The New Curtain-Twitchers

The Scottish arts may be unsalvageable from censorship, can we build anew?

Like all writers, I love words and have a small collection of personal favourites: quarrel, cantankerous, cloudcuckoolander, farce. Another one I like is ‘curtain—twitcher’. It refers to a busybody who enjoys spying on their neighbours, observing tidbits of private conversation and the comings and goings outside their house, pasting together devious little narratives for gossip or personal satisfaction.

The image associated with the curtain-twitcher is admittedly sexist and ageist, almost always an elderly female; a ‘nosy hag’ or ‘Karen’ as she might be labelled now. However, in the online world, particularly Twitter, it’s been my observation that the worst curtain-twitchers today are young, progressives in elite industries - most depressingly, the arts.

I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter or ‘X’ as it has been renamed. It is the online town public square, but the town in question is hell. Not only is it designed to encourage the constant, often ill-thought-out expressing of every view in your head, the algorithms both place you in an echo chamber and keep your exposure to opposing views that will aggravate you to the point of becoming more extreme. It also, in my opinion, contains a function that more or less gives you the illusion you are reading people’s thoughts: the ability to see the history of every users ‘likes’.

Much like snippets of conversations you shouldn’t have been listening into in the first place, all sorts of narratives can be assumed that are wildly inaccurate while scrolling people’s ‘likes’. And the people most keen to string together false narratives and weaponise them are ideological puritans. A celebrity makes a racist joke then issues an apology statement. Look! Such-and-such liked the apology statement, that must make them a racism apologist! Huh, I notice so-and-so’s been liking Jordan Peterson tweets of late. That must mean they literally agree with EVERY word he's ever said and written…Of course, ‘like’ policing becomes no less sinister and pathetic when the liker in question is doing it sincerely, it’s the creepiness of trying to peer into their mind or soul to use against them that’s wrong. Having said that, there’s all sorts of reasons why someone may ‘like’ a tweet. Maybe they wholeheartedly agree, maybe they like offensive humour, maybe they disagree but appreciate the sentiment, maybe they’re unaware that the person who tweeted it is controversial, maybe they misread it, maybe their finger bloody slipped. More to the point, 99.9% of the time, it’s none of your business, gorge.

This week the Scottish playwright David Greig was a victim of online curtain-twitching as its most insidious. He was ousted by one Rosie Aspinall Priest, an artist, who took it upon herself to broadcast two heretical ‘transphobic’ tweets that were ‘liked’. I’m not going to quote them here - not because they’re particularly edgy or provocative, they were perfectly reasonable - but because it doesn’t matter (you can read the full story here if you really want). Even if they had been offensive, unless the content was criminal, to share them around as indicative of his character to try and tarnish his career was, to put it politely, the behaviour of a bully and a narcissist.

I’ve no desire to instigate a further pile-on on Rosie Aspinall Priest but hopefully, the fact she’s had to delete her account is a sign that she’s learned the hard way no one likes a clipe (or tell-tale, for non-Scots readers). Her attempt to shame Greig wasn’t just vindictive, it stank of narcissism. “Really awful things on display here that do not align with the values inherent within Scotland’s theatre sector,” she twittered. Dear God, I can only dream of the arrogance to think you speak on behalf of the entire world of Scottish theatre, let alone have the lack of self-awareness to actually say it.

In what is clearly an excruciating bid to stave off TRAs from coming for his career, Greig has issued a pleading apology, swearing his allegiance to ‘LGBTQ+’ with such transparent desperation it reminded me of Wormtail grovelling at the feet of Voldemort. Part of me is frustrated at Greig and wants, frankly, to tell him to man the hell up and set an example by not giving into bullies - especially when he’s done nothing whatsoever wrong. At the same time, I’m sympathetic. While social-media thought policing is disorientating for anyone who has ever endured it, I would argue there is a particular terror in the arts. It’s an industry where you live contract to contract - and that’s those who are lucky enough to have contracts. Many (myself included) are still working towards our break and doing our best to make connections. Which is the one reason the arts are so vulnerable to this cruelty. Connections are everything. Create a thought criminal smell around an artist and, well done you, you’ve lessened your competition by one.

This is a raw issue for me, because I've had personal experience with it. When I was doing my creative writing masters degree in 2021, during peak woke hysteria, I dared like two tweets by J.K. Rowling. The tweets in question were about denouncing the abuse and misogyny directed at her, not even to do with the T-word (again, not that that’s relevant to the greater point). Nonetheless, in the space of about fifteen minutes I had been blocked and unfollowed by several people in my course and one directed an aggressive tweet at me.

The consequences were that I deleted my account and spent the next few months in anxiety. At the time, I'd been shortlisted for a novel competition and was convinced screenshots would be sent to the judges or any future agent who took me on. There was also the social fear. I worried private messages were going on behind my back, warning that I was a ‘terf’. The night before graduation, I lost sleep that I’d show up and find no one would sit with me. Throughout the course, with any number of speakers from the industry, editors and agents, it had been made crystal clear to me that it wasn’t enough to keep quiet if you disagreed with coercive progressivism. You had to lay your allyship bare. The fact that I had dissented in my ‘likes’ was nothing short of blasphemy.

I’m determined to try and end this on a positive note. In some regards, the pendulum does seem to be slowing around gender and censorship lunacy. I’ve been heartened by the media coverage of Comedy Unleashed’s cancellation at the Edinburgh fringe, for instance. This time last year, the language in the headlines would have been far more rigged in favour of the censors. At the same time, while a long overdue dawning does seem to be happening for those looking in at the arts, the arts itself is still captured.

The beautiful thing about the arts though, is that while funding bodies and organisations are owned by individuals, the right to make and express art belongs to everyone. It’s occurred to me that the solution may not be to wait for liberalism and freedom of thought to return to the spaces that have become indoctrinated and overthrown by censors but to say ‘f**k it’ and build brand new ones. Comedy Unleashed had no venue but it took up space regardless outside the Scottish Parliament and people came. If we could combine that spirit with a little money and the backing of a few influential figures, we could grow our own creative culture anew. It will be far, far from easy but seeds are already been sown. Poet Jenny Lindsay is running a new series for new, freethinking voices called Page to Platformed (tickets available here). Self-employed embroiderer Jess DeWahls embraced her thought criminal status, channelling it into her creations and her business is booming. Poet Magi Gibson runs Wild Women Workshops and has edited a gender critical poetry anthology. Dancer Rose Kay has hinted her next project may be an interpretation of The Crucible (God, I hope she’s serious). Literary agent Caroline Hardman exists.

I will leave this in the words of my friend, the artist Nicole Jones, who put it perfectly in her poem ‘I Don’t Know What To Do With All The Rage’.

I don't know what to do with all the rage

I don't know

what to do with all the rage.

I have tried burying it,

but lost sleep over the guilt.

I have tried to outrun it,

but couldn't keep up the pace.

I have tried putting it aside,

but it stared at me from my bookshelf.

I have tried doing the reading,

but that only left me with more questions.

I have tried asking the questions,

but couldn't hear the answers over all the noise.

I have tried writing a formal letter of compliant,

but received a copy-paste reply.

I have tried writing elsewhere,

but the record disappeared.

I have tried taking a photograph,

but its face was impenetrable.

I have tried matching the expression,

but I didn't like the person I became.

I have tried building with it,

and it's the only thing that's worked so far.