Losing My Perspicacity September 27, 2024

Nancy Armour urges Caitlin Clark to tell her toxic “fans” to stand down; Laura Bassett points out Elon Musk’s glaring hypocrisy; Abortion laws are killing women in Texas; and What the hell do the Browns do now?

Author

Julie DiCaro
September 27, 2024

Good morning and Happy Free Friday! I’m heading out of town for the weekend and straight into the “outer bands” of Hurricane Helene in Southern Indiana, so please thoughts and prayers for my feet to stay dry are much appreciated. In all seriousness, I hope you and your loved ones are safe and out of harm’s way. I knew a few people who are riding out Helene in Florida, so I’m thinking of everyone in the path and crossing my fingers for everyone’s well-being and property. The latest reports about the storm surge are somewhat frightening. Please stay safe!

Yesterday, I had my first “bad day” on Threads, which I recently have been touting as so much better than every other social media platform. I realize this is a “me” problem, that I probably share too many opinions that anger people and that my thin skin, despite years of online abuse, has never quite thickened enough to make social media tolerable. I’m not sure what I did to the algorithm over there, but lately, my timeline has been filled with outright misogyny. You know, by the kind of guys who call women “females” and think Andrew Tate/Jordan Peterson make some good points.

Yesterday, one guy took issue with my take on Sports Illustrated’s terrible Deshaun Watson headline, lecturing me I had to separate the “athlete” from the “person” (I do not), and another guy told me my take was the reason women should stay out of sports and “stick to reality tv.” That was pretty much the last straw, and I jumped into it with both of them in a way I haven’t for some time. Am I proud of myself? Not particularly. I’m not going to change anyone’s mind— I’ve been at this long enough to know that. But it still really bothers me when that kind of sexism goes unchecked, and I’m seeing it more and more on Threads, which is really disappointing. I don’t like the person I turn into sometimes on social media, and I don’t like the way a single bad interaction can ruin my entire day.

It’s doubly disappointing because when I first got to Threads, it seemed like a lovely little bubble of women supporting each other. Meanwhile, Threads is also disabling accounts of creatives who are also POC for standing up for themselves against racism and sexism. I don’t know who had the idea for AI moderation, but we have more than enough evidence that it’s a complete and total failure. Have I told you about the time I got suspended on Twitter for using the “I’m going to punch you in the ovary” Anchorman line that they had in their own GIF library?

At any rate, I’m suffering from impostor syndrome in a big way today (online assholes always have a way of hitting the thing about yourself you like least), so rather than giving you all my opinions on the state of the world, I thought I’d share some of my favorite pieces from other writers this week. What I lack in confidence for myself I have in spades for the people whose work I’m about to share.

By the way, Losing My Perspicacity is a reader-supported newsletter. If you’d like to get it in your inbox five days a week, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. As I said yesterday (when I was freshly enraged by Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno), if you donate a few bucks to Sherrod Brown’s campaign and send me the proof, I’ll send you a free month’s subscription to LMP.

So today: Nancy Armour urges Caitlin Clark to tell her toxic “fans” to stand down; Laura Bassett points out Elon Musk’s glaring hypocrisy; Abortion laws are killing women in Texas; and What the hell do the Browns do now?

Here we go.

Say something, Caitlin

We’ll start off with the always-fantastic Nancy Armour, who Caitlin Clark to address the hate her “fans” are spewing at Black women in the WNBA.

Of all the things Caitlin Clark has been asked to do the last two-plus years, this is the most important:

She needs to publicly call out the racist and homophobic trash purporting to be her fans and tell them, in no uncertain terms, that she neither approves of nor condones their bigotry. They need to make a choice, right now, and it’s her or their gleeful hate.

Yes, Clark disavowed the toxic discourse in June, calling it "disappointing" and saying, "People should not be using my name to push those agendas." But that was in response to a question, not a statement of her own initiative. And it's gotten much, much worse since then.

I’m sure Clark is getting advice from her people to “just ignore it” and not risk alienating any of her fans, who are all potential buyers of her gear and anything else with her name on it. BUT.

Clark did not ask for this, any of it. She just wants to play basketball. But so do the other 143 women of the WNBA and, right now, some of Clark’s fans are making that impossible.

Like the one who sent DiJonai Carrington a message Tuesday with racial and misogynistic slurs in the subject line and a wish that she would be raped and murdered. Like the woman at Wednesday night’s game who mocked the (almost exclusively) Black players with stiletto nails by wearing Edward Scissorhands-like fake tips and a T-shirt with the words “Ban nails.” Like the people who’ve sent fake nudes of Angel Reese to her relatives.

It was clear on Wednesday night, when Clark and the Fever were bounced from the postseason by the Connecticut Suns, that a certain segment of fans saw this, somehow, as an injustice, rather than the natural progression of a team that nothing much was expected of at the start of the season. If anything, the Fever overacheived this season.

Not so the “fans” who use rooting for Clark as cover for their bigotry and biases, hurling slurs at Black players and perpetuating the ugly stereotypes of Black athletes. They see their abuse as justified because Clark needs to be protected and cherished and elevated, privileges that society has long demanded for white women at the expense of Black people.

“It matters to certain people that Clark is in this Black woman-dominated sport and has been doing so well,” said Moya Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University who coined the term “misogynoir” to describe the unique prejudice directed at Black women.

It’s pretty clear, if you’ve spent any time on X, that a lot of Clark’s “fans” have never watched the WNBA before, and are only watching to see their Great White Hope stick to it to the rest of the league. That’s wild, considering that all-stars like Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Breanna Stewart, and Sabrina Ionescu all preceded Clark into the league.

