Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  In May 2018, the New York Times reported on a 2013 trip to Costa Rica taken by the management team of the NFL’s Washington Redskins and their cheerleading squad. (Please note that ‘Redskins’ is a racial slur, and from this point I will be referring to them as ‘the Washington team’.) The trip was ostensibly for a ‘calendar shoot’—so why did the Washington team’s officials collect the women’s passports when they arrived at the Costa Rican resort where they were booked to stay? Oh, sorry, I meant the adults-only resort, where the women were asked to pose topless and/or in nothing but body paint for the benefit of the spectators the team management had invited along. As The Times reported,

  A contingent of sponsors and FedEx Field suite holders—all men—were granted up-close access to the photo shoots.

  One evening, at the end of a 14-hour day that included posing and dance practices, the squad’s director told nine of the thirty-six cheerleaders that their work was not done. They had a special assignment for the night. Some of the male sponsors had picked them to be personal escorts at a nightclub.

  Those who spoke to The Times said they weren’t required to have sex with the sponsors (imagine!), but the expectation they ‘go as sex symbols to please male sponsors’ shouldn’t have been considered part of their job. This job, it should be noted, was not well remunerated. In fact, they were only paid transportation costs, meals and lodging. Also worthy of note: the five cheerleaders who spoke to The Times did so on condition of anonymity, because ‘they were required to sign confidentiality agreements when they joined the team’. Men retain power for themselves and actively work together to keep women out of it, but they double down on that inequality by turning these spaces into playgrounds for men to peacock their sexual appetites and prowess to one another. It’s telling that when Barnaby Joyce’s affair with Vikki Campion was revealed, politicians from both sides of the aisle argued for his ‘right to privacy’. The same courtesy was not extended to Cheryl Kernot when she, as an Australian Democrat, had a consensual sexual relationship with Labor’s Gareth Evans and news of this was revealed after she left government. You could argue these two situations are incomparable, because the latter especially involved not just infidelity but also a party switch (Kernot moved from the Australian Democrats to the ALP in the midst of the five-year affair). Still, think about the different treatment Kernot received to Evans. When it entered the public domain, West Australian MP Don Randall sneered that she ‘had the morals of an alley cat on heat’. In May 2018, Kernot told journalist Julia Baird that she’s still questioned by journalists about the matter, even though decades have passed; Evans, meanwhile, has received an Order of Australia.

  In 2013, news broke that a fundraising dinner for the LNP’s Mal Brough had included a menu item described as ‘Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail: Small breast, huge thighs and a big red box’. At the time, Julia Gillard was the prime minister, and had been recently accused by Abbott of ‘playing the politics of division’.

  Senior members of the LNP rushed to distance themselves from the event, with the restaurant’s owner, Joe Richards, ultimately claiming responsibility. It had been a ‘private joke’ between Richards and his son, he said, which raises the question of exactly what kind of masculine values were being instilled in that household.

  In the fallout, it was made clear that anyone who kicked up a fuss—chicks, basically—was overreacting and falsely crying sexism. You know, ‘playing the gender card’. It’s a curious accusation that is levelled whenever women complain about entrenched inequality. Rather than listening to our experiences of exclusion and ridicule, men (and their supportive female enforcers of patriarchy) squawk about some mythical card that allows them to deflect any responsibility for their actions. It isn’t that the world is sexist and that they benefit enormously from this discrimination—it’s that women can’t handle jokes. Throughout her leadership, Gillard was referred to as ‘deliberately barren’, accused of having the mining industry ‘pussy-whipped’ and queried on talkback radio about whether or not her long-term partner was gay. She dealt with all that and managed to pass an extraordinary number of pieces of legislation, even while fronting a minority government. Yet she’s still sneered at for being ‘the most ineffective Prime Minister this country’s ever had!’ and apparently that’s why women suck as leaders.

  It’s easy to think of toxic male bonding and abusive, harmful behaviour happening either on the fringes of society or among people who lack influence and power. But the truth is, power is where this all stems from. Men showcasing their importance and claiming their rightful spoils, particularly so when they think no one’s watching. In London, it might be a spot of groping and harassment at a charity auction with women who are not explicitly employed as escorts and sex workers (and certainly not paid for that). Sporting codes all over the world shield their golden-goose players from consequences, providing them with ‘entertainment’ that essentially translates to the provision of women as commodities. Men in business mentor and promote each other, citing babies as the reason women have to be kept down in the storeroom. Politically, there are still far too many men who’d prefer to retire to the billiards room to drink brandy, smoke cigars and play at being Masters of the Universe, even while they coordinate to make laws that govern women’s bodies and deny us basic autonomy over our medical, reproductive and economic rights.

  The message that this sends in adult life is as simple as if it were scrawled across the doorway of a treehouse: No Girls Allowed.

  In 2016, as Trump’s election victory was being declared, young white men attending a function at Sydney University (one of the country’s most prestigious tertiary institutions) began chanting, ‘Grab ’em by the pussy! That’s how we do it!’

