Thanks everyone for the positive comments! Just wanted to drop a reminder, as I think I forgot to mention it in the episode: you can contact me at jessicabarpod@gmail.com with story ideas, nostalgia about Tattle, exciting knitting patterns, or anything else.
Ok, Jessica the 80s baby is officially awesome. Super-articulate, funny, and a great storyteller. Hope she becomes a regular on air - she's got the magic mix of knowing her subject thoroughly and being able to explain it without losing the audience. 10/10
She was by far the best poster on tattle back in the dark days of COVID. I realise that I have a parasocial relationship with her. I feel oddly proud of her being on the show.
Waidaminute, I'd always assumed the reason you hadn't fired Jesse was that you had no one to replace him with. But Jessica the 80s Baby has been right there all along. Turns out she's a natural behind the mike. What the hell?
As someone who loves to participate in soccer forums online, you guys are so far off about men and footballers it made me laugh haha. Right now in France there’s a whole news cycle about how a player claimed he had inflammation in his ankle but then was spotted in a padel club in Dubai, leading to a whole wave of abuse. This is a relatively mundane example but like there are men who obsessively track the every move of certain soccer players and are definitely in full “bitch eating crackers” mode
I remember an incident well over a decade ago where an American football player got injured in a scooter accident and someone on a forum I frequented tracked down the exact place where it happened.
Yeah I think the major difference isn’t in the behavior but in the target. People make thread after thread calling Lamine Yamal trashy or making fun of Kylian Mbappe’s comments about politics or whatever, but the fact is that most of these professional athletes have now earned literal generational wealth. Making fun of someone who’s great grandchildren will probably never have to work again just feels different than making fun of a Mormon mommy blogger. Now, does that actually make it morally different? That I don’t know
2). The people doing that on sports forums are also cringe.
I never understand when women are like “our supposedly shitty behavior is just like this thing men do which is also considered shitty behavior, so stop criticizing us sexists!”
For real! Somebody on the Arsenal subreddit tracked Viktor Gyökeres’ plane during contract talks. People will post when a player follows Arsenal’s instagram as evidence they’re closing in on a deal. Male sports fans can be completely unhinged.
I actually thought about bringing up some of the nastiness people had about Declan Rice’s gf, but I didn’t because I thought it was more “people being nasty to women online” and not “people on a parasocial moral crusade”. But yeah. People are bonkers
Not a soccer fan, but I've seen similar behavior among hockey fans. One of the teams I support has a defenseman who signed an expensive contract with them a few years ago, and something about the city or the organization just does not work for him, because he's been playing poorly the whole time he's been on the team. The way people talk about this guy online, you'd think he'd boiled someone's cat or something. He seems to have stopped using social media altogether, but you still see nasty comments about him on the team's Facebook posts and such. It's a shame, because everyone who meets him in person says he's a really nice guy, not some mustache-twirling villain looking to sabotage the team. And it's not as though treating the guy like shit online is going to make his playing any better, or his contract any shorter.
All that said, I do think that this kind of cyberbullying affects women a little more deeply than it does men, just because of how women are socialized to value social harmony and people-please a little more highly than men do. Predictably, the majority-female gossip, snark, lolcow, etc. communities tend to target women, because that's who the algorithm promotes to them, and that's who they're exposed to in majority-female hobbies. These predominantly female communities also have a recurrent preoccupation with separating "lolcows" from their pets or children (typically by calling CPS unnecessarily), which I think is probably a result of the way they try to characterize their schadenfraude as morally justified. I gotta say, I don't think I've ever seen that in sports communities (which is ironic, given the high incidence of drug abuse and domestic violence among profession athletes). People are not calling CPS on the overpaid defenseman, they just tell him to kill himself.
I've found that the more people moralize their interest in "lolcows," their more abhorrent their behavior becomes, surprisingly. When you're pointing and laughing at the village idiot, you still understand on some level that what you're doing is wrong. But when you re-frame the village idiot as a threat to society, you can justify doing basically anything to him and still feel like you're in the right.
