“In this world nothing can be said to be certain,” - an American statesman once wrote in a letter sent to France - “except death and taxes.” Death, taxes, and as any of his female contemporaries might have told him, men’s bloody violence: the threat of which hums a constant background drone in the lives of all women, training our awareness, squeezing our freedoms, and sending us always the long way home through busier, more well-lit areas, away from wooded parks, keys poking out tight and wary between our knuckles.
I watched the Channel 4 Dispatches program about Russell Brand: In Plain Sight, like so many others did, with a stomach full of knots; my shoulders set in a rigid state of dread for what was to come - braced not only for each further revelation, but as well the wider fall out. Because for every Russell Brand, for every Harvey Weinstein, for every Bill Cosby, there is always a major blood letting. Not of men, but of women, who in the triggered and desperate hope that this time the needle will finally move, share their darkest secrets and disclose their howling pain until we are all of us red raw. Afterwards will see all manner of performative horror, of earnest reflections on those terrible times, and promises made that this time – this time - lessons have been learned. And then, once we have all exhausted ourselves, it will be back to the same old dirty business as usual: men with power and pizzazz continuing to do exactly as they please while women quietly lug around their ten ton bags of shame. Or else scream blue murder at a blank stone wall.
Still, in those earnest reflections, we congratulate ourselves. We cast our eyes back at the particular flavour of misogyny that imbued those terrible times and tut. In the late 90’s and the Noughties, when Brand was a regular fixture on the comedy circuit, it was lads, lads, lads and their mags: Zoo, Nuts, FHM and the like. Zoo indeed! With half naked women on the cover, presented as little more than animals in cages for men to gawp at!? Women did complain at the time that these magazines were being displayed on supermarket shelves in full view of small children. Of course, that couldn’t happen now. We would not allow it, not in 2023. These days we are far more enlightened.
We are not. Spared the soft porn on supermarket shelves, our children now watch violent, hardcore pornography on their smart phones. They watch it on the bus on the way home from school. Now our boys coerce their female classmates into sending them “nudes,” only to share them with their friends. They upload them to Pornhub where her father may see them on his occasional furtive browse through the ever popular ‘teen’ category. Tram lines that once lay parallel are diverging ever further apart: on one side societal awareness of misogyny and its impact grows, while the other veers further away into darkness. And when the next decades scandal breaks, as it surely will, and we come to look back at now, we will point the same, shaky, horrified fingers and cry at the inevitability of it all, while ignoring completely the current depths of misogyny to which we will have sunk.
It is a cycle; a treadmill, and on and on it goes.
Go to any 12-step meeting, anywhere across the globe, and no matter the drug of choice: booze, cocaine, slot machines, whatever, it will always end in the same way - with the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It is a good prayer, I think, or statement of intention if one is an atheist and prefers to put it that way. Simple, but not necessarily easy, the third part of course being the kicker. The wisdom to know the difference can be an elusive bastard.
That men abuse and exploit women sexually, physically and domestically, has become naturalized to such an extent that to suggest change is even possible can sound, to some, faintly ridiculous. It is a simple enough suggestion, that men might simply stop it, yet never fails to raise an incredulous stare. What do you mean, stop it? Why, now you are just being silly.
Men. So powerful and yet such hapless creatures, they rule the world yet cannot - we are expected to believe - rule themselves. Having conspired to dominate all political and public arenas, and finding themselves overrepresented in all areas of social, judicial and political power, when it comes to their baser urges, they apparently cannot help them.
Women, it seems, must step into the breach. When faced with such pre-programmed beasts who cannot possibly be expected not to harm others, for whom violence is in the blood, we are suddenly and magically empowered. Any relative lack of representation, power, social standing and brawn can be swept aside in an instant, replaced with the understanding that any reduction in the incidence and harm of men’s violence is now down to those of us that can control themselves. We, not they, can make it stop by doing such things as always going the long way home through busier, more well lit residential areas, keeping away from wooded parks, and holding our keys tight and wary between our knuckles. By not drinking too much, or even at all. By avoiding the likes of Russell Brand, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, as well as our own fathers, boyfriends and bosses. By going straight to the police. By never leaving our homes. By covering up. By not being too friendly, nor (we might quickly add) too hostile. By shrinking ourselves ever smaller in service to a world that is as it is, and by cultivating the serenity to accept the men we cannot change.
It is a dim view to take of men though, and of the world in general. After all, if it is only natural for men to abuse and exploit women, then it is only natural for women to be abused and exploited: our own degradation and defeat simply natures way. Viewed through this lens the collective, angry response to the Dispatches program makes scant sense. If women have evolved to be victims of rape then why should we be so devastated when it happens, by even the recounting by an actor of another woman’s experience? Why seek justice at all? If men can help it then they should, but if they really cannot then punishment and social sanction would surely be a questionable response.
Let’s imagine instead that things are not as they are due to the natural way of things, but because of the way in which things are set up. That men took some undeniable facts of sexual difference and built an entire story of gender and system of exploitation around it that suited them; that created a world in which they would come to view women primarily as sexual and domestic servants, and along with that a narrative that their violence against us was not deliberate and designed to reinforce our subordinate status, but natural and inevitable. That it was women, not men, who were responsible for preventing it, and that women often lied or exaggerated and were not to be taken seriously anyway. Let us imagine, for one moment, that this system could not ever hope to be changed by forgoing that last G+T and taking the long way home.
Imagine too that men are fully realized humans capable of choice who therefore choose to cling to the stories and systems they have created because it suits them. Because it reinforces their power. Because it keeps women down. Because women, as givers of life and birthers of the next generation, are too frightening to let loose. In this way we reimagine feminism, not as a vehicle for misandry, but as the only political movement that actually believes in men’s capacity to change – the only political movement that views men as entirely redeemable.
The courage to change the things we can requires not only courage, but a sense of moral responsibility. Which sounds perhaps a bit high falutin, but God loves a tryer and so do I. And more than anything I want to break this cycle; to finally force that needle to move; to effect radical change. I want never again to sit with my stomach in knots while news of another Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, or Russell Brand breaks, or to hear the myriad excuses trotted out on their behalf and the insistence that unless women are prepared to pursue justice through a system that consistently fails them, they’ve no right to speak at all.
Certain as death and taxes though, a male dominated society riddled with misogyny will remain like a production line, continuing to churn out men like Brand. Those men will keep on doing what they have always done, not because they cannot help it, but because there is little incentive for them to stop. We do not know how a society in which women were afforded equal freedoms and dignity would look, but let us imagine: a society in which men are consistently and appropriately punished for their sexual violations of women; in which women can expect to see justice. In which horror and disgust at these kinds of life shattering crimes mean men found guilty would forever suffer consequences. A world in which women can expect to have their allegations believed and properly investigated by an effective, unbiased police force, where they would be given the proper support and care they need to see the judicial process through. In which they can expect, in court, to be treated with respect and decency and not to be blamed and traumatized further. We have never lived in such a society that has taken a sledgehammer once and for all to the myths designed to shame victims into staying silent, that has put all the responsibility for rape onto the shoulders of perpetrators where it belongs. A society that refuses to laugh at men’s lewd and sexist jokes, or to reward men either professionally or socially who treat women with callous disdain.
This is the society I hope for, and you will prize my hope out of my cold dead hands. For the sake of women everywhere, and for potential future victims, why don’t we just try it.
Brilliant as ever Jeni - but it’s beyond depressing that this is what we were saying, pretty much, back in the 70s. So hard to accept that we’re having to explain, all over again, how socialisation works and that being species sapiens means we are capable of thinking and choosing to do things differently. And that means, yes, that men can change, and create change.
Wildly cheering!