In plain sight

An everyday tale of Russell Brand, rape and the pesky media (allegedly)

One of my lovely subscribers (well, he didn’t have any choice; I subscribed him and he hasn’t unsubscribed yet) responded to my opening post with a request: ‘PLEASE review Caitlin Moran’s book on men.’ So, of course, that’s what I’m going to do.

But two problems: one, I don’t read books. I haven’t finished one in years (and that could even be decades). I tell myself it’s because I read words all day long for my job (sub-editing news stories, proofreading and editing books and reports) and so the last thing I want to do for pleasure or relaxation is read some more (so I scroll my phone doing exactly that instead). The other problem: Russell Brand.

I have bought Caitlin Moran’s book on men, I’ve read a good half (maybe a third) of it, and was absolutely going to post on here about it and about another book that I’ve been dipping into on boys and men, so contrasting the two and questioning their central point: that boys have it harder than girls these days. Really?!?!

But then Russell fucking Brand (or Russell Brand fucking) came along. And a newsletter about men and our stuff can hardly ignore him (even though that’s exactly what the fucking narcissist wants: attention) and the fallout from the whole sorry and sordid affair.

So apologies to my lovely subscriber and to Caitlin Moran, who will both have to wait another fortnight (by which time I might have actually finished reading it, but probably won’t) for my thoughts on What About Men?. Instead, I’m going to explain what Brand has brought up for me this week.

Join the dots

Brand made me a) disgusted and b) roll my eyes. He made me think about an episode of the News Agents podcast that I heard back in April. I remember being struck by the way Lewis Goodall – the presenter and an excellent journalist – reacted to one particular story they were covering that day. He was interviewing the journalist Rachel Sylvester, who had just written a piece for The Times headlined: ‘Sexual assault, crude banter – what it’s like to be a female surgeon’.

In the piece Roshana Mehdian-Staffell, a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, told Sylvester of the years of misogyny, discrimination and sexual harassment she had experienced at the hands (literally) of male colleagues.

‘I’ve been sexually harassed lots of times,’ she said. ‘I’ve had people come into the sluice room [where waste is disposed of] and stand behind me and grind themselves on me.’

And Goodall was astonished. He referred to Sylvester’s ‘extraordinary piece’ and her ‘remarkable account’. ‘It’s happened to you many times in your career?’ he asked Mehdian-Staffel at one point with what sounded like incredulity. ‘People will be surprised, I think,’ he said of the revelations.

Surprised? Really? That men in positions of power and influence might treat women badly, or worse, to get their rocks off, to feel better about themselves, to protect the status quo? I was staggered. So just because surgeons are typically posh and older and professional they can’t be misogynists and abusers?

How many more ‘remarkable accounts’ from brave whistleblowers or of women victims do we need to read before we start to twig that maybe there’s a pattern here? Let’s think: Jimmy Savile and the music/TV/entertainment scene; Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood; Jeffrey Epstein and royalty; Crispin Odey (allegedly) and City money types; Wayne Couzens, David Carrick among many other police officers; MPs; footballers; and uncouth so-called comedians (allegedly) with self-diagnosed so-called sex addictions (allegedly) turned self-aggrandising conspiracy theorists who deny all allegations of rape and sexual abuse and emotional abuse vehemently. What can they all have in common?

Every time there’s a grim revelation or allegation of a man, a powerful man, using his power to get what he wants from a woman, we react with shock. How could that happen? When Couzens, a serving Met Police officer, was charged with and then convicted of the murder of Sarah Everard, after kidnapping her while she walked home, handcuffing her, raping and strangling her, and then dumping her body in a pond, there was a collective: What? An off-duty policeman could do that? Must be a random wrong ’un, a bad apple. Or if not that then the Met must be out of control; institutional sexism, misogyny etc. It must be reformed. Sack the commissioner.

And now there’s Russell Brand. So maybe not such a shock – after all, the Channel 4 Dispatches programme detailing the serious allegations against him was called ‘Russell Brand: In Plain Sight’.

‘Trial by media circus’?

But the allegations now made public by four women – that Brand raped, sexually assaulted or emotionally abused them, all of which he denies – have had a surprising effect. For many people, it seems, trial by media, or the intentions of mainstream journalists and their employers, is more worrying than Brand’s alleged conduct.

