Gossip Drop #8: What Nagi and Brooki show us about outrage.

The serious business of baked goods.

Well, what a riveting weekend.

If you’re in Australia (if not… Bonjour!) you’ll know we voted in the federal election, and chose a centre-left government. The result is being reported on internationally as part of a push against far-right politics, against Trump, against conservatism, against division and hatred, following a similar swing in Canada. I am not a political commentator, and have little to add in terms of analysing what this all means for Australia, but we should probably remember that it was only eighteen months ago we voted against an Indigenous voice to parliament, where the quality of public debate was toxic and bitter. There was a lot of hatred, and a lot of division.

A few brief thoughts on the election:

• Trumpet of Patriots sending me unsolicited (and grammatically incorrect???) text messages every day for a week and then not winning a single seat is glorious.

• Dutton’s concession speech was excellent, and I’m glad to live in a country where the basic principles of democracy aren’t up for debate.

• Ali France seems like a remarkable human being.

• I’m in awe of anyone who puts their hand up to run as a political candidate. It can be cruel and toxic and it must be near-impossible to withstand the mud-slinging, but thank goodness some people do.

I’m going to get into the story I can’t stop thinking about (Nagi vs Brooki), but first, recommendations.

---

Recommendations

On the topic of the election, there’s been fascinating analysis about what the Coalition’s historic loss means for the party. Will they venture further to the right, or closer to the centre? Who will replace Peter Dutton as their leader? Where, exactly, did they go so wrong?

My clever friend Charlotte Mortlock wrote an op-ed for Sydney Morning Herald arguing that going forward, gender quotas for the Liberal Party should be the bare minimum. While the average Australian is a 37-year-old woman, the average Liberal Party member is a male in his 70s, and Mortlock has established Hilma’s Network in a bid to repair the relationship between the party and women. Regardless of what side of politics you’re on, a strong opposition is crucial for a functioning democracy. And gender representation is necessary if the Liberals are going to create policies that are at all relevant in modern Australia. Mortlock argues that right now, Liberal MPs should be appointing two women as party leader and deputy. It’s bizarre that such a suggestion feels so… radical.

Moving away from politics, I adored this stunning essay by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker called ‘My Brain Finally Broke’. Tolentino is probably my very favourite writer when it comes to observation about the internet, and I recently re-read her wildly successful book of essays, Trick Mirror, some of which incisively explores internet culture. In this essay, she writes about dissociation, about reality slipping away, about feeling as though there’s a fog she can’t see beyond. She wonders if she’s in a phone-based psychosis, but before I start simply plagiarising her stunning writing, I’m just going to quote some of the passages that stood out to me:

On the warping of time:

At the root of this opacity might be whatever strange thing is currently happening with time. I mostly keep track of it on my phone, a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now.

The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly.

On Gaza:

There has been real resistance directed at forcing an end to this unbearable situation: people have marched, written letters, harangued politicians, occupied buildings, blocked highways, got arrested, set themselves on fire. At some point in my own tame letter writing, it occurred to me that I didn’t expect a single word to meaningfully reach a human being.

A chill sets in at some point, then a grimness, then a detachment.

It’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real.

She has an incredible way of packing nuance and complexity into every sentence. The final paragraphs about AI are drenched in the moral greyness of it all, and despite the fact the piece makes me utterly hopeless, at least it’s beautiful writing!

Finally, if you want to escape reality for the aforementioned reasons ^ may I suggest Holly Wainwright’s new novel He Would Never. I tore through it in every pocket of time I could find over the last week, and it’s one of those books you’re desperate to get back to. It tells the story of a group of women who met at their mother’s group and have an annual camping trip with their families, but over years and divorces and new babies and new relationships and kids becoming teenagers, the dynamics change. Now, there’s a father accused of behaving inappropriately towards a teenage girl, and tensions have to be untangled in order to get to the truth. A page-turner that also makes you think, it’s bloody brilliant.

---

Thoughts/Gossip

A couple of weeks ago, I asked a question on my Instagram stories about a time where internet outrage went ‘too far’. I was inundated with responses from people about online controversies where the punishment didn’t seem to match the crime, when the vitriol is response to a transgression felt crueller and more ‘problematic’ than the transgression itself.