I’m not sure “lolcows” are exclusive to majority female forums though. For example, I’ve never seen a cis woman earnestly post about Chris Chan. Or the Opie and Anthony group that made Katie a target— pretty sure that was majority male as well. I do think there’s something to be said about how we just handwave away the claim that this is a female behavior when I’m just not sure that’s true.
I never implied that they were. When I said that it "affects" women more, I meant that female targets are slightly more sensitive to it than male ones. The drop-shipping woman suing over her relatively small Tattle thread is a good example from this episode.
Like they said in the episode, gossip and collective shaming are behaviors intrinsic to human beings as a whole. Though the particulars (motivations, modalities, demographics of targets) vary between the sexes, the core phenomenon is the same.
Also, though it is predominantly male, Kiwifarms does have female users, and they do ocasionally post in Chris's subforum.
I remember your username! I was on the JM threads for a short while in the covid years. I thought much of the rest of the site was indefensible tbh. Very funny that Jessica was on those threads too.
Even though I knew she'd been involved with BARpod before I somehow never caught on to who Jessica was until now. My excitement at the realisation is more than enough to compensate for my disappointment in learning that her unusual background in Asia did not in fact involve escaping North Korea.
Loved this episode, I'm fascinated by these kinds of forums and it was great to hear Jessica in person.
I don't agree entirely with the characterisation of Mumsnet posters. There are loads of posters who hate Graham Linehan and think he's a complete arse who harms their cause and there are women who support him. It's certainly predominantly middle class but there are many women either living in poverty or moving into poverty after divorce. The Katie Price threads have posters saying she's a bad mother, a liar, horrible animal abuser etc and others who feel sorry for her and think her background of childhood sexual abuse are mitigating factors in her behaviour. The example of the woman whose husband made a face because she had her period is obviously silly but there are many times when a woman will start a thread about something that seems like nothing and will later acknowledge that it's a small part of a genuinely abusive relationship.
Mumsnet really has shown an admirable commitment to its feminism boards, at one point it was one of the only public online places where women could organise politically. It's where I first heard about women being kicked out of the British Labour Party for saying men cannot become literal women. It's an incredibly important forum that is routinely disparaged as silly mummies talking nonsense or being radicalised by mysterious right-wing forces (because women couldn't possibly be forming their own opinions online, everyone knows as soon as a woman gives birth her brain falls straight out of her vagina). Sarah Pederson's book, The Politicisation of Mumsnet is very good on the political and personal influence of Mumsnet.
I still use Tattle to follow the threads on Dr. Jessica Taylor - the Jack Monroe of psychology. She's started as a gender critical feminist, rapidly pivoted to anti-psychiatry telling women that psychiatric diagnoses are all just trauma - depression is trauma, autism is trauma, ADHD is trauma, psychotic illness is trauma etc etc - and no one should be taking medication but doesn't mention her PhD is research based, not clinical. Loads of drama around her. Claims to be talking to the police and MPs to take tattle down. There are all kinds of academics and clinicians in her threads criticising her behaviour, it's incredibly enjoyable.
The better argument for Tattlers to make to justify their gossip would be that influencers themselves blur the lines between their personal and professional lives, they monetise their children, their homes, their hobbies. It's reasonable for that to be up for some public criticism. The Hinch/Meghan Markle/Katie Price threads are pure insanity, though.
I wrote notes about her my first month on the job. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough of a clear narrative to make a really good episode. I'm pretty sure that at some point we'll be able to get one - I'm just waiting for her to do something that we can do some storytelling with.
Heartily agree! There are some mad/annoying people on mumsnet, but also a lot of funny and clever ones. I think the GC stuff is a bit too much sometimes, but it was vitally important 20 years ago or so when no other online community was covering this stuff. It didn't only launch Kelly Jay-Keen, but also A Woman's Place and a couple of other organisations I've forgotten. And it was v useful info when my kids were young - not too crunchy and very well-informed, generally.
