What Was She Thinking?

When @emilythornberry MP saw a house draped with the flag of St George, white van parked outside, she couldn't resist tweeting a picture to her followers back in her constituency.

Emily Thornberry is the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, which, as the Guardian constituency profile acidly remarks, "is routinely maligned as the natural habitat of the hypocritical, well-off, ostensibly liberal chattering classes". Perhaps as a result of this unfortunate stereotype her innocent action was widely interpreted as a snobbish reference, from a member of the North London urban elite, to the working class voters of Rochester, and she was forced to resign her position in the Shadow Cabinet.

But her constituency isn't homogeneously affluent, and she tweeted a photo of herself earlier this week, happily delivering leaflets in a housing estate. So not snobbery exactly.

So what motivated her to post the Rochester tweet in the first place, and who was its intended audience? It is now common for people to post pictures from their travels onto Facebook and Twitter, as a modern equivalent of the postcard home. So Emily Thornberry's tweet from Rochester makes it seem as if she regarded her visit to Rochester as a kind of rustication (or missus ad rusticos).

As @freedland writes, "even Thornberry’s defenders do not pretend she was trying to recruit white van drivers who fly the English flag from their homes. At best, she appeared to express the fascination of a visiting anthropologist for the natives of Rochester and Strood with their curious cultural customs." Or perhaps as @sarahditum suggests, she is drawing attention to the supposed jingoism of the Rochester and Strood electorate. How on earth could that be interpreted as class warfare?

To the extent that her thoughts and tweets are directed at the people back home in North London, she is keeping the Kentish voters at arm's length. As far as I can see, she doesn't appear in any of the photos she tweeted from Rochester and Strood, even as a tourist. Like many tourists, her tweets often lack explicit meaning, which then prompts people to project their own interpretation onto the real purpose of her communication. She casually labels everything #Rochester, although Strood has a significantly different demographic: most of the UKIP support was in Strood, while Rochester remained solidly Conservative.

Further insight into her London-centric vision can be inferred from her having retweeted a post from Buzzfeed called 27 Reasons To Fall In Love With A Londoner, which starts with the assertion that Londoners are the coolest people in the country. Yes indeed, Lady Thornberry, yes indeed.

---

Adam Donald, Emily Thornberry: How one tweet led to her resignation (BBC News 21 November 2014)

Jonathan Freedland, The Emily Thornberry affair proves it: US-style culture wars have come to Britain (Guardian 21 November 2014)

Sarah Ditum, Tweeting a picture of a house is not an act of class warfare, whatever the Sun says (New Statesman 21 November 2014)


Updated 26 Nov 2014

---

Out delivering Annual Report in St Peters with crack team. Kent this afternoon #labourdoorstep #whypaygymmembership? pic.twitter.com/ZQrG9Xnm6M
— Emily Thornberry MP (@EmilyThornberry) November 17, 2014

Absolutely & so many more >>27 Reasons To Fall In Love With A Londoner http://t.co/jIw7LuTTwr @FloPerry
— Emily Thornberry MP (@EmilyThornberry) November 12, 2014

Fundamental Programming

While browsing through some BBC News items for the previous post on the Purpose of Hormones, I came across the fascinating work of one Dr Nick Neave, of Northumbria University.

Dr Nick, who writes popular articles in the Daily Mail, and is regularly consulted by the science journalists on the BBC News website, believes that women are fundamentally programmed to depend on men. (Footnote for geeks: can anyone tell me the difference between fundamental programming and any other kind of programming? No, I thought not.)

• "Sorry, but women are dependent on men." [Daily Mail, 4th December 2006]

Dr Nick studies gender differences. His serious research indicates that women are better at finding things, but he is happy to say something quite different when a journalist prompts him for a stereotype about women drivers.

• Some evidence of a female advantage in object location memory using ecologically valid stimuli [Human Nature Vol 16 No 2, June 2005]

• Spatial skills such as map reading and parking may be difficult for some women because they had too little testosterone in the womb. [BBC News 24 January 2005 via BastardLogic]
  

Dr Nick has also studied sexual attraction

• "Females, like males, are always looking to enhance their reproductive success by trading upwards." [BBC News, 16 August 2005]

• "A male face with some attributes of both masculinity and femininity is attractive. ... Women kind of like your macho-but-sensitive type." [Times Online, 20 August 2003]
  

Dr Nick, who is an expert on testosterone, suffers from male pattern baldness. Wikipedia reveals that this form of hair loss is related to hormones called androgens, particularly an androgen called dihydrotestosterone (DHT).


Dr Nick Neave, Northumbria University

Paradise Wildlife Park

My local paper has a wraparound cover this week advertising the Paradise Wildlife Park in Hertfordshire, under the politically incorrect headline "Paradise - it's all white".

Perhaps the consciously intended meaning of this headline was the fact that the zoo features a number of white animals, including white lions and white tigers.

The advertisement contains several pictures of children enjoying the facilities at the zoo. All of the children in these pictures are white. Is this a coincidence? Does it matter?

We are increasingly accustomed to "political correctness" - and this sometimes seems to entail compliance with some inauthentic and unconvincing vision of modern Britain, achieved by including token representatives of minority groups. Any gross failure to conform to this stereotype - for whatever reason - seems to stand out as an act of deliberate or inadvertent defiance.

My local paper serves a large borough of West London, containing people with a wide diversity of ethnic backgrounds. What message are the non-white families going to get from this advertisement? That they are not welcome at this Zoo?

Perhaps those responsible for this advertisement - including those at the local paper who accepted and printed it - will deny any conscious racism. But that's not the point. Racism is not only manifested as overt bigotry - it may also be manifested through unconscious choices. That's an excellent example of POSIWID - what matters here is the effect.

After all, racism is rarely acknowledged in ourselves. Racism is always other people, isn't it?

Reinforcing Stereotypes

Google reflects the cumulative errors and distortions of the Internet. Several people (I got it from Radovan - see also Blogoscoped) have recently noticed that if you type "she invented" into Google, you are presented with a suggested modification: Did you mean "he invented"? So I tried some variations.

• "he chatted" - Did you mean "he created"?
• "she boring" - Did you mean "he boring"?
• "she time-wasting" - Did you mean "he time-wasting"?

I tried some other search engines. None of the others I tried has this helpful feature. I'd better get back to work ... 

Update

A related story about a boy whose mother wanted to call him Kohler Wilson, so that he would have a good Google rating. (I got it from Barry, see also Marc Perton.) Did you mean Reptiles of Central America, by Gunther Kohler and Larry David Wilson?

---

Comment March 2022

Early indications of search engine bias, some years before Safiya Noble and others started to research the hidden gender and racial bias in these algorithms.

Whenever she speaks anywhere, I try to find the recording on YouTube. But after I’ve watched it, the YouTube algorithm invariably decides what I should watch next is some white dude’s TED talk. I try not to overuse the word “ironic”, but I think it is fair to use it here.

Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York University Press, 2018)