Nancy is 100 percent right on this one. Clark may only want to focus on basketball, but a specific segment of her “fans” are making that impossible, and with great power (and coverage/marketing deals) comes great responsibility.

Elon Musk doesn’t understand irony (or much of anything else)

Laura Bassett and I were briefly EICs at the same time at G/O Media, when she was heading up Jezebel and I had taken over as interim EIC of Deadspin. I always tried not to fangirl over her too much, but I’m not sure I succeeded. Today, she wrote a banger of a newsletter about Elon Musk’s hypocrisy.

Here’s some rich (man) irony for your Thursday: Billionaire edgelord Elon Musk, who claims he bought Twitter in 2022 in order to expose the platform’s unacceptable “free speech suppression” related to the Hunter Biden laptop story, suspended journalist Ken Klippenstein’s X account today because he published a leaked document the Trump campaign had compiled about J.D. Vance’s vulnerabilities as a VP pick. Musk also banned us all from posting the link to Klippenstein’s story, effectively censoring the Vance dossier across the whole platform in the very same way he claims Twitter had wrongly censored the Hunter Biden story.

I can’t remember what link I was trying to post on X a few weeks back (I know, I should delete my account entirely and forget it ever existed, I know, I know), but the site would not let me post it. Like, at all. I tried for a while, then went back and tried again a few hours later. Nothing. I remember vaguely wondering if Musk was somehow preventing the link from being shared, then dismissed it as too ridiculous, even for him. Now, I’m rethinking it.

The leaked 271-page document, which Iran obtained by hacking the Trump campaign in July, was deemed not newsworthy enough for mainstream outlets like the New York Times to publish, despite the Times having breathlessly covered Russian hackers’ breach of the DNC’s computers in 2016 and the infamous Hillary’s Clinton emails that emerged from it. Having read the whole Vance document today, I can confirm that it is equally as boring as the leaked Clinton emails, making Musk’s censorship of it appear bizarrely desperate. I’d also argue that suspending Klippenstein and blocking the link to the Vance documents has almost certainly driven exponentially more attention and traffic to said link than it otherwise would have received—a perfect example of the Streisand effect!

Of note in that Vance report was a mention that the GOP VP nominee said he believed the women who accused Trump of sexual assault back in 2016, begging the question of how exactly how much of his soul Vance had to sell in order to champion a guy he believes is a serial rapist for President. As for Musk, censorship is bad, unless it helps his preferred candidate.

Every time I hear anything about Elon Musk these days, it’s dripping with C. Montgomery Burns energy.

Anti-abortion laws are killing more women

This isn’t an opinion piece, but I think it’s important to share nonetheless, especially as a follow-up to ProPublica’s reporting on Amber Thurman.

The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.

From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.

For any Bernie Moreno types who might be reading, I care about abortion because I don’t like seeing women die.

At the risk of alienating more men on Threads…

I really liked this Nora Princiotti piece over at The Ringer on just how screwed the Browns are.

Back in 2022, fed up—apparently—with not having won a division title this century, the franchise decided to sell its soul by trading three first-round picks (plus whatever affection several decades of being the NFL’s lovable losers had earned them) for quarterback Deshaun Watson. At the time of the trade, more than 20 women had filed lawsuits against Watson, saying he committed sexual misconduct and/or sexual assault during massage appointments. But the Browns made the trade, and they didn’t just agree to pay Watson an unprecedented $230 million guaranteed for five years; they also wrote bespoke language into the contract that protected Watson from the financial fallout of the 11-game suspension he served that year.

The Browns did all that for football reasons—or at least that seems to be their justification.

So now that Deshaun Watson is no longer the hot-shot future star and is an empty shell of the QB he once promised to be, what do the Browns do?

The sample size is now 15 games, but pretty much everything else is the same. Watson has gone from a quarterback acquired under morally reprehensible circumstances who hadn’t played well in three years to a quarterback acquired under morally reprehensible circumstances who hasn’t played well in four years. There are simply no football excuses left. He’s had time to learn Kevin Stefanski’s system. At least this season, he’s healthy. There’s no reason to think Watson will become anything close to the quarterback he was in Houston ever again. The Browns still owe him nearly $100 million, and the NFL is currently investigating him after a woman filed a lawsuit earlier this month in which she says Watson sexually assaulted her during a date in 2020.

And as that ugly, uncomfortable reality sinks in, the Browns must figure out what to do with the uncuttable player on the untradable contract who’s currently playing some of the worst football in the league.

There really are no answers for the Browns, who got themselves into this mess but not being put off by a guy who was accused of various forms of sexual misconduct by (literally) dozens of women. The whole column is worth your time, but I did take issue with one line. Princiotti rightly points out that Cleveland’s backup QB, Jameis Winston, also served and NFL suspension for groping an Uber driver in 2018. But she leaves out that Winston was also credibly accused of sexual assault while in college, and the botched (corrupt?) handling of that case by both Florida State and local police was detailed in the fantastic documentary called The Hunting Ground. It’s available on Prime on Apple TV, and I’d encourage everyone to watch it. The NFL is no different than college campuses, they just have better marketing.

Farewell to the Coliseum. You deserved so much better, As fans.

Have a great weekend! See you all on Tuesday. (I know I said I’d be back to a normal schedule next week, but I completely forgot I’d be out of town this weekend. So…Tuesday. See you all on Tuesday.)

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