by Laurie Penny
The problem is not ‘outrage’. The problem is rage, pure and simple. This is an anxious time, an age of great and worsening inequality, of structural racism and oppression, and when resistance fails to produce relief, that rage finds outlets wherever it can. Sometimes that rage turns ugly. I’m not going to argue there aren’t people on what I still think of as ‘my side’ who sometimes behave shamefully, targeting individuals with the sort of bullying tactics they claim to oppose. ‘Some forms of activist rage,’ says the sociologist and trans feminist Katherine Cross, ‘are flat out morally wrong and do real harm. But the problem at the root of it is the dispossession of marginalised people, which makes that rage the only avenue of self-actualisation available to them.’
There is so much to be angry about and precious little relief for that anger within what passes for democracy in most Western nations. For those of us who do not happen to own a senator or two, social media is one of the few spaces where we can sometimes, sometimes, see justice being done. The racist comedian forced to apologise for his jokes at the expense of Asian people. The margarine company pressured into withdrawing its homophobic ads. The newspaper that begins, at long last, to treat transsexual people more like human beings.
The world is waking up to new parameters of social decency and it is cranky and confused. The changes are coming too fast for anyone to cope with them without making a few mistakes, and when we do, we have to move beyond our shame and discomfort and try to act with compassion – for ourselves and others. I find putting the Internet down and taking a hot shower is good for this. Your mileage, as they say on Twitter, may vary.
Because the truth – the real, unspeakable, awful truth – is that we are all vulnerable, and afraid, and more ignorant than we’d like to be. We are all fumbling to find a place for ourselves in this weird, anxious period of human history, stumbling between the savagery of late capitalism and the rage of the dispossessed. I still believe in new stories, with new heroes, where the wolves sometimes get to win. I still believe that decency, tolerance and free speech are worth fighting for. You might call that political correctness. I call it compassion and I think it’s how we build a better world.
THE RAPE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE
Poor children are to be made poorer unless their mothers can prove that they were raped. Sometimes all it takes is one subclause of a single policy to show the true face of an administration, and this nasty little addendum to the Welfare Reform and Work Bill is shocking in its casual cruelty.
Almost as shocking is the lack of outcry – so far – as the Tories slice what remains of the welfare state into tiny decorative scraps to wrap the presents they’re giving to their upper-middle-class base. Among the flagship cuts announced in the Budget are swingeing cuts to tax credits. Families with more than two children will lose up to £2,780 per subsequent child, with an important exception: the government, in its beneficence, has decided not to withdraw support if these extra children, these gurgling drains on the coffers of state, were conceived as a result of rape.
Let’s sit with that one for a while. Let’s ponder that piece of political positioning. Let’s slow down and smell the squeaky leather and stale air of the conference rooms where politicians sat down to discuss which children they are going to impoverish this year. Let’s taste the Victoria sponge in the taxpayer-subsidised Whitehall cafes where advisers gathered to decide precisely how much violence needs to be done to a woman before her children can eat.
There are layers of monstrosity here. Let’s unwrap them one by one. The first is the question of child poverty. Hungry, shivering children are a moral quandary for this administration: conservative logic, after all, holds that individuals are to blame for their economic circumstances but it’s hard to tell someone it’s their own fault they’re poor when they’re not even out of nappies yet. Having failed to meet every national target on child poverty, the Conservatives have simply redefined poverty. Now, unable to blame impoverished toddlers for their lot in life, they have decided to blame their parents for having sex in the first place.
Child poverty is not only important as an indicator of global development. It is an indicator of the human decency of any state. The British government has made clear statements that it is prepared to let more children grow up in poverty to finance an economic recovery structured to benefit the super-rich and nobody has yet removed the mirrors from the washrooms of Westminster. George Osborne’s argument that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’ is moral rather than factual, which is another way of saying it’s a stunning lie. Most families receiving welfare benefits have at least one employed adult.
That’s the first horror. The second is the rape exception itself. To understand why it is so abhorrent, it’s worth looking at where else a similar principle is applied. Liberal campaigners for abortion rights sometimes condemn nations for forbidding the practice ‘even in cases of rape’. This has always seemed to me a telling twist of logic. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then surely it remains murder whatever the circumstances of conception. If, however, abortion restrictions are less about the ethics of life than they are about punishing women for having sex, it makes perfect sense to make an exception for rape. If you want to make an example of bad women who have consensual sex by forcing them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, it makes perfect sense to separate off the good women who became pregnant through no ‘fault’ of their own. That’s what any rape exception is about: it’s about punishing women for having agency.
The same logic is at play in the proposed rape exception to the welfare bill. Feckless ‘welfare mothers’ have long been favourite ogres of conservatives, but either children deserve to grow up in poverty or they do not. This is not about fairness, nor even about saving money. It is about sin. It is about punishment for sin, and specifically the twin working-class sins of poverty and fertility. It is also about misogyny.
