Whatever gets you through the night.
Social media has poisoned public discourse. I like Jon Ronson's work on the issue:
Along with the cult, one book in particular is often cited as particularly comforting to those in identity crises,
Revolt of the Angels by Anatole French. Published in 1914, it's available online.
The Jon Ronson talk is terrific. Very helpful for understanding the drivers and signs of public shaming.
I'm disappointed Russell Brand doesn't seem to have expressed concern about his alleged victims' experiences, which I feel would be consistent with the humane ethical positions he's assumed in recent years. Yet as Sea Salt & others pointed out, two things could be true at once here; abusive behavior by him in the past, and major societal forces using that now in an effort to shut him up.
I've compiled G. Greer's remaining relevant quotes, thought-provoking sometimes insensitive, from that 2019
Al Jazeera interview, mainly relating to the #MeToo movement which I think has much in common with Russellgate:
"if all it took was kicking ass and taking names and talking loud and drawing a crowd, then we might have got somewhere already. It’s not enough to denounce the abuse of women. I mean, think about this, the police, the New York Police Department has brought a criminal prosecution against Harvey Weinstein on three counts. One count of rape in the first degree, another count of rape in the third degree and then another, an account of a criminal act in which the woman who has complained of this is known to the public, that is, she’s associated with #MeToo. Now, you may say, “Who’s the first woman?” Well, we don’t know. Why don’t we know? Because her anonymity is being protected by the court. Now, this is kind of weird. I’ve been against that forever. I figure if you want to put a man away for seven years, show your face, don’t you, don’t be ashamed.
...They haven’t been victories for anybody. Sexual assault continues, abuse of women continues....Wait a minute, you’re persecuting a man in his 80s, who’s been offending for 60 years, what kind of a triumph is that?...We’ve got nowhere because the law is upside down, the law is if you pardon the expression, cock-eyed… The most important thing for it to do is defend the defendant against the malicious allegations of other people, and there is a legal obligation to do that …You’re talking about, “Oh, we need to concentrate on rape as a crime.” Now, most of the people in this country do not believe that non-consensual sex is rape. They think it has to be violent: wrong, it doesn’t. They think that it is uncommon, monstrous, done by outsiders...you will not find the millions of women who had non-consensual sex last night with their partners fronting up at the police station. It never happens. The longest struggle when it came to trying to rationalise the law of rape, which is a mess, was the one on whether it was possible to rape your own wife. That was not decided in some American states until 1994. But the fact is it hasn’t changed the law... there are many things that could be effective, but we won’t do them. I mean, we have teenage girls who have never had an orgasm, who have no idea why they’re even doing it because the pressure on them to have a partner is so great. Somehow, we have got to rescue the institution of hetero-sex from the mess it is in and that is partly brought about by pornography, prostitution, commercialisation and the cheapening of everything about a woman’s body...We are in an unsafe situation, we have unsafe convictions and we have other marauders like Harvey Weinstein apparently able to operate with complete impunity. Not because he’s who he is, but because he’s surrounded by people who are scared of him. This is, this is a much bigger problem. It affects all of us... there will be an appeal in the case of Cosby and you want to have him in jail – half-blind, in his 80s, after 60 years of doing what he’s been doing and you’re calling that a victory?...
this is not where the offences are being carried out. Stranger rape is very rare. Most women who are, who complain of sexual assault, know who their attacker was and is a friend of theirs and is a part of their circle... Look, we’re behaving as if Susan Brownmiller had never written her book on rape. And there she argues that men used the threat of rape to keep us all in continual submission, and that isn’t true. We are all made afraid of rape. And God knows why, because we’re more likely to be mugged than raped. But isn’t it strange, we’re not afraid of being mugged, we’re afraid of being raped and the chance of being? I was raped by a stranger and the funny thing was that I wasn’t even annoyed with him. I felt as if I’d stepped in the path of a bus. I still don’t know his name or else I’ve suppressed it, and it was nasty, you know. I was beaten half unconscious, so that’s about as bad as it gets, but would I want him put away for seven years?... Oh, for Christ’s sake, non-consensual sex isn’t always violent. You can have non-consensual sex with a woman who’s fast asleep without even waking her up. What world do you people live in? We’re not talking about bashing people up, we’re talking about really destructive sex where a man climbs onto his partner because she’s in the bed next to him. I’m actually passionately opposed to double beds, they’re probably more responsible for bad sex than any other single piece of furniture.... You’d better tell that [Rape is an inherently violent crime regardless of whether external visible injuries are sustained.] to the traumatised women who turn up for their rape kit examination who are penetrated again and again, who have blood taken, who have all kinds of liberties taken with them… it’s not about, it’s not about Harvey Weinstein masturbating in front of you. Believe me, that’s completely banal... of all the crimes in which injuries are sustained, rape is the least impressive. People get hurt all the time, it’s mad to pretend to a woman that a penis walking down the street is more dangerous than a knife, that’s just nonsense... Why do you think juries can’t convict? Why do they sit there listening to revolting stories and when it comes to the point, they can’t convict? One of the reasons for that is the extremity of the sentences. We’ve had them raised and raised and raised in the misbelief that women, more women, will complain and more juries will convict. The effect is the opposite... you haven’t got anywhere near enough prosecutions.... the crimes are not all the same and the outcome is not all the same....
