Pranks and Prejudice: Littlejohn versus Christian and Greig

Michael Christian and Mel Greig, in case you've forgotten, are were recently most evil disc jockeys in the world, because they took the piss out of the Royal Family via a prank call to a nurse, Jacintha Saldhana, who subsequently killed herself. That they lost that not-so-coveted position is probably more due to the role of most evil DJ being suddenly and comprehensively taken over by a more deserving candidate, of course. Julie Burchill got herself similarly shoved off the winners' podium in the Great Transphobic Stakes this week by the thoroughly loathsome Richard Littlejohn, again a far more deserving candidate for the post.

It can seem, sometimes, as though gobbing off is a worse crime than actually picking up a lump of wood and having at someone.People who say things, write things, draw things, sing about things in ways which are 'offensive' can get vilified or punished far more than some of the people who actually assault or kill others. The sentences given to Justin Lee Collins and Matthew Woods in the same week would bear that theory out, as I said at the time

On the whole, I've always been on the side of the writers and the speakers and the artists when the views they have expressed have upset someone or other - even if the views expressed have upset me. However obnoxious someone's views, I believe in their right to hold and express those views, and have always maintained that the best way to deal with the public airing of ignorance, bigotry, misinformation or propaganda is to allow room for the equally public countering of such stuff. When something bad happens, someone somewhere always starts insisting that censorship of some kind is the way to stop it happening again, but this is never, ever true. Censorship doesn't stop spite, it doesn't stop ignorance, and it doesn't stop violence.

Holding Greig and Christian responsible for Jacintha Saldhana's death was always ridiculous and wrong. They had no intention of hurting her, certainly no intention at all of driving her to kill herself: they were thoughtlessly pratting about with little or no malice attached. Julie Burchill's notorious rant against transpeople was a piece of fuckwitted bigotry but still only the expression of an unpleasant opinion. Richard Littlejohn's piece about Lucy Meadows, on the other hand, almost certainly led directly to her death. He may claim that he didn't want her to die, but he certainly wanted her to suffer. He wanted her to lose her job, leave her home and be shunned by her community. He said so, in his piece.

There was no justification whatsoever for publishing that piece in a national newspaper. Lucy Meadows wasn't a celebrity, she wasn't a criminal, she wasn't a campaigner seeking recognition for a cause, just someone trying to get on with her life. Her story wasn't 'news'. It had no relevance to the vast majority of  Daily Mail readers, apart from feeding their prejudices. But the publication of that story, according to emails she sent to friends, pretty much killed her by making her life unbearable. Not only were the press hounding her and her family and friends, but enough identifying information was given in the police to allow every knuckle-dragging keyboard warrior in the country to track her down and bombard her with abuse.

Before writing this post, I did a bit of googling based on a vague memory of there being a crime of Malicious Publication ie making someone's private life public for no good reason. Unfortunately, I'd remembered it wrong: at the moment, you only have legal redress if what is published about you is untrue. There should be a law against publicising the details of anyone's personal life for no reason other than to insult or mock them when the person has not in any way sought attention or publicity. The implementation of something like that might be a fitting memorial to Ms Meadows. Well, that and and end to the idea that transpeople are the minority it's OK to hate and laugh at, just because you think they're not like you.

Rape Myths: what are they good for?

In the light of the BBC's recent helpful reminder to the rest of us that men's reputations matter more than women's safety - the DPP announced that false accusations of rape are actually quite rare, the Beeb reported this by yowling and yammering about how awful it is to be accused of rape when you haven't done it. Well, yes it is, though I would venture to say that it's probably a bit less awful than, you know, actually being raped.

Rape myths, however, they can't be that awful, because so many people seem to love them so much. In some cases I can see why: the myths around what kind of women get raped function as a kind of magical talisman to many women. If rapists pick on provocatively dressed, drunk, flirty women who walk home alone, the fairytale goes, then by staying sober, covering up and never going out unaccompanied by your male owner, you will be protected from rape. It's understandable to want to believe that if you are Good and Careful and Obedient, bad shit won't happen to you, but unfortunately it's stupid and wrong. Bad shit happens to Nice Girls all the time. Bad shit happens to nice people through no fault of their own, all the time.

