Russell Brand always seemed repellant to me, but that had little to do with the fact he became famous in the noughties. And yet, since allegations have emerged, we keep being told repeatedly that Brand is a typical toxic product of the early years of the new millennium.
‘Resurfaced clips give a sobering reminder of noughties culture,’ says the BBC. ‘Nasty noughties: a culture reckoning?’ asks the Week. The noughties was a ‘cesspit’ – ‘a laddish era (that) allowed Russell Brand to thrive,’ said the Daily Telegraph.
‘Back in the noughties,’ began one of many pieces on Brand, ‘pop culture was hard and nasty…It was a period of viciousness and excess, where cruelty was the norm and misogyny was celebrated.’
What’s funny is that some of the people decrying the ‘nasty’ culture of the noughties are also those who probably look back fondly on that period as the final halcyon days before the relentlessness of political correctness set in.
The sad truth is that every age has had bad men
What they seem to have forgotten is that you can’t have a sexually progressive culture without the pitfalls of freedom too. Sexual libertinism is the generally tasteless, unpleasant outcropping of the much more substantial – and positive – fact of living in a liberal society. Liberal societies have to be sexually liberal. In cases like those suggested by the allegations against Brand – which he denies – some people’s notions of the ‘sexually liberal’ clash hard against what is decent, acceptable, and even legal behaviour.
But let us not chuck the noughties in the bin just because there were some objectionable cultural trends – and people – about. When one actually considers the ‘long noughties’, starting in the era of Tony Blair (1997-2000), our own age, full of belly-button tickling narcissism fuelled by social media, seems dreary, lacklustre, craven and risk-averse. Dull, silly, stagnant – woke.
Politically, in the noughties, there was the kind of punch we will never get close to after Brexit. There was the Good Friday Agreement and there was the bold display of morality and guts behind the invasion of Iraq (which was botched through America’s lack of planning). Blair was also instrumental in getting rid of the odious murderer Slobodan Milosevic. There were more women than ever before in his cabinet.
Billions poured into the NHS and other public services on the back of the kind of economy we used to be able to boast about. The rich got much, much richer (and there were many more people getting rich), and yet the lowest earners didn’t feel, for the most part, left behind. London suddenly went from looking horrible, with big dangerous pockets, to being almost scarily glossy. In the noughties, it felt like Britain worked and was on the up. Things were exciting – about as different from how things feel now as possible.
Culturally, despite the nasties, there was much pleasure. Or at least, for those of us with questionable taste there was: from the Spice Girls, Arctic Monkeys and — yes, OK, — Oasis to the cheesily satisfying Coldplay, who even then one knew one ought to hate but couldn’t help loving.
It’s worth noting that not every young woman was manhandled in the noughties. I moved to London in 2004 at 21 and began working as best I could as a journalist. As I was employed primarily on a finance desk at a newspaper, 90 per cent of what I got out of bed for was the free booze, liberally dispensed at all manner of receptions and dinners. Everyone tended to be very drunk indeed, from colleagues to associates to the randoms one often ended up going home with.
And then, at 24, in 2006, bang in the middle of the evil decade, I became a dating columnist for the now-defunct freesheet the london paper. This job was to write about going on dates, and whatever they entailed. Very often one didn’t even bother with the date bit.
For all the booze and schmooze and the spontaneous decisions to leave clubs with strange men, I never felt pressured, worried, or forced into a situation I didn’t want to be in. I always found it easy to extricate myself if I wanted to.
Obviously that’s just me, but my memories of the time, including the gaggle of female peers I went about with, are more about messy self-exploration than about victimisation by a predatory age, mass-producing violent, nasty and coercive men.
The sad truth is that every age has had bad men that do things to women in a wide range from the unpleasant to the downright criminal or murderous. To pin all that Brand is being accused of on the 2000s is unfair, not only to the decade but to the idea that bad men are bad men, always have been, and always will be – full stop.
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