I had such a lovely holiday, thank you for asking! Me and my tiny bag made it back from Athens via London to Antwerp in about 11 hours, a pace of journey I would only recommend to my enemies. But I simply can’t tell you how wonderful it is to see as much of the world before it all explodes!
We’ve by now all seen that Tattle Life has been hit with an order to cough up £300,000 to an influencer couple after publishing defamatory comments, that it’s been demonetised by Google Ads and its owner has been outed, right? Sebastian Bond has literally fled the country, and some of the users of his site who made defamatory comments, well, they might be named, too!
It’s always been so transparent that this site is populated by posters who can’t bear normal people harnessing the freely accessible tools that social media has to offer. The influencers they go after, in the main, have not made their fortunes the traditional way. Plenty of them act normal, seem normal, just document various bits and bobs of their life that actually anyone can, if they put their mind to it.
“Well, I could have done THAT” is the sentiment underpinning it all, like it’s a Tracey Emin or something. But you didn’t, and it must hurt that much more that this isn’t just Hollywood stars or Russian models but normies using the same tech we all have, and some clearly enviable nous, to make their way in this new advertising age.
While I agree that some influencers are dangerously misleading about what’s been gifted, where they get their cash from, who they’re secretly partnering with, surely the way to achieve accountability is not to dox, harass and defame these people? Surely punching upwards would mean to have a pop at Big Tech for not having more restrictions in place? Perhaps this multibillion dollar industry needs to wang the Advertising Standards Agency a bit of money so it can take on various inquiries into influencers’ misdeeds, rather than leaving it to the public to suss it out? If Instagram had been more ethical about what was posted on its site, Tattle never would have existed, but of course Meta isn’t really incentivised to give a crap. Instead, Tattle became a pretty dangerous place for those its users abused. I hope it’s over now.
And by the way, Marina Hyde’s piece on Bond’s quest for anonymity is top-tier stuff!
I loved Brussels so much that I thought I’d try out its little sister. We went on a Monday-Wednesday when plenty of things are closed but enough was open to have fun. Some quick tips:
AVOID the area around the central station. The station itself is beautiful but outside, well, I can’t actually think of one place in the world where the area around the central station is anything other than scummy. Euston’s various Indian restaurants and Roti King almost make up for its grossness but honestly, the area around central station is trash, expect little!
SCOOT we got lime bike scooters everywhere, meaning our step count was tiny but our ability to traverse the city was unrivalled. We even scooted together which was scary and romantic at the same time!
BOOK your trip well in advance for a super cheap deal, Eurostar is getting easier (and did you know they’re going to expand it so soon we can do London-Berlin! Ok with one stopover but that’s fun, right?)
EAT mussels at Maritime, if you’re feeling flush. Best mussels of my life! Plump, juicy and orange, brimming with vegetables and that’s just me after the dinner. If you want something cheaper, there’s a place called Fries Atelier which does chips with sauces and UNLIMITED mayos - bernaise, plain, truffle and andalouse which is a bit spicy - and while I have yet to tell you in great detail the immense privilege it is to eat an O’Taco, it’s there!
DRINK Stella Artois because it is Belgian and therefore quite fancy
DRESS exactly how you do in London, the arts university and Dries Van Noten in town mean it’s actually quite trendy there; do cast behind you all memories of the bored Belgian students mooching around Covent Garden.
We’ve all seen the impassioned arguments for assisted dying, people struggling for years and years with degenerative, terminal illnesses, looking for a dignified way out. Most of the public support the Terminally Ill Adults (End Of Life) Bill, which has now gone through the Commons. This means, after some scrutiny from the Lords, it will likely pass. I do hope some of this thrashing out will be applied with a feminist lens.
On the one hand, 59% of unpaid carers are women, making up 3 million women across the country. One in five women aged 55-59 are doing it and the unpaid carers doing the longest hours of unpaid care are women aged 75-79. Caring for a terminally ill person is a specific kind of torment, I imagine only intensified if the person being cared for does just want to die. Although many altruistic, duty-bound carers may not count the hours of lost time spent soothing and tending to someone who would prefer to just not be there, these efforts are, in the main, an abject waste of the carer’s skills, passions, experience, freedom and life.