Something else about Tattle and Mumsnet is that most of it is incredibly mundane. Even the very long-running threads are often filled with off-topic chatter.
Michael Hobbes' imaginative approach to information and reporting must be responsible for so many people taking whatever-colour pill it is that brings you to Barpod. Falling down the Moose-pill rabbithole.
In my mind he is the apotheosis of "person who made a name for bravely following facts and completely cannot see how his own orthodoxies keep him from doing exactly that"
I remember listening to an episode of YWA about gangs in urban areas, and everything they said 100% contradicted all the readings I’d done about the subject in an undergraduate sociology class just a few short months prior. I don’t remember any particulars, because that was pre Covid but the feeling that either I or those podcasters were losing touch w reality stuck with me. .
Yes! I listened to "You're Wrong About" for a good long time before it started to dawn on me that the hosts—particularly Michael, as the other host is more nuanced by temperament, I believe—were wrong about just as much and had all the same defensive blind spots they criticised other journalists for.
The turning point for me was actually a subscription episode on the beauty YouTuber James Charles as that was, embarrassingly, a topic I knew quite a bit about. They covered it as a current story, basically said he had exonerated himself of sexual misconduct allegations, and then never corrected the record when more damning information came out.
I also remember how attached Michael Hobbes was to framing a gay man as the hero in the Kitty Genovese story, even though that chap actually did nothing helpful and it was a straight woman who tried the hardest to do something and held Ms Genovese in her arms as she died. Michael Hobbes was listening to his co-host clearly tell him this information, and still couldn't hear it past his own bias.
I also listened to Maintenance Phase for a couple of years and unknowingly absorbed some of their talking points before realising the hosts would twist basic information to convince people that because the morbidly obese female host had failed to lose weight, no one can. All the while Hobbes eats and acts differently from her, is slim and athletic, and pretends this is inexplicable.
I could go on and on because I listened to so much of this nonsense, but yes, I think there is a definite Hobbes-to-Barpod pipeline!
Hearing about Mumsnet has triggered a memory I COMPLETELY forgot until this moment. In 2018 I was at a political science academic conference. I attended a panel about disinformation (very de rigeur at that time) and watched a bizarre presentation claiming that… Nobody on Mumsnet actually was a TERF, and that Russian disinformation actors had astroturfed the forum to convince British women to become transphobic. The applause was mild, to say the least
The scuba drama thing is interesting — I followed the online scuba community quite a lot around 10 years ago and I would say it certainly produces drama, but the drama’s also male-coded. So you get massive egos calling each other retards over disagreements on what kind of clips to use to secure your gear, but you’re kind of allowed to be a normie and opt out in a way not permitted in the kinds of drama BaRPod covers, where everything’s part of the grand struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Programming culture is probably an interesting case study in this respect where large parts of the scene have seen a transition from the former to the latter.
Thanks everyone for the positive comments! Just wanted to drop a reminder, as I think I forgot to mention it in the episode: you can contact me at jessicabarpod@gmail.com with story ideas, nostalgia about Tattle, exciting knitting patterns, or anything else.
Ok, Jessica the 80s baby is officially awesome. Super-articulate, funny, and a great storyteller. Hope she becomes a regular on air - she's got the magic mix of knowing her subject thoroughly and being able to explain it without losing the audience. 10/10
She was by far the best poster on tattle back in the dark days of COVID. I realise that I have a parasocial relationship with her. I feel oddly proud of her being on the show.
I was, in fact, coming here to rave about Jessica.
Third!
So great to finally hear her and find out how great she is! She is absolutely right about what makes the best Blocked & Reported stories.
Bonus points for the accent as well. I love when a guest has a cool accent.
Did you JUST call a woman articulate? ✨
Couldn't agree more!!
The term webmaster is exclusionary and offensive as it harms those of us with webslave ancestors.
Don’t you mean webenslavedpeople ancestors?
