Whingeing on Steroids

by Les May

SEXUAL harassment of female performers at the Edinburgh Fringe is a problem, or at least the BBC would have us believe so.  If this was a serious news item whoever put it together might have found a couple of better and more convincing interviewees than we were offered.

The first complained that when she offered a flyer for her show to three young men they said they would only take it if she put her phone number on the back. Shocking isn’t it?

I could have said that she ‘accosted’ three young men out for a stroll down the Royal Mile and tried to press on them an advertising flyer, which would have been an equally correct version of what happened.

The second complained that a gentleman of mature years had approached a police officer about the amount of flesh being shown by her and the other women in her troupe who had built their performance around something to do with the #MeToo ‘movement’.  So that’s alright then.

Seemingly the police officer concluded that the troupes costume, or possibly lack of it, did not transcend the bounds of public decency and sent them on their way.   The complainant said that the actions of the man who approached the policeman amounted to ‘harassment’.

Both these women were whingeing aided and abetted by the BBC. 

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The Silent Sisterhood

by Les May

Asia Bibi

THERE’s a pub in Slaithwaite, or ‘Slawit’ as the locals call it, by the name of ‘The Silent Woman’. I imagine it has done a roaring trade recently as all feminist journalists and politicians hide there in case someone should chance to raise with them the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who has fallen foul of Pakistan’s draconian, but vague, blasphemy laws.

A year ago the Twitterati were obsessing about the self promoting #MeToo movement; Harriet Harman was in full flow demanding anonymous ‘hot lines’ so that supposed male miscreants could be ‘outed’ and Clive Lewis was being pilloried by MPs Stella Creasy, Yvette Cooper, Jess Phillips, Mims Davies, Justine Greening and Guardian journalist Nadia Khomami, about something he said, which none of them actually witnessed.   More recently Boris Johnson was being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ for a comment about some women wearing burkas.

So what have this self righteous bunch had to say about the Asia Bibi case?  Not a lot it would seem.  Whilst they are keen to promote the idea that western women are living in fear of walking down the street in case some man wolf whistles at them, makes some tasteless remark or just says something they don’t like, a poor Pakistani woman who has just had her sentence overturned after eight years in jail with the prospect of death by hanging to look forward to, has been abandoned to her fate by these supposed liberals.

If anyone in this world is a victim it is Asia Bibi.  She picked up a drinking cup belonging to a Muslim woman and was accused of ‘polluting’ it simply by being a Christian woman and hence ‘unclean’.  An argument followed and lead to her being accused of blasphemy.   First she was beaten up by a mob which broke into her house, then she was charged with blasphemy, found guilty and sentenced to death.   This was upheld by a higher court.   Last week this sentence was overturned by the Pakistan Supreme Court which said the women who had made the accusations against her were lying.

What followed was that mobs demanding she be hanged rioted for several days doing what has been claimed to be £900 million of damage.  Imran Khan, the prime minister, struck a deal with the rioters that she would no be allowed to leave the country until the verdict had been ‘reviewed’.  Forcing her to stay in a country where tens of thousands of people want to kill her is inhumane.  Her lawyer has left the country in fear of his life.

I am normally very reluctant to resort to the word ‘racism’ to describe someone’s attitudes or beliefs, but I cannot help noticing that Asia Bibi is a poor, brown, ‘asian’ woman and the women who do the shouting about ‘misogyny’ are affluent, white and western.

The failure of these women to use their positions to draw the attention of the British public to Asia Bibi’s plight is difficult to explain unless they simply do not care, don’t think it will raise their profile in circles which will help them in their career or are afraid that they will be accused of ‘Islamophobia’.

There is one bit of good news. Heywood and Middleton MP Liz McInnes has written to the Minister of State, Mark Field, about this case and asked him to encourage his colleagues at the Home Office to consider the religious elements of this matter before making decisions on asylum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Bibi_blasphemy_case

Germaine Greer on 'Bad Faith' & 'career rapees'

An anthropological approach to rape in society

by Brian Bamford

YESTERDAY Germaine Greer argued on Radio Four's 'TODAY' program that we need to look at how the rape narrative is tackled and defined in society, and what this tells us about the treatment of women today.  She said, among other things, when asked to define her stance on #MeToo, Ms Greer declared: ‘I don’t actually think it’s gone too far, I don’t think its got anywhere at all.'

She then added:  ‘What we need is to sort out the law regarding rape and to sort out our concept of what it is.
‘It’s pointless now bringing up this stuff when [for] most of it no action can be taken.
‘Why wait 20 years?’

She of course neglected to concern herself here with the treatment of men or boys in society.

 Cambridge House & the abuse of boys

And yet, I live in Rochdale where it was at Cambridge House in November 2012, that the issue of the exploitation and abuse of boys by Cyril Smith in the 1960s was initially reported on this NV Blog and simultaneously on the Westminster Politics Home website.  A few hours later Simon Danczuk made his speech in the House of Commons (an earlier story about this in 1979 in Rochdale's Alternative Paper [RAP] had been squashed by a threat of legal action by Cyril Smith's solicitor).

Rape & Jean-Paul Sartre on  'Bad Faith'

Ms. Greer told listeners to Radio Four that #MeToo doesn’t work:  ‘I don’t actually think it’s gone too far, I don’t think its got anywhere at all.
‘What we need is to sort out the law regarding rape and to sort out our concept of what it is.’