For me, the anti-argument stacks up higher, though. First, we have those whose illness already tells them to die. Women and girls are almost twice as likely as men and boys to have anorexia, a complicated condition that can see a sufferer declared terminal, but after careful, expert-led treatment, recover.
Myth has told us that anorexia is about conformity, about silly little girls copying what they see on catwalks and in adverts. Of course those images are not helpful, but anorexia depends on other factors; otherwise we’d all be possessed by this pernicious disease. Thomas Fuchs (yes, a man) describes anorexia in one paper as “pursuing the ideal of an asexual, angelic, even disappearing body”. Kelsey Osgood, titled her book, a memoir of her experience of anorexia “How to disappear completely”. Kate Leaver described her own teenage anorexia’s motivation as entwined with depression: “I wanted to shrink away from the world in the only way I knew how and by denying myself food. It was my best effort to vanish, one skipped meal at a time”.
The monster that possesses those with eating disorders is absurdly resourceful and will use every tool at its disposal to diminish the sufferers’ existence. The monster’s methods - I won’t share any here - are terrifying in their cunning, meticulous in their execution. So many sufferers are already being sent down a palliative care route. Why should the state also hand the monster a simple means to finish the job off, a big shiny red button to make it all go away? Not one recommendation offered by eating disorder charities has been taken on by the politicians shaping this bill.
Then we have those who might be nudged towards death. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has said that palliative care, so underfunded already, will only become more so when its resource is funnelled to assisted dying. “There isn’t a budget for this. Politics is about prioritising. It is a daily series of choices and trade-offs. I fear we’ve made the wrong one”. Of course this will affect men as well as women; if the choice is crap care or a quick death, what route would anyone take?
The feminist take on this element, though, is rooted in financial inequality. At present, the state steps in to provide basic care to those with less than £14,000 in savings. But in many cases, unwell people can use their properties are funding care. When my granddad moved to a comfortable, high quality nursing home, the fees could be covered by the sale of a flat that he’d bought decades previously (for barely any money, I’m sure). Plenty of people don’t have that luxury, but women are disproportionately less likely to have that luxury, with only 33% of mortgaged owner occupiers being women. And that’s right now. What of the next generation of non-home-owners? Faced with the decision of impossibly expensive care, poor care, or death, again, what route is best? You might say “their body, their choice”, but how strong are the choices on offer?
And then we have external forces seeking women’s annihilation, men who think that women are there to serve them and must be gotten rid of once they step out of line, or no longer provide what has been promised never by them but by sexist principles of what women are for. Right now, every three days a woman is killed in the UK by a man known to her. Some men will be crafty, too, with hidden homicides- please look at Louise Tickle’s journalism and criminologist Professor Jane Monckton Smith’s work on this - seeing young, healthy women found dead in their beds next to men who just shrug, say they’ve got no idea how it happened, and get let off the hook. There are also those women driven to suicide after being tormented, stalked, harassed by men obsessed with their demise. Men are more likely to be killed than women, yes, but women are more likely to be killed by those who have formed intimate, supposedly loving relationships with them. The same men who get to be down as next of kin. Did you know that one in eight women killed by men are over 70?
Do we want to give these men a go on the big shiny red button, too? Sorry, maybe a ‘big shiny red button’ is trite, but it’s certainly a kinder way of describing the actual process.
There are set to be independent panels to decide who gets to die. Who will populate these panels? Where do their biases lie? How are they kept in check? Women are 32% more likely to die when being operated on by a male surgeon than a female surgeon; if even these paradigms of facts-over-feelings no-nonsense clinical expertise are somehow enacting misogyny, what’s to stop a panel from doing the same?
Now look, there are plenty of right-wing anti-choicers who are gunning for assisted dying to never happen. Feminists in the Lords must take care not to fall in step with them. However, the arguments, to me, are too clear to be avoided. And if we’re to do this, we must do it right. I’m not opposed to assisted dying, just to any legislation that leaves vulnerable people, and especially vulnerable women, at a loss.
BEAT is the UK’s eating disorders charity
Happy birthday Lana Del Rey! May you forever say silly stuff in interviews and date questionable men but channel the divine through your music!
Bye!
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