The myths surrounding false accusations are a bit more problematic, though. Yes, sure, there are cases of mistaken identity, when the attacker was a stranger and the police pick up someone of a similar physical appearance, or when the victim is too frightened of the real assailant to name him and therefore accuses someone else. Being falsely accused of a crime is a dreadful thing to experience, especially if the crime is an unusually nasty one, to the extent that being accused of it puts you at risk of vengeance from the victim, the victim's family or indeed the local self-righteous hate mob. People wrongly accused of crimes have every right to battle for a public acknowledgement of their innocence, no problem with that. But this insistence that women are always, or at least nearly always, or at least loads and loads of times, really lying about rape, that's a bit more worrying. 

Sometimes, no one wants to believe a man's a rapist because he's Such A Wonderful Man. Charming, friendly, good-looking, wealthy... Does a lot for charity. Give me a J, give me an I, give me a double M - you can see where that one's going, can't you? I think that sometimes people who want to believe that a woman accusing a popular, successful man of rape must be lying are simply not wanting to doubt their own judgement. They like or even love the man, they would have known if he was a rapist, how could they be wrong about him? Underlying this is also, perhaps, the unspoken assumption that a Wonderful Man is actually entitled to have sex on whoever or whatever he wants, because he is important, and the victims are less so, with the real bottom line being that they are only women, after all. They must be jealous, or mad, or money-hungry, or something else wicked.

The nastier myth is that women accuse men of rape after sex because they are stupid, vengeful or don't know their own minds. A woman will claim to have been raped if the man didn't want to see her again, or went back to his wife, or didn't give her an orgasm, or because she doesn't want people to think she's a slut, or because she was drunk and now she's thinking it wasn't such a good idea to have sex with him - so goes this myth. And it's entirely misogynistic, because it portrays women as desperate, spiteful idiots who are incapable of having sex for the sheer enjoyment of it but use it as a form of currency and then want the equivalent of their money's worth. The thing is, women generally know the difference between crap sex and rape. We've often had crap sex with men - sometimes he promised undying love right up until the moment he took the condom off and then all of a sudden he wanted to go home, sometimes we did get a bit pissed and shag the bloke from the kebab shop when we shouldn't have, sometimes he was just a really rubbish shag and farted all the way through the performance while calling us Mummy or something. But that's just crap sex, we shrug it off, learn from it if necessary and move on. It just seems very likely indeed that the sort of men who insist that women are lying about rape because they can't tell the difference between assault and unsatisfactory sex are the men who are actually raping women and don't see why they should be held accountable for doing so.

(I haven't put any pictures on this one. Maybe you'd like to find yourself some Lolcats or something to lighten the mood a little, the Interweb is not short of them...)

Rape Myths: what are they good for?

Bunch of arse - or not?

Yes, I changed the profile picture. Yes, it used to be a picture of my arse, and I decided to remove it.

Oh please, put your tissues down. It was just an arse, and a clothed arse at that. And a very old pic, taken as a favour one night in the old studio around the inception of the very wonderful SharkInfestedWaters website, though I have a feeling the particular image was destined for use on a flyer for a club I was then running. The picture later got re-used as a book cover.

Yes, it was about the only useful and appropriate picture I had handy. And, for a book about shagging, well, it's a picture of an arse, in PVC. And, for a while, for a blog which is, if not about shagging then about sexual behaviour and erotic fiction (when not ranting about general politics, feminism, atheism and market trading) that was also a useful and appropriate picture. 

Only I've gone off the idea of waving my arse at people in a general sort of way. For one thing, I don't want to perpetuate the idea that every woman into kink really really wants to bend over and wave her arse at Her Master. I'm a top, end of. So until I can manage to coordinate a photoshoot of me doing something fiendish to some fit bloke's arse, profile pics will consist of items from the stock cupboard.

