Manifestos for torturing men
Douglas Murray at the Spectator says there can’t be any sex any more because of all these women persecuting men for THE TINIEST THINGS.
We are in the middle of a profound shift in our attitude towards sex. A sexual counter-revolution, if you will. And whereas the 1960s saw a freeing up of attitudes towards sex, pushing at boundaries, this counter-swing is turning sexual freedom into sexual fear, and nearly all sexual opportunities into a legalistic minefield.
The phrase “sexual opportunities” is interesting. Often that’s the issue: the way some men see women in a work environment as “sexual opportunities” when the women are there to work and don’t want to be seen as “sexual opportunities” rather than competent colleagues.
The rules are being redrawn with little idea of where the boundaries of this new sexual utopia will lie and less idea still of whether any sex will be allowed in the end.
Don’t be schewpid.
But it is away from the law — tied up in the ‘#MeToo’ movement that followed Weinstein’s downfall — that the real revolution is happening. Accusations of genuine and monstrous abuse are being mixed with news that a cabinet member touched a woman’s knee many years ago. This week The Crown actress Claire Foy was forced to issue a statement saying she had not been offended after angry Twitter users pointed out that actor Adam Sandler had touched her knee — twice — during their appearance on The Graham Norton Show.
I don’t believe she was forced to. Who would have forced her, and how? He means she felt like it. She is free to say she doesn’t mind, and we are free to say that assuming women are fair game for casual touching is part of the problem.
A new generation is being encouraged to redraw the lines of acceptability in a way that goes too far. What once was gauche has now become unacceptable.
God, the smug blindness.
Yes, the people with more power considered sexual harassment merely “gauche,” but that’s the whole point. What’s “gauche” to the groper is not necessarily merely “gauche” to the gropee. Murray is talking as if the only point of view is the male one, and women are just objects – objects can’t have a point of view.
Foremost propeller of this is a form of modern feminism which is in fact barely disguised misandry. Take an essay from the sociology professor Lisa Wade, which argues that ‘We need to attack masculinity directly. I don’t mean that we should recuperate masculinity — that is, press men to identify with a kinder, gentler version of it — I mean that we should reject the idea that men have a psychic need to distinguish themselves from women in order to feel good about themselves.’ Or, as Lara Prendergast has noted in this issue, other women writers have taken it upon themselves to issue strict instructions for men on how they must behave. This ‘feminism’ isn’t producing guides for helping men. It is producing manifestos for torturing them.
By expecting them to treat women like fellow human beings as opposed to “sexual opportunities.”
requiring consent is not the same as torture.
It continues to astound me that this guy, and other men happily committing similar sentiments to writing, that anyone can read, can be so completely oblivious of half of humanity. I mean, particularly this line from your excerpt: ‘this counter-swing is turning sexual freedom into sexual fear’–what woman could possibly relate to this statement?
I HOPE most of the men I know and interact with acknowledge me as as human as they are…but after reading things like this I just can’t be sure, to be honest.
If you haven’t yet seen it, enjoy the wonderful Jo Brand educating the male panellists on Have I Got News For You last night. I expect Quentin Letts to be an unrecontructed dinosaur, but I was disappointed by Ian Hislop’s off-hand snarky remark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKdpZ-MKsQE
@Graham: Agreed. But in my book Ian does get a fair amount of credit[0] for immediately conceding the point, rather than getting defensive and doubling down.
[0] Not as much credit as he lost for making the point in the first place, granted, but a fair amount of it.
“[T]hat men have a psychic need to distinguish themselves from women in order to feel good about themselves” – As a man, may I say that this is a fine thing to reject? That, if a man needs to distinguish himself from women in order to feel good about himself, he’s got some disturbing issues about his self-image?
Granted, my own expression of sexual identity is best summarized as an indifferent shrug, but goodness – if you think you have to mark yourself off from womankind on a deep psychic level to be okay with you, you’re not right. You’re not supposed to be helped accomplish that – you’re supposed to be helped get over that.
And if your opportunities for sex all run into being a bit too close to rape and harassment, well, do please prepare for a long stint of celibacy while you revise your approach – much like those whose opportunities for money all run into legal problems regarding definitions of burglary, assault, kidnapping, etc.
Honestly, not being a jackass shouldn’t be that hard!
#5 beat me to it. I think the last time I felt something like a need to distinguish myself from women to feel good about myself was about 50 years ago, when I was going through the “girls are icky” phase (is that still a thing?). Somehow, I managed to grow out of it. Men like Murray are admitting that they’re permanently stuck at a single digit emotional age.
It’s baffling to me how many people (including none too few women) are working so hard against the idea that women should only have sex when and how they want to, and should be treated with respect in all situations.
It really annoys me that this is how the incident is described by practically everyone. It’s so dismissive. What actually happened is that he repeatedly put his hand on her knee, under the table, after she had asked him to stop.
Even so, it is seriously unlikely that incident alone would have led to the resignation of a cabinet minister, at least not so quickly. Other allegations are being made and at this point it seems virtually certain that there are more to come.
What is absolutely certain is that he didn’t just resign because he once absent-mindedly and “in different times” accidentally brushed his hands against a woman’s knee.
If only he were the “father of daughters” none of this would have happened….
Brand’s response was excellent.
I’m not defending Hislop – he’s said some idiotic things about women in the past – but it’s possible that his comment kind of came out a bit wrong in the edit. I got the sense that he was reacting to the headline “Tory MP takes his personal trainer to the cinema” which as and of itself as a headline isn’t particularly damning.
I don’t know the story behind that but presumably that was inappropriate. Hislop should have realised that. But anyway the charitable interpretation is that he was laughing at the seemingly incongruous headline. He did say “some of these” stories, of course, so I could be talking bollocks. Brand’s response was spot on either way.
‘…the idea that women should only have sex when and how they want to,’
That ‘sexual revolution’ would only have been real if that had been the starting point. As it was, all that happened was that antibiotics and contraception gave Bronze Age patriarchs more opportunities.
The injunction “Don’t grope women” is …torture? What a fucking idiot.
It doesn’t even have to be an injunction. A mere suggestion is apparently torture. “Guys, don’t do that”.
BURN THE WITCH! BURN HER BEFORE SHE DESTROYS THE HUMAN RACE’S ABILITY TO REPRODUCE!
How hard can it be? The boundaries of who, when, and how someone gets to touch (or otherwise control) someone else’s body get set by the person who owns the body.