Weirdly, there was a thread on Mumsnet of all places entitled ‘Trial by media circus’ in which a poster asked (and I paraphrase): ‘Am I being unreasonable to think… this witch hunt… is abhorrent and flies in the face of justice’. As I write, 52% of the almost 700 respondents thought the poster was not being unreasonable.

Many replies made the point that the allegations against Brand should be best left to the police and the courts. The media (in this case The Times, The Sunday Times and Dispatches) must have an agenda (other than exposing alleged wrongdoing when no other authority or organisation is doing anything about it) and can’t be trusted.

The obvious problem with this argument is that so few rapes reported in England and Wales end in convictions. Of the 67,169 rapes that were recorded by police in 2022, only 1,276 resulted in charges being brought by the end of that year. That’s 1.9% of cases… fewer than 2 in every 100, according to Rape Crisis England and Wales, citing official statistics.

You think that’s shocking? Five of every six women who are raped (and 6.5 million women in England and Wales have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16) don’t report it to the police.

In thinking about all this I was reminded (again) of something I listened to a few years ago that absolutely blew my mind. I remember it so well partly because I was decorating our bathroom when I heard it… and that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me.

The state of men

I’d been following David Runciman’s podcast series called Talking Politics: History of Ideas. As I said, I’m not very well read and have long felt I’m intellectually lacking so this was perfect for me: 12 episodes, each explaining a major political philosophy in what was not a book. So ‘Tocqueville on Democracy’, ‘Marx and Engels on Revolution’, ‘Hayek on the Market’. And on this particular day, as I’m scraping mouldy paint off the bathroom ceiling, Runciman introduced “MacKinnon on Patriarchy” – and it made sense to me like few things have ever made sense in my challenged mind.

Catharine MacKinnon, an American lawyer, academic and radical feminist, wrote Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in 1989 and in it she explained how liberalism and Marxism and in fact every other ism that has attempted to provide a political framework for the way we live have failed. We, all of us, she said, have failed to address the fundamental injustice and imbalance that pre-exists all laws and rules and states and governments. That injustice and imbalance is the one between men and women. It underlies everything and unless and until it is addressed then the most liberal democracies and the harshest authoritarian regimes and everything in between are doomed to fail.

As Runciman says in the episode:

MacKinnon thought that basically the liberal state was the male state. It tried to conceal that by saying it wasn’t taking sides but as she says any woman who has tried to deal with the state knows that in not taking sides the state takes the man’s side because it is often made up of men. It sees the world as men see the world. And it calls it neutrality.

Wow. That’s it, I thought. So the liberal state, in our case the UK, cannot address the problem of male violence against women because men’s attitudes to women are baked in to the system. We (the state, our society, us) basically don’t care enough about it because we don’t think like women; we don’t see this (and so many other issues) the way women see them.

And women obviously know this, which is partly why they don’t go to the police when they have been raped. And this is why the Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, said: ‘Some victims tell me they find their experience in court worse than the offence itself.’ Because the court, and the police, is the state, it’s us. It’s men.

I’ll leave the last word to Roshana Mehdian-Staffell, the surgeon who’s lost count of the number of times men have treated her like … well, a second-class citizen? A plaything for their pleasure and gratification?

‘I love that there’s this enthusiasm for it [her whistleblowing revelations] being a watershed moment but I’m not holding my breath.’

Links

– Janice Turner, in The Times, as she so often does, sees things more clearly than most. In taking aim at the political and cultural left for its embrace of Brand, and The Guardian in particular for promoting and employing him, she said:

‘The merest whisper of racism or homophobia and Brand would have been shunned. But he was only offensive about women, so wilful blindness melded with political expediency and those who pride themselves in defending the vulnerable gave a cunning abuser a free pass.’

– Not to promote his autobiography in any way, but this from Brand himself (2007; serialised in The Guardian) on his supposed sex addiction:

‘Many people are sceptical about the idea of what I like to call "sexy addiction", thinking it a spurious notion, invented primarily to help Hollywood film stars evade responsibility for their priapic excesses…’

Hmm.

– And just for reference, the NHS currently advises:

‘Experts disagree about whether it's possible to become addicted to sex.’

– Will Lloyd, also in The Times, saw through Brand. He quotes him from a 2014 live show (a ‘Guardian Live’ event):

‘I want attention. I want women. I want drugs. I want food. I want, I want, I want. I exemplify the problems of our culture . . . I’m a viciously authoritative, controlling man.’

And, Lloyd wrote:

‘An audience of sweet left-wingers in knitwear giggled and applauded.’