Cassandra Voices

Tag: Sarah Everard

  • A Few Good Men and Women

    In the wake of the murder by a police officer of the unfortunate Sarah Everard, and the ensuing justified anger, many media people were calling for “good” men to act more visibly in opposing violence against women. While I back 100% the calls made for “good” men to speak up, I am also concerned that the more general ideas of social equality are fast becoming reduced to a gender-specific proposition, having the potential knock-on effect of splitting the Left.

    This is not to diminish the seriousness of violence against women, but only to attempt to bring to light how the focus on gender equality may be impacting our perception of more general inequality, and how this apparent narrowing of focus risks being manipulated by those whose interests are not necessarily best served by social equality.

    While many women are exploited by many men, in the wider culture there are those still looking to keep wages low; rents and the cost of living high, while reneging on any social housing provision, who will look to spin the fact of female exploitation in order to capture the female vote to the service of their own particular brand of social exploitation.

    Spin

    In a recent tweet, Una Mullally, responding to Josepha Madigan’s dig at the Kerryman newspaper, suggesting the paper be renamed the Kerryperson, called this out for the cynical political ploy it was. Referencing her own Irish Times article of March 8th which predicted this type of play, Mullally described Madigan’s move as an awkward Fine Gael grab for the female vote, which, as things stand, may decide the next government, as it decided the referendum in 2015.

    But the main talking point in the past week has not been Fine Gael attempts to capture the female vote, but the more immediate mystery as to why “good” men don’t speak out against violence against women.

    Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times on March 16th said that in order for men to make a more overt stand against violence against women they must first learn to be shocked by that violence. At the moment, he argues, such violence all seems routine to most men. I wonder about that, since it seems to suggest that silence equals complacency equals broad approval.

    When you remove the particular instance O’Toole is referring to, that is, the emotive and highly charged question of violence against women, and replace it with say, general social inequality; you immediately already have an answer as to why “good” men appear to do nothing in the face of violence against women. The truth is, the majority of good men, and good women too, tend to remain strategically schtum on a wide range of problematical social issues until they see which way the political winds are blowing.

    Good Men

    Edmund Burke is reputed to have said that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.‘

    Burke wrote the line in a letter in 1770, which is more than a little while ago. The point being, the good men idea is far from being new. In fact, Burke’s quote needs updating, since at the time of his writing the realization of women’s suffrage was a long way in the future. An updated version would read: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and good women to do nothing.‘’

    So instead of posing the question, Why do good men do nothing, in such a way as to refer to a specific issue – in this case male violence against women – it is perhaps clearer to ask why do good people, regardless of gender, not raise their voices in say, situations where right-wing policy creates homelessness and subsequent deaths from exposure; or privatisation results in poor services and deaths due to cut corners and profit-conscious oversights? Why do good people not raise their voices en masse on these issues too?

    By the strict criteria of the “good” men concept as framed by Edmund Burke and others, we are all responsible, good men and good women alike, for homeless deaths, for direct provision deaths, for deaths caused as a result of medical privatisation, for domestic violence in all its guises and so on. Since this is a democracy, we all, strictly speaking, bear equal responsibility for the failings of democracy to deliver equal treatment to all. But these are difficult questions when applied to the real world.

    For instance, if you were an arts practitioner cosying up to Josepha Madigan when she was Minister for Arts, with a view to gaining favour and financial support for some project you had planned, are you complicit in Madigan’s rallying support to oppose Traveller accommodation? Or are the two issues compartmentalised? One being her political position and the other being her apparent social and class intolerance. Do you sacrifice your project to make a point, or do you compromise?

    Herds

    Along with such moral quandaries you also have the problem of the behaviour of crowds, which tend to behave like herds. Even politicians don’t really lead, they too follow the herd in the form of the public mood glimpsed in polls. Most people are spectators, going with the flow of the herd. We stand and watch the game until some critical mass is reached and then we raise our voices in support of whatever new majority appears to be on the rise. This works for every growing gang, from commies to fascists. A critical mass is reached and the herd follows. History shows that the herd will follow any old idea once this critical mass is achieved.

    Søren Kierkegaard, writing on this phenomenon, noted that an individual is worth more than a crowd of individuals, because an individual has personal agency, whereas a crowd tends to go with the flow of the herd. As a result, Kierkegaard comes to the conclusion that truth always belongs to the minority, since the majority tend towards unthinking obedience to the movement of the herd.

    It could be that now is the time where the issue of violence against women is to be embraced by the herd as an issue whose time has come. An issue for which good men are expected to speak up. But the point is, that apart from the particular issue, the question as to why do good people do nothing might be more properly considered in relation to a wider sense of social equality, encompassing all issues of social inequality.

    This applies equally to the politician allowing the market to decide the fates of those seeking housing, as it does to the person turning a blind eye to white collar corruption, or a man turning a blind eye to violence against women.

    Good Men and Good Women

    In this regard, for Fintan O’Toole to suggest that the evil of violence against women is exacerbated by good men doing nothing, is disingenuous at best, or is simply more political gamesmanship.