Attacks on welfare are always attacks on women. As long as the sexual double standard exists in employment and childcare, women will need welfare more than men do. Women battered by a patriarchal system that does not consider child-rearing and domestic tasks ‘real work’ will need support to raise those children. Already plunged back into the old sexist bargain – depend on a partner or watch your children suffer – the women of Britain now face another appalling prospect. They face having to beg a jobcentre adviser for the money to raise their rapists’ children.
That is the underlying horror in this package of poison. It’s a woman in a sterile office some months from now having to explain the circumstances of her rape to a welfare adviser who is inclined, both by modern economic policy and by ancient sexist prejudice, not to believe a word she says. If ‘welfare claimant’ is already synonymous with ‘fraudster’ in the public imagination, thanks to a long and successful campaign on the part of the right-wing press, so is ‘rape victim’. Less than 10 per cent of rapists are convicted in court, and crisis centres for victims of sexual assault are already closing up and down the country. How does the government think this is going to work? By keeping poor women in their proper place: abject and terrified.
I am not suggesting that children conceived in rape should not receive public support. I am suggesting that all children should receive public support – whatever the pearl-clutchers in government happen to think of their parents’ sexual morality.
As the Treasury continues the time-worn Tory tradition of shrinking the state until it is just small enough to fit into everyone’s bedroom, we are speaking in hypotheticals – but they are hypotheticals that lay bare the bloodless moral core of government.
NO CONSPIRACY HERE
How should we watch Annie Hall now? After filmmaker Woody Allen was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes in 2014, his former foster-daughter, Dylan Farrow, then twenty-eight, told the New York Times the story of how he sexually abused her as a child. The charges against Allen are twenty-odd years old, and he was never brought to trial. B
ut he takes his place in a grim roll-call of famous men whose work and achievements are being called into question because of the way they are said to have treated women and children.
It seems like the whole world is a mess of rape allegations. In Britain, Operation Yewtree has marched a grim procession of beloved household names – some of them deceased, some of them merely half-deceased – through the spotlight of public approbation, on charges of child abuse. And there are others: politicians such as the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith; respected activists such as Julian Assange. It is extremely uncomfortable to watch. It might challenge us to rethink art and ideas that we hold extremely dear.
Today, the fightback seems to be on. In America, Woody Allen publicly responded to Dylan Farrow’s accusations by accusing Dylan’s mother, Mia Farrow, of maliciously making up the whole thing.
There are people out there, not all of them men, who believe that a conspiracy is going on. When I speak to them as a reporter, they tell me that women lie about rape, now more than ever. They lie to damage men and to ‘destroy their lives’. This is despite the fact that the fraud rate for rape remains as low as ever, and despite the fact that popular culture is groaning with powerful men who have been accused or even convicted of sexual abuse and whose lives remain distinctly undestroyed. Men like boxer Mike Tyson, or singer R. Kelly. Men like Woody Allen.
Women and children who bring those accusations, however, risk their relationships, their reputation, their safety. Anonymity in the press is no protection against the rejection of family, friends and workmates. Dylan Farrow is living somewhere out of the public eye, under a new name. We have created a culture and a legal system which punishes those who seek justice so badly that those who do come forward are assumed to have some ulterior motive.
Rape and abuse are the only crimes where, in the words of legal scholar Lord Hale, ‘It is the victim, not the defendant, who is on trial.’ They are crimes that are hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law, because it’s a case of ‘he said, she said’. Nobody can really know, and so naturally we must assume that he is innocent and she is lying – because that’s what women do. The trouble is that in this society, ‘he said’ is almost always more credible than ‘she said’, unless she is white and he is not.
There is a growing understanding that ‘wait for the ruling’ is an insufficient answer when the latest celebrity is hauled up on rape charges. The rule of law cannot be relied upon when it routinely fails victims of abuse. Rape and abuse cases have come to be tried in the court of public opinion, for better or worse, precisely because the official courts are understood – with good reason – to be so hopelessly unfair.
As the Allen case demonstrates, the law courts aren’t the only place where the nature of sexual power, of what men may and may not do to women, children and other men with impunity, is played out. No judge can legislate for the ethics of the Golden Globe Committee. And no magistrate can ensure that a young girl like Missouri teenager Daisy Coleman, who came forward in 2013 to describe how she was raped by classmates at a party, is not hounded out of town, along with her family, until she makes attempts on her own life.
Rape culture means more than a culture in which rape is routine. Rape culture involves the systematic silencing of victims even as women and children are instructed to behave like potential victims at all times. In order to preserve rape culture, society at large has to believe two different things at once. Firstly, that women and children lie about rape, but that they should also act as if rape will be the result if they get into a strange car, walk down a strange street or wear a sexy outfit. Secondly, if it happens, it’s their own fool fault for not respecting the unwritten rules.
This paradox involves significant mental gymnastics. But as more and more people come forward with accusations, as the pattern of historical and ongoing abuse of power becomes harder to ignore, the paradox gets harder to maintain. We are faced with two alternatives: either women and children are lying about rape on an industrial, organised scale, or rape and sexual abuse are endemic in this society, and have been for centuries. Facing up to the reality of the latter is a painful prospect.
