to my column assumed that PIE was somehow “covered up”. The bleaker truth is that they were given a great deal of media attention in which to say exactly who they were and what they wanted.

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Watched

Babygirl (general release)

It’s sort of funny that Babygirl opens with a scene of Nicole Kidman’s character failing to have an orgasm, because its big problem as a movie is that it doesn’t know how to finish: it doesn’t actually want any of its characters to get hurt (again, sort of funny for a film about the self-revelatory power of risky sex), so it ends up fluffing the climax. But until that last act, this is an awful lot of fun. Kidman is probably the best and rawest she’s ever been as an exec throwing herself into a dangerous affair with an intern; I also loved the casting of Antonio Banderas as the husband who can’t get her off. You can see Babygirl as part of a mini-wave of movies that look at desire and the body from the female perspective: I wrote about it for the Sunday Times.

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Read

Sam Mills, Uneven: Nine Lives that Redefined Bisexuality (Atlantic Books)

This book (which I reviewed for the Times) suffers from a lack of argument: the nine lives in question may well have “redefined bisexuality”, but Sam Mills never pulls out a big conclusion about what that means, and I ended up suspecting that “people who have sex with other people of both sexes” might not be a very coherent group. There’s one very specific beef that I didn’t fit into the review: Mills refers to an interview in which Russell Harty quizzed David Bowie about his bisexuality, and calls Harty “fusty”. The implication is that Harty was an emissary from the straight world, confounded by Bowie’s gender bending. Well, maybe that’s the role Harty was playing for TV — but Harty was actually gay, and underwent gross intrusions from journalists as he was dying of hepatitis at the peak of AIDS panic. Bisexuals might suffer from woes like “erasure” and “suspicion”, but actual homophobia probably still has the edge when it comes to unpleasantness.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• “Jess Bell and Stefan Wake say the name means ‘light bringer’ and have urged people not to dwell on its devilish connotations. However, they were left feeling they had made the right choice, as Lucifer was born in delivery room 6 before mum and son were taken to bed 6 in room 6 at the hospital.” This story starts strong, but just you wait till you get to the middle name. (Northern Echo)

• “Did they suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is ‘gain of function’ research a byword for a bioweapons programme?” Peter Thiel going extremely tinfoil hat. But don’t worry, he promises to be “forgiving” to the agents of the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”, just as soon as he’s worked out who they are! (FT, free to read)

• “He spent one night lying naked under a vehicle in an underground car park beneath his flat. ‘I got bitten on my feet by rats. I think I must be the only person in showbiz who’s been tested for plague!’” Oh Tony Slattery, such a loveable tragedy. (Times, registration required)

• About 15 years ago, I gave a lukewarm review to a movie called Triangle in the now-defunct magazine DVD and Blu-ray Review. After rewatching, I became convinced that Triangle was in fact a minor horror classic and have devoted several thankless conversations since to trying to convince other people of this. Anyway, director Christopher Smith has now made a brilliant six-part series for the BBC called Video Nasty, about three Irish teenagers in search of a video nasty (in keeping with the theme of this newsletter: more forbidden knowledge!). It’s thrilling, it’s scary, it’s got great characters and it’s horror-literate without being deadeningly referential.³ All the cast are excellent, but I think Cal O'Driscoll (playing Con, below left) might be a massive star in the making. (iPlayer)

1. There’s an argument, I suppose, that Tortoise — a relatively new startup — isn’t strictly the “MSM”. But as it’s an organisation founded and run by the former director of BBC news along traditional lines of newsgathering, it’s not a very good argument.

2. I gave up on trying to find the tweet, but sometime before Christmas, Elon Musk shared a version of the below anti-MSM meme. Not one of the brands tagged here as the braindead enemy has the influence of, say, Joe Rogan; Vice, which is in the centre of the picture, went bust last year. The MSM as most people who use the term imagine it ceased to hold sway over knowledge some time ago.

3. I’ve only seen about three of the films on the list of video nasties, so bigger buffs than me can probably point out more nods to the source material. The main reference point is actually non-video nasty The Wicker Man, which is one of my absolute faves: of course it is, I was the May Queen at my school.