America’s New Female Right - BBC

[ScoldsBridal]

Anyone watch this? It was a few nights ago, very late. It’s on I-player. I watched and was equally appalled, disturbed and angry. I won’t go into detail describing it but would like to discuss with anyone else who may have seen it. Young woman from Liverpool presenting it was new to me. I noticed Louis Theroux was a consultant or advisor. Veered from young women making comments about it being a bad idea for women to have got the vote, to the presenter being horrified at a t-shirt being sold at a Far Right religious conference that said ‘Woman is not a Costume’. Guardian review below by Lucy Mangan that was surprisingly quite critical.

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/sep/02/americas-new-female-right-review-this-lazy-bbc-documentary-fails-to-tackle-dangerously-extreme-views

“I am going to go out on a limb and say that most Guardian readers who watch a BBC documentary called America’s New Female Right are unlikely to be in accord with the views espoused therein.”

“Third is Hannah Faulkner, 17, who came to her particular brand of fame three years ago when she organised a Teens Against Genital Mutilation rally in her native Nashville, Tennessee, supporting a ban on medical intervention for young transgender people.“

“If you are going to interview people such as McMichael, Hutcherson and Faulkner, you need a presenter who is capable and unafraid of going toe to toe with them. These are people with sincerely held beliefs. You need someone with the intellectual and temperamental firepower to challenge them – someone who is not afraid to, in British terms at least, be “rude” to their subjects and see if they can really defend assertions that are otherwise allowed to stand as truth.”

Mangan doesn’t mention any other campaigning by Faulkner.

So this article means that Lucy Mangan thinks that most Guardian readers would object to campaigns against the genital mutilation of teenagers and that teenagers campaigning against genital mutilation of teenagers should be subjected to robust challenge on behalf of Guardian readers?

@LoobiJee

So this article means that Lucy Mangan thinks that most Guardian readers would object to campaigns against the genital mutilation of teenagers and that teenagers campaigning against genital mutilation of teenagers should be subjected to robust challenge on behalf of Guardian readers?

I think that's very unlikely. Unless Mangan has changed her views in the last few years, she is very much on the gender critical/sex realist side of the argument. I think she was making a wider point about the interviewer failing to challenge any of the interviewees (who, she points out, aren't necessarily wrong about everything).

She does seem to be saying that Guardian readers do support teenagers having their genitals mutilated. I suspect she would claim she supports no such thing, that she supports transgender teenagers. How she thinks these kids transition from their own sex to, well, their own sex with an approximation of the opposite sex's genitals finangled onto their bodies, I don't know. She wouldn't use 'mutilated'. She'd say 'gender affirming care' or some other synonym that helps her sleep at night but it amounts to the same thing.

Edited to add

Just seen pp. If LM is GC well good for her and i apologise but she made her point rather poorly imo.

I went looking for evidence of Mangan's earlier terfiness, and it turns out I'm wrong: I'm so ashamed.

Posting a link to her earlier piece, just because it's that rare thing, a trans piece in the Guardian with comments enabled:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/09/lucy-mangan-terf-war

We saw women who were racists. Women who thought a Cartel was out to bring down America by allowing an invasion of murderers and rapists across its borders. Women who deemed themselves to be subordinate to the men in their lives, Women who thought it was wrong to have ambitions beyond being good wives and mothers and that Feminism was to blame for the collapse of society. And women who thought anything other than heterosexual relationships were an abhorrence. And into this mix there was the issue of ‘gender identity’ - so the t-shirt that said ‘woman is not a costume’ was brandished as yet another example of bigotry and intolerance.

And I just thought to myself - is this the only way the BBC are prepared to cover this issue? By dismissing it as just another right-wing trope?

This could have been a 3-part series. There should have been more probing and analysis and challenge. It was lazy and messy and infuriating. I liked the young woman ‘investigating’ the issue but there wasn’t enough investigation. She got fantastic access but I think the programme floundered. What was its point??

“And I just thought to myself - is this the only way the BBC are prepared to cover this issue? By dismissing it as just another right-wing trope?“

In a word: yes.

I find shows like this really annoying.

There are some crazy weirdos.

But there are also some interesting movements toward more right wing positions by some groups in the US. Young black men, for one. And increasingly I'm seeing this with some women too. Gay men and lesbians, immigrants, especially African, lots of Hispanic Americans.

Some of these people are more what you'd think of as socially conservative, others more center right, and of course there are a variety of viewpoints on many issues. But it is absolutely a thing.

It's really interesting, and could be worth looking at in more depth. But of course the BBC, Guardian, etc would much rather focus on people who are actual nut-jobs.

I also think, that while it can work for a person doing this sort of documentary to take a hard hitting approach, it also doesn't work if the person is unwilling to be really honest about listening and understanding their POV. You have to be able to really see things from others' POV and be willing to be self-critical, especially about your own assumptions.