Many of the allegations surfacing, like those against Woody Allen and the Yewtree defendants, are not new. What is new is the attitude. We are beginning, on a cultural level, to challenge the delusion that only evil men rape, that it is impossible for a man to be a rapist or an abuser of children and also an epoch-defining filmmaker. Or a skilled politician. Or a beloved pop icon. Or a respected family man. Or a treasured friend. We are beginning to reassess the idea that if a man is any of these things, the people he hurts must stay silent, because that’s how power works.
An enormous change in consciousness is taking place around consent, and it threatens to change everything. At some point between 2008 and today, the collective understanding of what rape and abuse are, and what they ought to be, changed for ever. At some point we began to talk, not just privately, cowedly, but in numbers too big to ignore, about the reality of sexual violence and child abuse, about how victims are silenced. Survivors of rape and abuse and their loved ones had always known this toxic truth, but we were forced to hold it close to ourselves where it could fester and eat us from within. As you may remember, yes, I do have intimate experience of this, and so do a lot of people you know. We just didn’t talk about it in quite this way before.
Something has changed. When the allegations that Woody Allen sexually abused Dylan Farrow first surfaced in the early 1990s, his defenders swamped the mainstream press and that was more or less the end of it. Now the people who have always been on Team Dylan get a say, too. Without wanting to sound like a headbanging techno-utopian, this is happening because of the Internet. It is happening because a change in the way we communicate and interact has allowed people who have traditionally been isolated – say, victims of rape and child abuse – to speak out, to share their stories without mediation, to make the structures of power and violence we have always known were there suddenly visible, a thing that can be challenged. And that changes everything.
If we were to truly accept the enormity of rape culture, if we were to understand what it actually means that one in five girl children and one in ten boys are sexually abused, it will not just be painful. It will force our culture to reimagine itself in a way that is uncomfortable even to contemplate. As Jessica Valenti wrote at The Nation, ‘It will mean rethinking institutions and families and power dynamics and the way we interact with each other every day.’ It will mean looking with new eyes at our most revered icons, our social groups, our friends and relatives. It will involve hard, difficult work.
It will change everything. And it is already starting to happen.
Every time an inspiring activist or esteemed artist is charged with rape, abuse or assault, I feel that awful, weary rage: not him too. But behind the rage is hope. Because rape culture hasn’t changed, but the way we talk about it has. Silencing victims does not stop rape and abuse. It just stops us having to deal with the implications of a culture where rape and abuse are routine. And today I see men and boys as well as women and girls speaking up in protest, and I see a future where all of those people will understand power and violence in a new way. Today, everywhere, survivors and their allies are finding the collective courage to look rape culture in the face, call it by its name and not back down. And that is cause for hope.
THE FREE SPEECH DELUSION
Oscar Wilde, who knew a few things about censorship, once wrote that he could ‘tolerate everything except intolerance’. Today, the rhetoric of free speech is being abused in order to shut down dissent and facilitate bigotry. On behalf of everyone with liberal tendencies, I’d like to know why and how we’ve allowed this to happen.
Before we start, let’s all take a deep breath and acknowledge that sometimes change can be scary. Right now, cultural politics are changing extremely fast. Right now, ordinary people can speak more freely and organise more efficiently than ever before.
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That single fact is pushing culture to the left too quickly for some people’s comfort, and the backlash is on – including from liberals who don’t like the idea that they might have to update their ideas. Writing on Facebook, Marlon James named this backlash ‘the Liberal Limit’, and spoke about mainstream writers in every centre-left outlet from the Guardian to the New Republic who are ‘Tired of learning new gender pronouns . . . Tired of having to figure out how to respond to a Rihanna video. Tired of feminists of colour pointing out fissures in whatever wave of feminism we got right now. Tired of black kids on campus whining all the time. Tired of everybody being so angry because without their alliance all you coloured folk would be doomed. Liberal but up to the point where it scrapes on privilege.’
Every generation of self-defined progressives has to tackle the fact that progress doesn’t end with them. Every generation of liberals has to deal with its own discomfort when younger people continue to demand liberation.
Instead of doing that hard, important work, today’s liberals – particularly older, established white male liberals – are dismissing the righteous activism of today’s young radicals as petty ‘outrage’. They are rephrasing criticism of their positions as ‘censorship’ so they don’t have to contemplate the notion that those critics might have a point. They are enraged that they are being challenged, and terrified, at the same time, of being deemed regressive. But liberals need a reason to think of themselves as just while ignoring alternative views, and ‘free speech’ has become that reason.
I hear the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ so often from people trying to shut down radicals, queers, feminists and activists of colour that the words are beginning to lose all meaning.
So before that happens, let’s remind ourselves what freedom of speech means, and what it doesn’t. I didn’t want to have to write a listicle, but you brought this on yourselves.