And speaking of which, if you fancy buying the book depicted above, please do! It's not a bad little effort even though it's over 10 years old and Of Its Time ie issues that could have been solved by Googling have to be solved by other measures and all that.

Authenticity and the Wank Break

I spend a certain amount of my time pointing out to people that sex is just another recreational activity, and that it's stupid to insist that everything to do with sex has to remain in the ghetto called SEX and be treated as  different, special, dangerous, etc. While it's not at all unreasonable for people to get outraged about the exploitation and shitty working conditions some sex workers experience, it's stupid to insist that the sex industry should be totally banned on the grounds that people within it are mistreated while ignoring the abuse and suffering that goes on in the catering and clothing industries. And no, I'm not whining about being forced to work late and poop-scoop for the creative director's chihuahua if you're a junior fashion PR, I do mean the child labourers locked in their factories sewing pictures of cartoon characters onto jackets for pennies a day, and the cockle pickers who drowned at Morecambe. We should all try to make sure that our pleasures come from a reasonably ethical source, at least as much as we can afford.

When it comes to fiction-writing, though, there's one bit of received wisdom that does seem to make sex a bit of a special category, and that's the wank break. I doubt I invented the concept, but I have certainly peddled it a fair bit over the years. It's this: if you are writing erotic fiction, and you finish a piece of erotic fiction without having stopped for a wank or at least really, really wanted to do so, then what you have written probably isn't very good.

(pic nicked at random off the interweb)

I still think it's true, of course: if you've written an entire erotic story and not had the faintest urge to put your hand in your pants or go and grab a nearby playmate then your story is not likely to be all that erotic. Erotic fiction is still the baby of fiction genres, which means that every unpublishable cash-hungry buckethead thinks that/s/he could 'churn some out' to make some money, and they are all completely wrong. Writing good erotic fiction is like writing good fiction of any kind: you have to care about it and enjoy it or it's going to be unreadable crap. It might, of course, be unreadable crap even if you care a lot, but it won't be as unpleasantly unreadable as the stuff produced by people who really don't care about a word they have written.

Fiction should engage you, make you think, make you care, make you want to do... something. And it's only right that good erotic fiction should make you want an orgasm - but it probably isn't the case that good crime fiction should make you want to go and kill somebody. I used to make faces at the people who asked me if I'd personally done all the sex acts I wrote about, and ask them how many people they thought Agatha Christie or Ruth Rendell or Sara Paretsky had killed while they were writing their (good, honest, satisfying) books. That's probably the only argument in favour of treating erotic entertainment as a special category that I haven't yet found a counter to.

The Stupidity Factor

I used to have what I considered a fairly good list of Stupidity Indicators. Paying money for homoeopathy, believing something was true because it was in The Sun, insisting that Angels by Robbie Williams was  the most moving and beautiful song ever recorded, all those were fairly high on the list. Doing any of those things were likely to make you a person I wouldn't terribly want to be friends with. You'd have to have some outstanding other qualities to compensate.

But this week, I'm thinking of recalibrating that index, as this week has scored nearly as high in terms of blatant, unashamed mass stupidity than the week Diana forgot to do up her seatbelt. I'm not even sure what order to put these demonstrations of fuckwittedness in, except to say that no one who's bought into any of them is someone I'd be able to keep as a friend, on Facebook or in the flesh. Eeny meeny miney moron, let's start with B for Bulger.

If you 'shared' that photo on Facebook, you are not just stupid, you are malevolently, dangerously stupid. What you did was horrible. There are, apparently, at least two photographs going the rounds. Of different people. They can't all be Jon Venables or Robert Thompson, and it's quite likely that none of them are. This means that at least two, if not more, individual men of a certain age who may be secular saints, innocent even of overstaying on a parking meter, are now identifiable to deranged vigilante mouthbreathers and knuckledraggers and in danger of being assaulted or killed on the grounds that they are 'child killers'. 
In an interesting aside, the story of the traumatized paediatrician so often mentioned when less-stupid people worry about mob hysteria is itself massively exaggerated. But that's probably because it's neater and more cartoonish than exploring the cases of individuals attacked, killed or driven to suicide after being mistakenly identified as child-abusers. Or, indeed, the  Maxine Carrs, victims of a preposterous hate campaign against a woman whose only actual crime was to tell a lie.