No need to be ashamed, theilltempered!

It’s hard to believe that Guardian writers have been dismissing feminists on this topic for ten years.

Mangan didn’t exactly cover herself in glory: dismissing everyone but herself as a bunch of girls.

Ed Balls did a program about groups in the US a few years back, tempest. I found it interesting although I can’t remember much about it,

Oh, I'll have a look for that, thanks.

There is a film produced by Larry ELder about black conservatives, and particularly Trump supporters - in the US, called Uncle Tom. It's very partisan - kind of a mirror image of Roger Moore film, but I found it extremely interesting in terms of being a window into a group that a lot of left media doesn't want to even acknowledge exists. I didn't make any attempt to challenge them (and why should it really?) but it gave, I think, a really fair look at their views from their own perspective. And it really mirrors a lot of what I am hearing from the black community here, and also indigenous Canadians (and I think this may be more so among indigenous Americans) - at least, the working class people from both of those groups. It made it pretty clear to me that the class/educational divide is probably way more important politically in the US than race, and that's coming more to fruition across demographic groups.

Was the Ed Balls show Trump's America?

I think it's been obvious for a while that American voters are becoming less polarised by race and more by education/class. That's not really been explored very much. Steve Bannon has been pushing for it for a long time, but if you can't take Bannon, there are sane lefties like Ruy Teixeira who are making similar points.

The polls this year are consistently showing Trump around 20% of the black vote, which is unheard of for a Republican in the post-civil rights era. I don't think black voters over 50 are moving - it's specifically young black men, who hate the Democrats, don't much like the GOP, and seem to like Trump's disruptive potential.

There's a meme going around TikTok of young black men talking about Trump, saying the guy lives in a golden tower, he shags porn stars, he's in and out of court all day, he's got a mug shot, he's now actually taken a bullet - let's face it, he's a gangsta rapper.

That's the kind of thing that's interesting and worth trying to understand. Unfortunately most Democrats are not only crazy on a range of issues, they've also got that centre left thing that we see with UK Labour - our voters are out of touch, but we can shame them back into line.

If anything I think the Louis Theroux approach of finding some extremist outliers and holding them up to be laughed at is even less productive.

I'll have to look that program up; thank you. I'm interested to see if they mention influential broadcasters such as Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens. (Also interesting to note, Megyn is frequently retweeted by Posie Parker - even just a few hours ago.)

Megyn Kelly sent out a tweet 2 days ago saying "My God she is so dishonest," referring to a tweet of Kamala Harris'. Harris was pointing out that JD Vance had said that school shootings are "a fact of life". He had said these words, exactly. I'm mentioning this to highlight Kelly's brand of politics and dishonesty, and wondering why Posie Parker is aligning herself with her.

The original UK version on BBC was called Travels in Trumpland, tempest

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bdpvh5/episodes/guide

but they changed the name for the North American / overseas market.

https://www.bbcselect.com/watch/ed-balls-trumps-america/

If you watch Vance's comment about guns he says that he doesn't like that school shootings are a fact of life in America. He goes on to say that in his view one solution is greater security for schools. Kamala HQ in Twitter reframed that as Vance saying that "school shootings are just “a fact of life”". Megyn Kelly's point that such a reframing is not honest.

That's just what he said though.

That was quick.

I watched it. I felt so sorry for the teenage girl featured.

That's just what he said though.

Seems a bit odd to object to someone saying something you've said yourself.

That 2014 piece by Mangan really is a terribly written piece of crap, isn't it? And the comments are 'interesting'. Do Guardian 'staff' routinely join in discussions these days? That's something I'd never noticed before.

I saw Goody Proctor retweeting Megyn Kelly...

So much of this is a gentry left problem, isn't it? If you belong to certain classes - female, working class, LGB, ethnic minority, disabled - they think they own you. They think they're entitled to your support no matter what they do that's against your interests, no matter how much open contempt they have for you. That's where the shaming tactics come in.

But eventually the tactics stop working.

There was a Radio 4 series along the same lines in the last couple of years. I seem to remember it featuring a group of moms against drag queens type thing. Again no real analysis of the situation, just lazy journalism and seeing them as bigots.

It’s about time we had a documentary on why Labour and the Democrats turn away so many people, yet claim to be about inclusion. Or looking at the intolerance of the Green Party. Or groupthink in the arts. With some actual analysis and questioning of views.

But that's not how quotes work. If I say "I don't believe Trump is the best candidate for President " and you quote me as saying "Trump is the best candidate for President " you have quoted my words but misrepresented what I said.

I'm pretty sure I've seen some strong hints of Terfiness from Mangan in the past couple of years. 2014 was a very long time ago and things have changed since then.

What the Harris campaign is doing in this situation is what Hollywood studios do when a critic says "this film is an amazing piece of crap" and the poster quotes the critic saying "amazing".

It's dishonest, but PR gonna PR.