Waidaminute, I'd always assumed the reason you hadn't fired Jesse was that you had no one to replace him with. But Jessica the 80s Baby has been right there all along. Turns out she's a natural behind the mike. What the hell?
As someone who loves to participate in soccer forums online, you guys are so far off about men and footballers it made me laugh haha. Right now in France there’s a whole news cycle about how a player claimed he had inflammation in his ankle but then was spotted in a padel club in Dubai, leading to a whole wave of abuse. This is a relatively mundane example but like there are men who obsessively track the every move of certain soccer players and are definitely in full “bitch eating crackers” mode
I remember an incident well over a decade ago where an American football player got injured in a scooter accident and someone on a forum I frequented tracked down the exact place where it happened.
Yeah I think the major difference isn’t in the behavior but in the target. People make thread after thread calling Lamine Yamal trashy or making fun of Kylian Mbappe’s comments about politics or whatever, but the fact is that most of these professional athletes have now earned literal generational wealth. Making fun of someone who’s great grandchildren will probably never have to work again just feels different than making fun of a Mormon mommy blogger. Now, does that actually make it morally different? That I don’t know
1). Exactly
2). The people doing that on sports forums are also cringe.
I never understand when women are like “our supposedly shitty behavior is just like this thing men do which is also considered shitty behavior, so stop criticizing us sexists!”
Umm….
For real! Somebody on the Arsenal subreddit tracked Viktor Gyökeres’ plane during contract talks. People will post when a player follows Arsenal’s instagram as evidence they’re closing in on a deal. Male sports fans can be completely unhinged.
I actually thought about bringing up some of the nastiness people had about Declan Rice’s gf, but I didn’t because I thought it was more “people being nasty to women online” and not “people on a parasocial moral crusade”. But yeah. People are bonkers
That's different. The guys tracking the pro sports players are degenerate gamblers, so they have money on the line.
Not always. Hence why I invoked examples that are pretty independent from someone’s performances on the field.
Not a soccer fan, but I've seen similar behavior among hockey fans. One of the teams I support has a defenseman who signed an expensive contract with them a few years ago, and something about the city or the organization just does not work for him, because he's been playing poorly the whole time he's been on the team. The way people talk about this guy online, you'd think he'd boiled someone's cat or something. He seems to have stopped using social media altogether, but you still see nasty comments about him on the team's Facebook posts and such. It's a shame, because everyone who meets him in person says he's a really nice guy, not some mustache-twirling villain looking to sabotage the team. And it's not as though treating the guy like shit online is going to make his playing any better, or his contract any shorter.
All that said, I do think that this kind of cyberbullying affects women a little more deeply than it does men, just because of how women are socialized to value social harmony and people-please a little more highly than men do. Predictably, the majority-female gossip, snark, lolcow, etc. communities tend to target women, because that's who the algorithm promotes to them, and that's who they're exposed to in majority-female hobbies. These predominantly female communities also have a recurrent preoccupation with separating "lolcows" from their pets or children (typically by calling CPS unnecessarily), which I think is probably a result of the way they try to characterize their schadenfraude as morally justified. I gotta say, I don't think I've ever seen that in sports communities (which is ironic, given the high incidence of drug abuse and domestic violence among profession athletes). People are not calling CPS on the overpaid defenseman, they just tell him to kill himself.
I've found that the more people moralize their interest in "lolcows," their more abhorrent their behavior becomes, surprisingly. When you're pointing and laughing at the village idiot, you still understand on some level that what you're doing is wrong. But when you re-frame the village idiot as a threat to society, you can justify doing basically anything to him and still feel like you're in the right.
I’m not sure “lolcows” are exclusive to majority female forums though. For example, I’ve never seen a cis woman earnestly post about Chris Chan. Or the Opie and Anthony group that made Katie a target— pretty sure that was majority male as well. I do think there’s something to be said about how we just handwave away the claim that this is a female behavior when I’m just not sure that’s true.
