IS PATSY STEVENSON A CRISIS ACTOR?
A version of this piece appears in Unherd.
Is Patsy Stevenson a crisis actor? This claim quickly began circulating on social media following the discovery that the flame-haired protester, whose photogenic arrest in Clapham Common on Saturday evening was printed the next morning on the cover of every Sunday newspaper, retains a profile at acting website Casting Now.
Further evidence is suggestive. Shortly after her arrest, looking unaffected by her experience, Stevenson gave a statement to the activist organization Counterfire which sounded like a workshopped script. "I came here to support any woman: whether it be cis woman or trans woman... who cannot walk down the street by themselves because of the fear of men. And it’s not all men, we know this, that’s not what we’re saying...”
Who is this we? Was Stevenson already connected to Counterfire before the vigil, or did she meet them on the day? Did she intend to get arrested? Footage of the moment the police suddenly moved-in to disperse crowds on the Clapham Common bandstand show Stevenson impassively ignoring their instructions. According to an eye witness, members of Sisters Uncut an intersectional direct action group known for their theatrical tactics had occupied the bandstand moments earlier “to speak to the crowd about violence against women and girls and the lack of faith many of us understandably have in the police to protect us.” Was Stevenson part of this group?
Invited by her Counterfire interviewer to propose next steps, Stevenson, who has now denied being an activist or protester, calls for larger protests, and a crowd off-camera cheers. “We need to rally the troops…. It needs to go worldwide. It should be a global… same as Black Lives Matter, same as everything that matters." This campaign coincidentally appears to clash with protests against lockdowns, scheduled for March 20, just as BLM protests last year interrupted growing opposition to the policy.
Does this suggest behind the scenes collusion? The fact this question is conceivable is already disturbing. But no one doubts that the mass media is a cavalcade of simulations. Captivating images and stories circulate, not because they are innately true or innately false, but because they feature symbols which unconsciously excite emotions and advance narrative agendas.
Because the essence of this element lies in individual psychology, this process can operate without direct coordination, and simply through incentive structures, divorced from clear intentions. Individual activists and activist groups may believe that they are advancing one agenda when they are contributing to another: thus Guy Debord speaks of meanings that can "set-off as a circle and arrive as a square.”
At the same time, because mass psychology is generally predictable, theoretically this economy can be manipulated by anyone who knows the codes.
One of the most striking antecedents of the picture of Stevenson was State of Emergency, an Italian Vogue photoshoot by Steven Meisl from September 2006 featuring models being elegantly brutalised by anti-terror police. Defending the series from more sceptical takes at the time, writer Mark Fisher argued the images offered an eroticised sublimation of humiliation and violence: “Meisel’s photographs — which, we should remember, appear in a magazine the vast majority of whose readership is not ‘adolescent males’ but women — are ‘fantasy kits’ which offer just such sublimations, providing scenarios, role-play cues and potential fantasmatic identifications.”
The motive significance of this world of scenarios, from Matt Hancock’s identification with Matt Damon to the broken psychology of Boris Johnson and the savior complex of Bill Gates is among the less examined aspect of twelve months of lockdowns. There is little to be gained from any effort to apply this analysis to Stevenson herself, but the drive to circulate her image speaks for itself. Stevenson’s photograph is on the front of every newspaper, and ubiquitous on social media because of the eroticised humiliation her photo shows, a state of mind which Britain under endless lockdown shares.
Irrespective of her intentions, her own statements, or the hypothetical blueprints of her handlers, the seductive power of the photograph itself, at least, is real.