I agree that women should come out and take names and talk loud and draw a crowd and ostracise the person who is behaving badly. I mean, I’ve been teaching in universities all my life and I know who the sexual predators were at the universities I was in and there’re many ways of abusing women, they don’t all involve the penis. In fact the penis is the only part of a man I know what to do with frankly... I think, there is a Maria Goretti aspect, which is, I was virtuous, I fought him off and he punished me by not putting me in the movie. And I’m thinking, “Somebody stitched that together for me. He is the executive director, investor in the movie he put the hard word on you, you said no, you didn’t get a part in the movie, how can you prove that the two things are related?” And the fact is, you can’t. This is, it’s what the world is about. People are negotiating, using sexuality and using vague threat and using promises that are fake …If you spend as much time working on rape as I do, you know that we’re not even allowed to call complainants victims, anymore. We have to call them survivors as if being raped was like the wreck of the Titanic. I’m just fed up with the whole thing...
It’s a very curious thing; I spent 1970 travelling in India, looking at how women lived, to see whether you could grow in authority and power and dignity as you got older, as you cannot in our society. Even Mrs Thatcher got slung out like an old rag and left government in tears, no man has ever had to do that. Then she had to go on the lecture trail while Tony Blair, the great liar Blair is rolling because he’s got so many directorships and seats on boards and so on and it’s always got me that we mostly identify with young sexually active women and we don’t think about what happens to older women. I mean, I went on Good Morning TV the other day and they were talking about, you know, misogyny and nastiness to women and I had to say, “Try being an old woman, everybody treats you like an idiot.”... I don’t believe that somebody can say to me, “You are not a woman, you’re a cis-woman, I’m the real thing.” I’m very happy to believe that men make better women than women do because we know from what it takes to turn you into a woman. We used to call it conditioning, nobody even mentions that anymore, where you learn how to dress, how to speak, how to love pink and all the other things that make you a girlie girl. We had to learn all of those things and they are fake, they are a masquerade....And now we have to accept the masquerade as the thing that is more real than we are at this point, as the author of the
Female Eunuch, I can’t do anything else....
Do you know one of the things that’s been happening over the course of my life is that women who had a raw deal when I started out are getting an even worse deal now, but nobody talks about it. You know, we can’t run maternity centres, they open and close like clams, women get sent hither and yon, we can’t explain miscarriage, so common, a catastrophe. Why don’t we understand menopause? Why don’t we understand …I’m being told that I’m being exclusionary because I’m not taking on board Caitlyn Jenner’s problems. I can’t take them on board, I’m too concerned about the woman who died in the back of an ambulance in, during a crisis of postpartum psychosis because they couldn’t decide where to put her, she should never have died.... I have had to listen to so much stuff about an issue that doesn’t interest me, I have been forced to talk about transgender as now, not once, not twice, but a thousand times and I think that the male to female transgender community is very good at talking about itself, very good at grabbing the headlines, appears all over the place and is caressed by all and sundry. That’s fine, go right ahead, but don’t expect me to join in, I’m not interested....
I’m forever attacking misogyny and trying to get people to believe or understand how pervasive it is and how unconscious it is and how children learn it from the time they’re small and I think I, I do understand about the lifelong state of abasement that can result from extended abuse from childhood onwards....when somebody tells me that you’re more likely to suffer PTSD as a rape victim than you are as a veteran of foreign wars, something has gone seriously wrong... the first thing that happens to you as a rape victim, is you get told that this has ruined your life, that this, you will never get over this.... We’ve already talked about the fact that rape is universal, rape occurs in practically in every house in the land, that non-consensual sex is everywhere and then you want to say and it’ll drive you mad and you’ll have PTSD, but I can’t be doing it.... You and I both know that [FGM] is not a simple question. That there are many different ways of doing the cutting and they have different significance in different communities. So we, this is not an easy question but what annoys me is that we decide that African women or whoever, from whichever community, may not do these things to themselves. violation of human rights] you’d better stop American women and English women from doing it... Let me explain to you, that the commonest operation on the female genitalia, in America, is the shortening of the labia minora, it’s practically the same operation and it is practised in great numbers...
I’m sorry to be crabby about this, but when Uma Thurman tells me that Harvey Weinstein, who was clearly her good friend, pushed her down somewhere and then tried to expose himself and generally gives the account that she was in danger but she escaped and I think, “He tried to expose himself? What stopped him? How does he go to the toilet? If he can’t work out how to expose himself?” Why did she give us this narrative, what does it mean?... the reason for naming them is that they could finance the whole thing, so far I’ve been told that there are civil suits being brought, but I haven’t found them and I do nothing but look for them.... If there’s anything I don’t want to be, it’s an icon. I grew up with holy pictures and I don’t want to be one, and I’ve never pretended to be one. I’m not speaking on women’s behalf, I’m trying to talk sense, especially in an environment where we seem to be talking a lot of sloganising nonsense.... Wait until something happens, I mean, signing hashtag MeToo, means nothing...
"If you hit the mark on the wrong target, you have missed" - Masanobu Fukuoka