I never implied that they were. When I said that it "affects" women more, I meant that female targets are slightly more sensitive to it than male ones. The drop-shipping woman suing over her relatively small Tattle thread is a good example from this episode.
Like they said in the episode, gossip and collective shaming are behaviors intrinsic to human beings as a whole. Though the particulars (motivations, modalities, demographics of targets) vary between the sexes, the core phenomenon is the same.
Also, though it is predominantly male, Kiwifarms does have female users, and they do ocasionally post in Chris's subforum.
Old Tattler, Monroe forum veteran here waving fondly at Jessica (I've been here since that show) - the place was never the same after you moved on!
Hard agree. I occasionally read the Mumsnet thread of tattle, but the jack monroe thread was terrible last time I checked in on it.
I remember your username! I was on the JM threads for a short while in the covid years. I thought much of the rest of the site was indefensible tbh. Very funny that Jessica was on those threads too.
Nah it's hilarious and she's barely around anymore since she got her job. The funniest thread was when she turned up and then the taxi driver sock!
Even though I knew she'd been involved with BARpod before I somehow never caught on to who Jessica was until now. My excitement at the realisation is more than enough to compensate for my disappointment in learning that her unusual background in Asia did not in fact involve escaping North Korea.
Snap. A big hello from me and the Brambly mice. Also a Monroe thread veteran right back to daily kitchen
Loved this episode, I'm fascinated by these kinds of forums and it was great to hear Jessica in person.
I don't agree entirely with the characterisation of Mumsnet posters. There are loads of posters who hate Graham Linehan and think he's a complete arse who harms their cause and there are women who support him. It's certainly predominantly middle class but there are many women either living in poverty or moving into poverty after divorce. The Katie Price threads have posters saying she's a bad mother, a liar, horrible animal abuser etc and others who feel sorry for her and think her background of childhood sexual abuse are mitigating factors in her behaviour. The example of the woman whose husband made a face because she had her period is obviously silly but there are many times when a woman will start a thread about something that seems like nothing and will later acknowledge that it's a small part of a genuinely abusive relationship.
Mumsnet really has shown an admirable commitment to its feminism boards, at one point it was one of the only public online places where women could organise politically. It's where I first heard about women being kicked out of the British Labour Party for saying men cannot become literal women. It's an incredibly important forum that is routinely disparaged as silly mummies talking nonsense or being radicalised by mysterious right-wing forces (because women couldn't possibly be forming their own opinions online, everyone knows as soon as a woman gives birth her brain falls straight out of her vagina). Sarah Pederson's book, The Politicisation of Mumsnet is very good on the political and personal influence of Mumsnet.
I still use Tattle to follow the threads on Dr. Jessica Taylor - the Jack Monroe of psychology. She's started as a gender critical feminist, rapidly pivoted to anti-psychiatry telling women that psychiatric diagnoses are all just trauma - depression is trauma, autism is trauma, ADHD is trauma, psychotic illness is trauma etc etc - and no one should be taking medication but doesn't mention her PhD is research based, not clinical. Loads of drama around her. Claims to be talking to the police and MPs to take tattle down. There are all kinds of academics and clinicians in her threads criticising her behaviour, it's incredibly enjoyable.
The better argument for Tattlers to make to justify their gossip would be that influencers themselves blur the lines between their personal and professional lives, they monetise their children, their homes, their hobbies. It's reasonable for that to be up for some public criticism. The Hinch/Meghan Markle/Katie Price threads are pure insanity, though.
I don’t think a sane Meghan Markle thread exists any where on the internet.
Was just coming here to say I was amazed Dr Jess Taylor didn’t come up
I wrote notes about her my first month on the job. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough of a clear narrative to make a really good episode. I'm pretty sure that at some point we'll be able to get one - I'm just waiting for her to do something that we can do some storytelling with.
Interesting as if you’d think from her posts she was leading the charge and she brought down Tattle. I have such mixed feelings about her.
