“A wife is without her husband. Three children are without their dad. Yet everyone thinks the real victim in this is a drunk groupie who was cheating on her boyfriend. Someone who has anonymity for life and will probably get a financial payout…” these, according to an account being shared around with all the others on social media, are the words of one of Russell Brand’s ex girl-friends, as he goes down for rape.
Meanwhile, a whole series of famous men, many of whom are pretty revolting in their dealings with women, are busy trying to demonstrate that they hardly knew, and never liked (or were fooled by) Russell Brand.
Okay, here’s my impression of Brand to add to the pile. He did a lot of good and useful work. The housing campaign, the entertaining lessons in media analysis, an appearance here and there for Occupy… His clownish persona was frail. He clearly had taken some knocks over the years – I wanted to like him, but he always reminded me of a dangerously bad-tempered horse. Standing there looking handsome but, when he turns his head, you see that pale, malevolent glint in his eye – and when he laughs – well blimey, the term ‘horse laugh’ could have been invented for him. Any woman of the world should have clocked him as one to be wary of, surely…
I wasn’t ‘fooled’ as such, despite the fact that I cheered on his ‘Trews’ project back in the day, and criticised media hacks slagging him off on very dubious grounds. Why him, I’d say. Who would like to join me in listing the number of men doing more or less useful work in society, politics, entertainment that most women know are blatantly misogynistic, but who always get a free pass from the media? And they are always backed up by many women who also know about the misogyny but are helplessly in love anyway.
…but the main reason women don’t report their suspicions about the dodgy men around them is that they are the norm. As women, if we were to insist on condemning all those men because there’s a fair chance they are, or will be at some point, sex offenders, we’re criticised as noisy feminists being divisive. …but if we trust them and we fall, we’re brainless floosies and groupies who ‘had it coming’.
So it’s not surprising that social media – and quite a lot of the legacy media – is filling up with a frothy mix of condemnations and passionate justifications. I’ve even seen one or two commentaries that managed to come down in the middle and say no-one’s all good or all bad. I’ll go with them. He’s a character, he’s done some good stuff – but he was a foul comedian and, for the sake of a lot of women, I’m glad he’s been nabbed.
But however loudly the ‘carceral feminists’ cheer, there’s something missing, and it’s the most important thing.
Think of the girl, or the young woman, flirting a bit with a shining man – not necessarily a celebrity, but one who shines out as special in the social pool she moves in. She either knows, or is beginning to suspect, that men will always tell her she’s gorgeous, and that she’s made them go weak at the knees. They’ll assure her that they’re besotted, they’ve noticed something special about her… She knows she’s being led and yes, maybe she is being a drunken groupie – drunk on the illusion of power he gives her – but almost inevitably, she’s overwhelmed. He’s older and more confident, and probably larger and stronger than her. She’s walked into a trap, and he’s going to commit what to him is a minor demeanour, forgotten in half an hour – but one that may well leave her with a wound that’ll take decades to heal, if it ever does.
Feminists have been saying for some years now that obtaining convictions for rape is so difficult that the crime has been all but legalised. They are right, but even if most rapists were caught and contained, the problems women face would still not be solved. The solution would have to be nothing less than a serious movement by women and men, to highlight and dismantle the force running so deeply in our society – that thing that some of the very impressive women in organisations currently defending women’s rights cheerfully say does not exist. It exists, and it’s called ‘patriarchy’. It’s the culture that has, for a whole long age of this world, equated women with the desirable possessions that men fight for. It’s the culture that makes rape a weapon of war, that introduces kids to hard porn, that is unremittingly judgemental with girls whilst professional judges forgive male predators if they seem like nice lads with prospects.
Jailing a rapist is necessary, for the protection of the women around him but it doesn’t solve our systemic problem — it merely drops that dysfunctional male into an exclusively male, severely dysfunctional institution for a few years. He is not going to come out any better.
If we seriously wanted to destroy that force, we’d need to start by addressing the sex industry – the billions of poundsworth of business that weaves predatory sex into entertainment, politics and the drugs underworld. At the moment, it’s solely women’s groups working to close the industry and all its proliferating businesses.
But there’s something even larger and more pernicious than the fallout of the sex industry in the debates over Brand. No doubt he’s sitting somewhere right now feeling unfairly targeted, feeling as though he’s Pope’s ‘butterfly broken on a wheel’ and in a way, he’s right. For all the hard work it took that team of women to get him convicted, he’s a low-hanging fruit; a handy scapegoat patriarchy can afford to sacrifice. No politicians, no important CEOs, no drug barons or royalty will be dragged down by the fall of this jumped-up Essex lad, this freaky character who somehow managed to become rich and famous.
I remember associating him with Julian Assange, in that the media decided we shouldn’t like them, and so everyone very quickly pinned the same criticisms on each man – the very same words – with Assange, it was ‘ego’, with Brand, it was ‘narcissist’. I remember noting that both terms came from the Guardian, and that Medialens even included the two men in the same bits media analyses.
(and just to show off, I had them both in one line about media hyperbole in a blog in April 2014…)
Click here for blog article on Nils Melzer’s book
Two men the establishment wanted us to distrust. Feminists obediently singled them out for equal founts of hatred – although Assange was not a rapist, and did not get rich man’s protections. Brand did, up to a certain point…
…but thus far and no further. Pariarchy has allowed this one to fall, because he’s not a top-rank rich man.
Sexism, like racism and classism, is merely a tool of the arch-enemy, it’s the preferred weapon of those who have a firm grip on all the money and the real power so yes, although I’m glad he was convicted, I do feel a bit sorry for Brand, and I’m not going to start cheering until we see the big names from the Epstein files in court. Instead, I’m going to ask you to join the fightback against sexism, racism, classism and the anti-humanity powers that use them.
********************
Dear Reader,
Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.
You can make one-off or monthly payments by BACS to Mrs K Green, Sort: 07 01 16, Acct No: 43287058, Reference: blog
Or via Paypal…
Click here to donate via Paypal
Another great way to support this, and other independent blogs you read, is liking and sharing on social media, signing up for email updates, or by emailing a link to friends.
Cheers,
Kay
********************