To understand this better perhaps we should consider the nature of bad faith and exploitative behaviour in human relationships generally.  Ms. Greer talks about women who 'open their legs' to gain career advantages from Harvey Weinstein

In the North it was in the 1970s and 80s, and may still be, a common practice for women to hang around in  pubs using their charms in order to get men to buy them free drinks, and one (perhaps I should say second generation feminist) use to complain to me about these working-class women who boasted about it as she thought it was 'disgusting' and anti-feminist.  When I went working in London I worked with men in the sugar refinery in Hammersmith who used to chat-up women in clubs and when the women went to the toilet they would tell me how they would empty their handbags. 

Dealing with bad faith in a way which seems to relate to what Ms. Greer has said, the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. gave an example of a young girl on a first date:
'The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances. Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.'

 The #MeToo Mob in Hollywood want to argue that they had no choices and had to succumb to Weinstein's wilds and that they had no power of agency. 

Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date.  The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being.  He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it.  Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances.  Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.

For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, social roles, and value systems.

 Germaine Greer's anthropological analysis & the initiation of 'Donkey Dick'!

Germaine Greer's approach to what she calls 'career rapees' is it seems to me anthropological, while Sartre's is philosophical.

I mentioned Rochdale, and the historic case I knew about of the teenagers abused by Cyril Smith at Cambridge House, using spanking practices and 'false medicals'.  I could have dealt with the historic practices of the initiation ceremonies which took place in the factories in the North West of England in the 1950s and 60s, when I was an apprentice electrician.  Last month we had Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tueday, and it was at that time common for young apprentices to get their balls blacked or greased, or both.  De-bagging's of lads were often indulged in on the shopfloor on the pretext that it was an ancient custom of an 'iniation ceremony', in the 1950s it was argued that this should be done when lads reached 18-years when the lads became 'improvers', perhaps owing to the advent of the Welfare State, lads were becoming too big at 21 on completion of their apprenticeship when they officially 'came out of their time'.  One lad at Tweedale & Smalley where I worked, gained the title 'Donkey Dick' and seemed to enjoy the title as well as the exploits and High Jinks.

However an outsider may view these escapades, and when I did try to protest I was made to feel like a wet blanket,

How do we consider these initiation practices?  Are they to be represented as the abuse and exploitation of young people and apprentices by tradesmen?  Or are we to see it as an ancient custom perhaps handed down to us from the times of the rural village? Perhaps even Harvey Weinstein and those who engaged with him thought they we involved in some ancient ritual or initiation ceremony.

 Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith | Outre monde:

www.https://outre-monde.com/2011/03/29/jean-paul-sartre-on-bad-faith/ 
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Steve Spielberg slams French critics of #MeToo....

YESTERDAY Steven Spielberg said he disagreed with Catherine Deneuve's insistence that 'the Harvey Weinstein scandal has turned into a "witch hunt" against men'.  Mr Spielberg claimed that sexual abuse has it turned out was not just a Hollywood problem but it was a 'national problem and probably a global problem'.

On Wednesday Ms. Deneuve, a famous French cinema icon, was one of 100 French female writers, actors and academics who signed a letter published in the newspaper Le Monde.  

The letter claimed that campaigns like #MeToo and its French equivalent #Balancetonporc (Call out your pig) that have stemmed from the Weinstein scandal have gone too far and threaten hard-won sexual freedoms.

Spielberg, a Oscar-winning director, said: 'I don't see it as a witch-hunt at the moment - I don't. I'm sorry I don't see it as a witch-hunt - I see it as an imperative.'  He added that he thought the harassment scandal was a 'watershed moment', with more allegations to come in the future.

Spielberg went on: 'This is a watershed moment, and extolling the virtues of women coming forward through tremendous personal sacrifice, using tremendous amounts of courage to speak about what has happened to them yesterday or 40 years ago, it doesn't matter.'

The French cinema icon Deneuve, who starred in the 1967 French classic Belle de Jour, attacked the 'puritanism' triggered by the recent surge of sexual harassment allegations, arguing men should be 'free to hit on' women.

 

Interestingly, in the 1960s the young French actress Catherine Deneuve teamed-up with the Spanish 'anarchist' film director Luis Buñuel to create Belle De Jour, a dense, Freudian-tinged film that also worked in the director’s trademark surrealism and had better characters and a more potent story to boot.  It is about a young woman frustrated in her recent marriage who seeks to find out what makes men tick by becoming a prostitute.

One early critic wrote of the Buñuel film that 'there is always plenty to look at, often for the sake of humor.  Buñuel has always been a great comedian, with physical, dark humor showing up in the most unlikely places, but here he relegates it largely to background, which only makes it funnier.'

One may even wonder if Mr Spielberg is simply 'virtue signalling' given that this week Michael Douglas became the latest candidate accused of sexual impropriety.  Mr. Spielberg wouldn't want to be the next one to appear on the #MeToo blacklist.

Spielberg also has a new film The Post staring Meryl Streep coming out, which is set during the Nixon administration era in the 1970s, but he says it's actually very current and there are many themes which resonate today. Thus the current scandal allows him to give it a bit of a plug.