    Because the Irish Times also plays politics with notions of equality, quietly supporting right-wing Fine Gael policy through the manner in which it shapes and pitches stories, while always being first up with the property supplements when the market shifts, eager supporters of the housing Ponzi scheme, where the wealthy business class figuratively eat our young by selling them over-priced houses, while their political cronies refuse to enter into any believable form of social housing policy.

    Which begs the question, that when Fintan O’Toole is calling on “good” men to be more vociferous in condemning violence against women, is he referring to the same “good” men who remain silent in the face of social inequality on a more general level, keeping strategically schtum on a range of social equality issues, in order to ensure the perpetuation of a neoliberal status quo that is giving rise to social inequality in the first place?

    Conclusion

    All of this is not to suggest that the call for “good” men to raise their voices on the subject of violence against women is a wasted exercise; but only to point out that such a call to “good” men is not new; and furthermore, that by repackaging that call as an issue-specific moral imperative, while ignoring the same demand across a more general range of social equality issues, is to have the effect, whether knowingly or not, of splitting the Left by narrowing the imperative of social equality to a divisive gender issue, in such a way as to assist the project of the establishment parties and the elite they appear to represent.

    This will doubtless remain the situation until such time as good men and good women of all classes speak out against social inequality in all its guises.

  • The Terrible Truth about Sarah Everard

    Even after six days listening to the outpourings of grief, shock, and rage, about the kidnap and horrific murder of Sarah Everard in London; of how her life was scrubbed out, a beautiful young woman reduced to ‘human remains’ in a builder’s bag identifiable only by her dental records; even after story upon story hit the media of how women are attacked, abused, raped and battered, in every country, every week, every day; the words of Mairin de Burca, founder and creator of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970’s Dublin, stopped me in my tracks:

    ‘Sarah Everard wasn’t wiped off the face of the earth because someone wanted her jewellery, her mobile phone, the keys to a car or home. She was murdered because she was a woman and a man got pleasure from killing her.’
    Mairin de Burca

    The words were a gut punch. They also felt (horribly) true.

    Since forever in our Western culture women have been attacked but murders such as Sarah Everard’s surely mark new levels of depravity.

    Where is this depravity coming from? What is driving it?

    In one way the answers are so glaringly obvious it’s a measure of the robustness of the Patriarchal system that all of the drivers remain firmly in place: the Patriarchal system itself, the law as it stands, encompassing both police and judiciary, and pornography.

    Let’s take pornography. Instead of being closed down long ago for systematic civil rights abuses, called out for abusing children, trafficking women, cheer-leading sexual brutality against women 24/7, it is protected. It’s legal. It is also a massive money spinner.

    When I was researching Feminism Backwards I went back and had a look, where is porn at today. For those of you, like me, who haven’t kept up, you’re in for a shock. Where once porn meant large naked ladies with pneumatic breasts in Playboy mags, porn today involves the vicious sexual exploitation of women, is expensively shot, and is everywhere.

      

    ‘Before the internet’ as Michael Sheath, child sex abuse expert says ‘there was a ceiling on how much porn you could consume, maybe your dad had some; you had to go to a sex cinema to watch a film. It was limited in scope and there was a stigma on its consumption.’

    In 2021 porn dominates the sexual landscape like a horrible cancer. ‘Thanks’ to the internet it can be viewed anywhere, anytime. As Gail Dines professor, author and long time anti-porn activist says, in today’s porn ‘you will not see two people having sex, you will see images depicting a level of physical cruelty that would not be out of place in an Amnesty International campaign’.

    Porn has become truly vile.

    Young men, some starting as young as eight, will have watched thousands of hours of porn, many before they ever have a sexual relationship and porn is now the way most kids, particularly boys, get their sex ed., with every type of porn freely downloadable onto iPhones, tablets, laptops.

    So what, you might say. Porn has always been around. It’s just a bit of popcorn on the side.

    Wrong.

    Porn is no longer about eroticising sex, it is about eroticising extreme male violence against women. Porn sites such as ‘Gag me then fuck me’, ‘Anally Raped Whores’, ‘18 and Aroused’ indicate what’s on offer.

    As Dines writes ‘with mind numbing repetition you will see gagging, slapping, verbal abuse, hair pulling, pounding anal sex, women smeared in semen, sore anuses and vaginas, distended mouths and more exhausted, depleted and shell shocked women that you can count’. Young women routinely wrecked by being simultaneously anally, vaginally and orally penetrated, shouted at, whipped, spat at, splattered with male cum, are left with prolapsed anuses, ravaged vaginas and shattered self esteem.

    As Dr Fiona Vera-Gray of Durham University wrote in The Guardian last week, ‘This is not a problem of niche sites or the dark web, something only found by “bad men” actively searching for this content. This is mainstream pornography on mainstream sites with the mainstream message that sexual violence is sexy.’ With porn’s ever growing audience the brutality has to be endlessly upped.