Heartily agree! There are some mad/annoying people on mumsnet, but also a lot of funny and clever ones. I think the GC stuff is a bit too much sometimes, but it was vitally important 20 years ago or so when no other online community was covering this stuff. It didn't only launch Kelly Jay-Keen, but also A Woman's Place and a couple of other organisations I've forgotten. And it was v useful info when my kids were young - not too crunchy and very well-informed, generally.
Taylor is so bizarre.
Something else about Tattle and Mumsnet is that most of it is incredibly mundane. Even the very long-running threads are often filled with off-topic chatter.
Most gossip actually is incredibly mundane.
Jessica the 80s Baby is a delight and as quick on her feet as Jesse. Great episode. Bring her back regularly, please!
forgetting the name of maintenance phase and calling it "fat fat" is legitimately the funniest thing katie's ever said on the show
Michael Hobbes' imaginative approach to information and reporting must be responsible for so many people taking whatever-colour pill it is that brings you to Barpod. Falling down the Moose-pill rabbithole.
In my mind he is the apotheosis of "person who made a name for bravely following facts and completely cannot see how his own orthodoxies keep him from doing exactly that"
I remember listening to an episode of YWA about gangs in urban areas, and everything they said 100% contradicted all the readings I’d done about the subject in an undergraduate sociology class just a few short months prior. I don’t remember any particulars, because that was pre Covid but the feeling that either I or those podcasters were losing touch w reality stuck with me. .
Yes! I listened to "You're Wrong About" for a good long time before it started to dawn on me that the hosts—particularly Michael, as the other host is more nuanced by temperament, I believe—were wrong about just as much and had all the same defensive blind spots they criticised other journalists for.
The turning point for me was actually a subscription episode on the beauty YouTuber James Charles as that was, embarrassingly, a topic I knew quite a bit about. They covered it as a current story, basically said he had exonerated himself of sexual misconduct allegations, and then never corrected the record when more damning information came out.
I also remember how attached Michael Hobbes was to framing a gay man as the hero in the Kitty Genovese story, even though that chap actually did nothing helpful and it was a straight woman who tried the hardest to do something and held Ms Genovese in her arms as she died. Michael Hobbes was listening to his co-host clearly tell him this information, and still couldn't hear it past his own bias.
I also listened to Maintenance Phase for a couple of years and unknowingly absorbed some of their talking points before realising the hosts would twist basic information to convince people that because the morbidly obese female host had failed to lose weight, no one can. All the while Hobbes eats and acts differently from her, is slim and athletic, and pretends this is inexplicable.
I could go on and on because I listened to so much of this nonsense, but yes, I think there is a definite Hobbes-to-Barpod pipeline!
Jessica! Genuinely never been more excited to listen to an episode. And about Tattle!
Hearing about Mumsnet has triggered a memory I COMPLETELY forgot until this moment. In 2018 I was at a political science academic conference. I attended a panel about disinformation (very de rigeur at that time) and watched a bizarre presentation claiming that… Nobody on Mumsnet actually was a TERF, and that Russian disinformation actors had astroturfed the forum to convince British women to become transphobic. The applause was mild, to say the least
Jessica the 80s baby is a fantastic speaker, probably my second favourite guest after Helen. Hope to hear more tales from her soon.
🪧 more Jessica the 80s baby🪧
I would gladly pay twice as much as I currently do to have Jessica as co-host for an episode or two every month.
The scuba drama thing is interesting — I followed the online scuba community quite a lot around 10 years ago and I would say it certainly produces drama, but the drama’s also male-coded. So you get massive egos calling each other retards over disagreements on what kind of clips to use to secure your gear, but you’re kind of allowed to be a normie and opt out in a way not permitted in the kinds of drama BaRPod covers, where everything’s part of the grand struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Programming culture is probably an interesting case study in this respect where large parts of the scene have seen a transition from the former to the latter.
Edit: oh hey, 34:30 covers this exact point