You might just want to hate Heather Frost, a cancer patient who looks after her grandchildren, along with her own younger children, so her adult children can work. But she dyes her hair, you see, and has 11 children,has had sex with more than one man in her lifetime, and is being rehoused in one of a number of properties being built according to green energy specifications - a house that suits her needs and frees up a couple of other council houses for other families. Branding her a 'dole queen' and revelling in the chance to bring out your inner misogynist might distract you from the real housing crisis, which came about due to a combination of selling off and not replacing the stock of council homes, and the frenzied speculation of buy-to-let which fucked the private rental market by filling it with greedy speculators who couldn't cope with being landlords. Nothing like digging up a highly unusual situation ie a very large family and using it to insist that the poor should be punished for poverty, rather than addressing issues such large corporations not only dodging tax but paying slave wages and stropping that the poor 'won't work'.

Perhaps the last stupidity Red Flag is the least worrying in that it's a matter of opinions being aired and condemned, though the number of people who wield a lot of power but aren't even capable of reading an article before screaming for the author of said article to be punished is scary. Actually, it's perhaps the scariest stupidity indicator of the lot because of who has tested positive for utter, utter stupidity on the issue.
Yes, this is Hilary Mantel VS Kate Windsor. Here's the actual piece. An intelligent and compassionate essay on royalty, media and myth-making that has been turned into Jealous Fat Cow Attacks Goddess by people who wield a lot of actual power but can't be bothered to fact-check. What does that say to you about how much the likes of David Cameron and Ed Milliband can be trusted to know what they are talking about?

So the next time you are getting your undies in a bundle about something someone told you in the pub or shared on Facebook or pointed out to you in the newspaper, before you pass it on, why not actually look into what you're passing on? And think about it a little? Because having your friends point and laugh at you for being a gullible fuckwit might only be the beginnin.

Minor Erotic Writer Fail

Back in the days of the Guild, when erotic writing was on all of our minds a lot, we used to discuss the way in which almost every experience could be turned into some form of erotic story. I have, admittedly, long maintained that there is nothing in this world that someone, somewhere, wouldn't want to have a wank over, and I say this as a former reader of erotic fiction submissions who is still haunted by the Bloke With A Thing About Teatowels. Whose manuscript was illustrated with little drawings of... oh go on, work it out.

(image 'borrowed' from seller of fabric items)

And I did also have a bit of a chat with the Countess at the weekend over where and how Stuff turns into Stories, and it's not just a matter of 'Oh, I'll put you and your entourage of naughty boys into a book, because there's all  these filtration processes and clever stuff wot I does and all that...' It is, in fact, quite entertaining to look back at a piece of work and pick out the odds and ends that almost unconsciously made their way in there.  But I'm going to have a job putting this week's experiences into a horny one-handed read, I think.

Basically I have been, very briefly, in hospital, and I am now utterly baffled by medical fetishists. I couldn't find anything arousing at all in the blue pyjamas and nylon hats most of the staff were attired in. And, as a top in BDSM terms, I'm not wild about being chopped into and given pain, even if the drugs were pretty damn good. I suppose if I ever decide to have another go at horror fiction I might utilise the Walk of Doom, where you follow a medical professional down endless corridors, in your barearse nightie and your own slippers, to the place where you will be laid on a bed and operated on, but it's probably been done already. 

Though the main gripe I really had about the whole business was the lack of anything good to read once my own choice of literature (a fairly lame bit of vampire romance, since you ask) had been locked away. Four month old Mail on Sunday supplements, leaflets on incontinence or planning your funeral, or the final horror: Hello magazine. I think perhaps I should gather together some of my stock of out-of-print erotica by other people and donate it to the local day unit. Or, if I have to go back in there again, maybe I should try to think of this poor chap.

(image found somewhere on the web and used by someone else taking the piss out of it)