  I know these men—or I know their type, at least. They are the ones who flock to feminist pages to mock our hysteria, who call us angry (and sometimes suggest it’s because we are unrapeable), who taunt us with ‘jokes’ about sexual assault and domestic violence. They then insist, angrily, that women are too sensitive, that we criminalise male behaviour and tar all men with the brush that’s painted the bad ones. They are the ones who hate women both publicly and privately, and yet assert that feminism’s greatest crime is that we hate men. By the time I crawled out of bed that November morning, they had already begun flooding my Facebook page, crowing about how Trump’s election would bring an end to ‘feminazis’. They’re barely out of adolescence, but they already believe that the world belongs to them. Why shouldn’t they? Everywhere they look, they’re reminded that they were born to rule.

  For them, Trump’s victory sent a clear message: you can do and say whatever you like to harm whomever you want, because you’re the boss. Grab ’em by the pussy. They’ll let you do it, and even if they don’t no one will hold you to account for it. You were just having a joke. You can’t help it if they overreacted and got hysterical. This is why women are unsuited to lead. They can’t keep the sand out of their vaginas.

  Those young men didn’t believe women were lying about the times they said Trump assaulted them. They had even seen Trump admit to it himself. But they just don’t care, because caring about things like the dignity and autonomy of women would mean they might not be able to behave exactly as they please at all times. Every time a Kavanaugh is confirmed and rewarded by a system that is designed by men, run by men, for men, it sends another very strong message about how men as a class will always be protected. They can grab ’em by the pussy all they like. They can assault women in closed bedrooms and nothing will happen. They can scream and spit at women who anger them, and no one will accuse them of hysteria only defend their righteous outrage while saying we should all be very scared for our sons, it’s a witch hunt these days. Meanwhile, they can go on mocking the survivors of sexual assault eagerly and to much uproarious laughter, because this is apparently what powerful men do openly now and isn’t it great they no longer have to hide their amazing comedy from the PC police? They can do all this because the
power and potential of privileged white men is still valued far more highly than the lives, bodies and autonomy of women, and any attempt to change this system will vigorously opposed.

  We should all be deeply scared for our sons. Because the world we live in is telling them that as long as they’re white and went to the right schools, it’s okay to be criminals, rapists and assholes. Hell, you might even get to run the country one day.

  It is good to be the king.

  10

  IT’S JUST A JOKE

  The debate about ‘rape jokes’ (are they appropriate, is it okay to laugh at them, should they be defended) is decades old, but it’s first major showing in the post-internet world can be traced back to 2012, when the set of a moderately well-known comedian at a Los Angeles comedy club spawned a viral Tumblr post, an outpouring of Hot Takes™ and a visible example of what it looks like when men close ranks around each other.

  It began in July of that year, when a woman who remains anonymous turned up at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. She was there to see Dane Cook, but stuck around after his set to watch a comic named Daniel Tosh perform. It was the first time she’d heard of him, but who doesn’t love to laugh? At a factory of laughs, no less!

  What the woman didn’t know is that Tosh—who also hosted Tosh.0, a TV show on Comedy Central—is a big fan of jokes about rape. So committed is he to exploring the hilarity of rape that his catalogue of jokes about it even includes one involving his sister. Classy guy.

  According to a Tumblr post published afterwards on Cookies For Breakfast, Tosh’s set included a series of ‘very generalizing, declarative statements’ about rape jokes being universally hilarious. Presumably agitated by the blazing arrogance of a young white man deciding that the traumatic experiences of one-third of the world’s women makes for excellent ‘material’ to advance his generic, lowest-common-denominator comedy career, the young woman called out, ‘Actually, rape jokes are never funny!’

  Now, everyone knows that if you heckle a comedian then they’re going to turn what they hope is their razor-sharp wit on you. Disrupting the flow of someone’s set is a faux pas that doesn’t usually go down well, especially when the comedian’s being called out for being a jerk. But Tosh’s response was low even by the already low standards set for male comics who consider the trauma of everyone who isn’t them to be their personal playground.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?’ he replied, pointing at her. ‘Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?’

  Yeah! Wouldn’t that be TOTALLY FUNNY? That would really show her! Who does that bitch think she is, coming into a comedy club and thinking she has any right to tell the comedian—the EXPERT!—what is and isn’t funny?! Jesus Christ, you’d think she’d actually been fucking raped or something.

  Oh. Hmm.

  I don’t know whether or not the woman targeted by Tosh had a history that included sexual violence. My guess would be . . . probably? I mean, most women have had some kind of experience in which a man has pushed against the boundaries of her consent, if not smashed through them entirely. Sexual violence isn’t always the central villain in our stories but it sure is a common enough backdrop for a lot of them. The thing is, even if she hadn’t been assaulted in the way Tosh thought fit to joke about before inviting his audience to laugh at the thought of her being gang-raped, she almost definitely knows someone who has been. A woman doesn’t need to have been raped herself to object to the use of rape as a cheap punchline by a comedian who is statistically far less likely than her ever to be subjected to such a violation.