    Porn, like a lot of other nasties, flourished during the neoliberal ‘boom’. As Feminism was reduced to consumable ‘Pink Power’, porn was pushed ever further into the mainstream. Modern ‘laddettes’ were deemed ‘up for it’, encouraged to watch it, even ‘normal’ women were seduced with films such as ‘50 Shades of Grey’, dubbed by the porn industry as ‘A Romantic Tale for the Porn Age’. Sugaring porn’s brutal edges with sensational clothes, stunning interiors, and A List actors, 50 Shades was basically a film that depicted in unbearable detail how to lure a lonely isolated child into ‘consenting’ to sexual abuse’ (Gail Dines). It grossed $570 million.

    As Gail Dines writes in her book The Pornification of Culture, porn’s favourite gags – the objectification of women, the sexualisation of women as girls, of girls themselves, the younger the better, has leaked into films, advertising shoots, video games, glossy fashion and fashion mags. As actress Kathy Burke’s character remarks acidly on Fashion’s love affair with ‘pre-nubiles’  in ‘Absolutely Fabulous’, ‘They’ll be chucking foetuses down the catwalk next.’

    Second Wave Feminist had few illusions about what porn was. It was ‘the scene of a crime’.  ‘Porn is the theory. Rape is the practice.’ (Robin Morgan, 1975).  Or as Andrea Dworkin wrote, ‘I live in a country (America) where women are tortured as a form of public entertainment and for profit, and that torture is held up as a state protected right.’

    Pretty unbearable right?

    Try flipping the picture and imagine an industry, estimated to be worth $97 billion, where adult women kidnap and traffic young boys, young men, even children, many of them damaged, survivors of incest or child abuse. The women then film the guys day after day being violently sexually assaulted by other adult women, whipped, beaten, gagged, penetrated with everything the ladies can lay their hands on, physically wrecking the guys physically and psychologically, all for the pleasure and gratification of other women worldwide and making the women at the top of this ‘business’ obscenely rich.

    Not so nice, huh?

    Would the male judges, male barristers, male politicians, male academics, male policemen still turn a blind eye?  Would they still argue that porn and it’s ‘consumption’ are an inevitable part of life and cannot be regulated, never mind stopped? That it is protected under Free Speech?  And that anyway it doesn’t affect real people’s everyday behaviour?

    Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Kylie Bax wearing a Playboy shirt, with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Melania Trump.

    In a week where in London a Metropolitan policeman savagely murdered a young woman walking home through lit streets, almost certainly tricking her into getting into his car by using his police ID, where another policeman guarding the site where her poor body was found sent obscene images ‘as a joke’ around his police mates, where another London policeman was released (today) without sentence after brutally attacking a woman, wrestling her to the ground in a headlock while screaming she was ‘a fucking slut’, where yet another policeman who had viciously killed the Mum of two he was having an affair with had his ‘manslaughter’ sentence reviewed because of the levels of injury to her, where a whole bunch of policemen brutalised women attending a peaceful vigil for the woman one of their mates had slaughtered, and that on the way home from that vigil yet another woman who ran to a policeman for help as a man exposed himself to her, was told to get lost, he wouldn’t deal with people attending the vigil, where in America this week six Asian women were shot down in two separate spas and the US sherrif said the shooter was ‘having a bad day.’ That he had a sex addiction and was ‘removing temptation’.

    I mean come on.

    If, as the porn industry is forever saying, porn doesn’t affect normal living why is it that violence against women is now a worldwide pandemic with two women killed every three days in the UK? Why is it that the police are not only ignoring women’s pleas for help, but appear to be actively involved in their brutalisation? Why is it that rape convictions are at an all time low? With only 1.5% going to trial? Why is it that in a rape case the victim is the only person in the court without legal representation? How in the name of god has it been deemed legal to force her to hand over, to the rapist and his legal team, all of her notes from counselling or therapy, if she’s been lucky enough to get counselling or therapy?

    It’s bullshit.

    With visits to Netflix, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter combined outnumbered by visits to porn sites, maintaining the nonsense that the porn industry doesn’t affect everyday would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Does the fashion business not affect normal life? Or the food business? Or the drinks business?

    Even as we become more ‘civilised’, more caring, more vegan, women are to accept porn’s violence against women, its endless, ferocious violation, without question, while the Justice System and the police stand by?

    With Sarah Everard’s terrible death at the hands of a policeman, who had, incidentally, four days previously exposed himself in a fast food restaurant, and shockingly was not demobbed, his badge, gun and car immediately removed, thereby saving Sarah Everard’s life, but was allowed to carry on, women’s anger has reached boiling point.

    This is women’s George Floyd moment. See what they are doing to us? Enough. Enough.

    The Patriarchy, and its porn addiction, are costing women their lives. Their latest victim is Sarah Everard. In her name. In the name of all women – Black, Asian, White – murdered and destroyed by men fuelled on porn’s poisonous meth, shut it down.

    In the name of us all, shut it down.