I’m writing it fully aware that at this late stage, there is unlikely to be anyone left in the internet who wishes to read more commentary on mangy old Bob Ellis’ latest word-vomit. I would have put it up when it was somewhat relevant, last night or the night before, but I was busy recovering from getting high/laid, and getting high/laid, respectively.
Yes, it *was* lovely, thank you!
But for any of you who haven’t heard, what happened was something like this…
the scene, chez Ellis, a Sunday evening…
Bobby was in the sitting room watching Carry on Camping, on the tee-vee machine. The film wasn’t giving him the same pleasure it usually did. No. A Great Injustice was troubling him, making it difficult to focus his first-class mind on Bab’s perky bosoms. It was a bit to do with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and a bit to do with pederasty, and a lot to do with intolerably impertinent ladies. It was really making his blood boil. There was nothing for it; he had to write. “Anne, old girl!” he bellowed to his wife, who was presently in the kitchen fixing another scotch, “Come! I am having important man-thoughts on justice, art, politics! Take this down and get it to those ABC chaps!” He cleared his throat and began to dictate…
it’s been said, so
I’m not going to dwell on Ellis’ hysterical accusations of some vast feminist conspiracy against left-wingers (starting even before feminism was a Thing, because that’s just how cunning women can be); the notion that a world with a couple fewer artworks is preferable to one in which fewer people get, you know, assaulted; or his concession that alright, if you insist, people who rape children should maybe kinda sorta be locked up.
But!
What I want to talk about – and it’s something that goes a lot broader and deeper than one confused old codger – is this practice of writing opinion pieces which discuss rape, harrassment, child sexual abuse, infidelity, and even mere homosexuality or promiscuity as though they were all the same kind of thing. They’re really not. Some of these things are not even unethical, while the others range from hurtful to severly damaging and criminal.
Here are Ellis’ amazingly numerous examples of “good” men undone by something related in some way to sex, presented in handy table form:
It’s a a pretty egregious example, but Ellis isn’t the only one conflating things that shouldn’t be conflated. You can actually see it on all sides of these debates, in, for example, the rash of Shwarzenneger and Weiner-induced articles asking why do men do this shit?, in opinion pieces about football players, and in a whole bunch of other places that I can’t be bothered tracking down and properly referencing, right now.
And so what?
I don’t wish people would make this distinction just for the sake of analytical clarity. The thing is, when we jumble all these different things together in the same basket, we condemn actions that aren’t wrong at all, and diminish the seriousness of rape and child abuse.
I also have this theory that our tendency to put all these things together contributes to our currently fucked-up sexual situation. One, when people concerned about rape, sexual assault and harrassment casually lump it in with, say, cheating, or paying for the services of a sex worker, it is easier to write off their legitimate complaints as prudish wowserism. Two, and this may be naive, I think that if we untangled all these things according to the harm they each cause, rather than considering them together just because they involve someone’s naughty bits, we might even see some slight improvement in sexual behaviours.
If people’s sexual feelings and attractions weren’t already subject to unjust derision and criticism, perhaps they’d take more notice of legitimate moral principles when acting on those feelings. If it was more widely acknowledged and accepted that there are ways people can want – and have – multiple partners without being irredeemably sinful, then perhaps fewer people would commit to monogamous arrangements that they don’t truly want and won’t succeed in maintaining. If it was more widely known that from time to time horny women enthusiastically consent to group sex, maybe gang-raping an unenthusiastic woman might be more obviously wrong, even to really stupid people.
Or perhaps you disagree?
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