A few days later, I got a message from someone who had responded to my initial call-out. ‘Watch it happen in real-time,’ she wrote. Then she sent a link.

It was a post by award-winning author Nagi Maehashi, the founder of RecipeTin Eats. Maehashi is widely loved for her accessible approach to cooking, having created the website RecipeTin Eats and the not-for-profit organization RecipeTin Meals. Her cookbooks have broken sales records, and she’s followed by 1.6 million people on Instagram. On that account, I clicked through a series of black tiles with white text.

Over 12 slides, she alleged that Brooke Bellamy, the author of bestselling cookbook Bake with Brooki, had plagiarised two of her recipes, as well as recipes by other authors. Maehashi included screenshots to illustrate the striking similarity of the two sets of published pages, and said she’d written to both Bellamy and Penguin about her concerns. She argued that the copying was unethical, that it breaches trust, and that it’s a slap in the face to those who create original content. Maehashi calculated that Bellamy’s book had made $4.6 million in sales. Given that the income from Maehashi’s website helps fund her food bank, she said the plagiarism was ethically indefensible.

As I’m writing this, the post has 140,000 likes and more than 35,000 shares. And that’s not including the people who have read about the allegations via the RecipeTin Eats website, those who saw it on other social media platforms, or those who have read/heard/watched stories about it in the news.

Anyone who spends far too much time online (me) could have predicted what would happen next. Bellamy’s social media was flooded with comments, to the point where she had to turn her comments off, which then triggered commentary about WHY she would turn her comments off, when people were simply trying to hold her to account. Personal details about Bellamy have been splashed around, as well as claims from people who say they’ve worked with her, none of which I’ll repeat here because in most cases they’ve been shared anonymously and in all cases they’re unsubstantiated. The commentary has been cruel and personal and that’s just the stuff we can see - we don’t know what Bellamy is receiving directly. I’ve been deep in researching the mechanics of internet pile-ons for my novel, and if Bellamy’s experience is anything like that of other women in similar situations, I’d imagine there are death threats. Invasions of privacy. Terrifying moments that have her fearing for her safety and the safety of her family. Within a couple of days, the attacks on both Bellamy and her business were so vicious that Maehashi had to ask people to stop.

“Please stop the trolling. I know I’ve made serious allegations,” Maehashi said in a video posted to her Instagram. “But this does not justify the personal attacks I’ve seen against Brooke Bellamy. I do not support it and I’m asking you to stop.”

“At the end of the day, we’re talking about recipes,” Maehashi said, imploring her followers to “keep it respectful.”

To Maehashi’s great credit, it’s one of the few times I’ve seen someone ask their audience to back off the person they’ve publicly called out. Usually, when a prominent voice takes aim at someone online, they put their head in the sand when the abuse begins. There seems to be an unspoken rule that if you do the wrong thing and it’s prosecuted online, you deserve any and all of the backlash that comes with it. People calling you a c*nt? Toughen up. People posting your address? Log off! Rape threats, defamatory claims, pure lies? Get over it.

But Maehashi isn’t the kind of person who does this. She is clearly shocked by the response to her allegations, having assumed that it was possible to separate a woman - her personhood, her business, her family - from a shitty thing she might have done. Maehashi didn’t anticipate the outrage towards Bellamy, which makes the entire controversy sadder. She also, likely, didn’t anticipate that there would be anger directed at her. Those who empathise with Bellamy, or who don’t believe you can plagiarise a recipe, or who think the whole spectacle is ridiculous, are now attacking Maehashi. You have to choose a side, apparently. And being on one side means wholly demonising the other.

The weirdness of digital media means it has turned into a Mainstream News Story, and audiences always click on two women fighting.

I feel for both of them. There are no winners.

Well, actually, that’s a lie.

There is a winner.

It’s the same party that wins every war of outrage culture: tech giants. Our attention has fallen into their hands, and their algorithms keep serving us more opinions, more hot takes, more gossip, so they can keep selling us as products to advertisers.

I guess the point of me diving into this whole story is to remind you (and myself) that there are probably two shattered people at the centre of this. Imperfect, powerless, hurt people, whose humanity is far more important than a debate about caramel slice.