  After the woman posted her story to Tumblr, a number of people took to social media to condemn Tosh’s behaviour. In a rare display of humility, he offered what he called a sincere apology, saying, ‘The point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. #deadbabies.’

  But there were a number of mid- to high-profile comics who not only felt that Tosh shouldn’t have had to apologise at all but who came out swinging in his defence. Dane Cook, the comedian the woman had originally bought tickets to see, tweeted: ‘If you journey through this life easily offended by other people’s words I think it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.’ Doug Stanhope tweeted to Tosh: ‘You’re hilarious. If you ever apologize to a heckler again I will rape you.’

  Cute.

  Alex Edelman, a stand-up comic from New York, warned against trying to make comedians accountable in the moment, telling The Guardian, ‘If he actually addresses something you’ve said in a serious way, then a) he’s abandoned his bit and b) he’s actually made rape really come into the room.’

  There’s merit to the first part of this statement; comedians aren’t there to debate philosophy or morality with their audience, and artful comedy has a precise and delicate flow. But Edelman’s second observation isn’t just total bullshit, it also signifies how unqualified he is to be making that kind of commentary. Rape is already in the room. It’s in the traumatic histories of the people present who’ve experienced it, which is statistically one in five women and one in twenty men. It’s in the way some people will tense up the moment they recognise a rape joke is coming, knotting their hands together and gazing steadfastly into their laps. It’s in the glances cast around the room in that moment, as individuals look around to see if they’re the only ones who aren’t ‘getting it’ because someone once upon a time or maybe even last week made sure they ‘got it’ against their will.

  Rape is in the room.

  It’s there with the survivors, but it’s also in the room with the people present who’ve perpetrated it. Because make no mistake, they’re there too. They’re watching and listening and slapping their knees in spontaneous hilarity, and they’re observing all the people around them who are doing exactly the same thing. You think rapists don’t go and see comedians? Of course they do. And every time a rapist listens to a roomful of people laugh about something they’ve done—something they almost certainly don’t think is that big a deal—they receive the reassuring message that they’re not really so bad. That other people think like them. That other people have done the things they’ve done. That this is what all men are really like and, besides, if it were that big a deal, why would everyone find it so funny?

  Think about one of Tosh’s other big defenders, Louis C.K. During the controversy, he tweeted to Tosh: ‘Your show makes me laugh every time I watch it. And you have pretty eyes.’ Later, he claimed he’d been watching Tosh.0 and broke a self-imposed social media detox to let Tosh know how funny he found him, completely unaware that it came in the middle of an online blow-up about the merits of offensive comedy and the people allowed to make it. He clarified his stance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, saying:

  For me, any joke about anything bad is great, that’s how I feel. Any joke about rape, the Holocaust, the Mets—aargh, whatever—any joke about something bad is a positive thing. But now I’ve read some blogs during this whole thing that made me enlightened at things I didn’t know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women’s lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t dress a certain way, because they might—I never—that’s part of me now that wasn’t before, and I can still enjoy the rape jokes.

  C.K. was born in 1967, which means it took him forty-five years to realise that rape is ‘something that polices women’s lives’ and not just a peripheral act of violence that happens to some of us with the same probability and element of surprise as, say, dying in a plane crash or enjoying a Dane Cook movie. I first became aware of the circling threat of rape in women’s lives before I’d even started my first period, but men like C.K. get to live for almost five decades before ‘some blogs’ open his eyes—don’t worry though, he can ‘still enjoy the rape jokes’.

  But should we be surprised? In late 2017, shortly after widespread allegations again
st movie mogul Harvey Weinstein came to light, spawning the #MeToo and #timesup movements, the New York Times published an article under the headline LOUIS C.K. IS ACCUSED BY 5 WOMEN OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT. The piece addressed longstanding rumours of C.K.’s indecent behaviour, which includes asking shocked female industry colleagues if he could masturbate in front of them (and sometimes proceeding to do it) and also masturbating while on a professional work call with a (female) performer whose boyfriend he had previously worked with.

  Shortly after the publication of the story in the Times, C.K. issued a statement in which he admitted to the allegations, framing his motivation as arising from the curse of being ‘admired’. In fact, in his statement he referred to the admiration people—and women especially—felt for him no less than four times, which was four times more than he mentioned the word ‘sorry’. After dodging allegations for years and refusing even to entertain the possibility that there might be any truth to them, as if it were beneath him to acknowledge such meaningless, petty distractions, he had the gall to write: ‘I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position.’

  Like so many men caught with their pants down, what C.K. actually seems contrite about is the fact he was finally forced to own up to his actions. But his response is in keeping with his comments that night on The Daily Show (which, incidentally, came only a few months after the rumours of his behaviour were first published on the Gawker media network).