I’ve always wondered about the strike-rate of men who, in that fine media phrase, ‘aren’t safe in taxis’.
I’ve always wondered about the strike-rate of men who, in that fine media phrase, ‘aren’t safe in taxis’. It must be pretty high, you’d have thought, otherwise we’d tend to hear about them before they, for example, got accused of rugby-tackling chambermaids in New York hotels. Only, if it is, that would suggest that large numbers of women are actually quite aroused at the thought of a mauling from a lusty old codger in the back of a black cab, and I’m just not sure this can be true. You know that little switch that sets the fan off? You’d keep hitting it, wouldn’t you? Probably with your knee.
It’s been a bad few weeks for the reputation of men. Dominique Strauss-Kahn doing whatever he did. Arnold Schwarzenegger, now dubbed ‘The Inseminator’. Even Hugh Grant who, in rebutting the suggestion that his bad behaviour deserved a place in newspapers, blithely declared on Newsnight that men are ‘naughty by nature’. Speaking as a man, I resent this.
Then there’s the Slut Walk. Where do we start with this? A Canadian policeman, advising a small group of students on how best to avoid being attacked by nasty men, suggested that they should ‘avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. Cue worldwide outrage, apparently, and actual demonstrations across the globe, in which women have marched around in bras and basques to defend their right to do so. I think I must be missing the point on this one. It seems to me that most of the anger is based around the assumption that the Canadian policeman meant his sentence to have a second half, which was ‘because if they don’t, whatever happens is their fault’. Only, he didn’t say that, did he? For all we know, he thinks men who even look at women are disgusting brutes who ought to be castrated with rusty staplers. As a policeman, though, he may have felt his advice ought to have an altogether more practical bent.
I mean, you know. Either there is a link between men ogling women and sexual assault, or there isn’t. Slut Walk seems to be saying both at once. It seems to be saying that the reasons why some men rape has nothing to do with the way some men like to stare at women in underwear, but they shouldn’t do this either, and just to make sure they don’t, lots of women are going to go out in their underwear and stand in front of men holding signs saying ‘This isn’t about you’. Which these men shouldn’t even see, because they shouldn’t be looking. And possibly won’t be, but only if they are rapists.
I don’t get it. It makes me feel a bit like I’m being cast as the enemy, and I don’t think that’s fair. When women march to reclaim the night streets from dangerous lunatics, I’d frankly quite like to join in. Albeit probably not in a basque. But I spent two nights in hospital as a teenager after straying into the wrong place one night, and as somebody who quite literally bears the scars of unthinking male aggression, I resent being considered one of the bad guys, which is all guys.
It’s Hugh Grant’s fault. It’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s fault, whether he’s guilty or not. It’s Mick Jagger’s fault. (‘I was at a party with him,’ a friend once told me. ‘He was at it in the garden shed. Disgusting.’) It’s the fault, en masse, of Italy and France. To be clear, I’m not saying it’s their fault that bad things happen. I’m just saying it’s their fault that men — all men — get blamed for them. Because it’s people like them who spread the myth that all men would behave like this — in this chest-thumbing, grabby, gropey sort of way, devoid of morality, unthinking of responsibility — if only they reckoned they could get away with it. And you know what? We just wouldn’t. I hardly know anyone who would.
Maybe I’m just naive, maybe (I actually suspect this is true) I’m a member of an unusually and unspokenly puritanical generation. Maybe I’m just young, and by the time I’m 50 I’ll be as prone to dry-humping the legs of strangers as anyone. But I don’t think so. ‘It shows the ancient link between sex and power!’ I keep reading, and I resent that, too. Because I’d like to think I could be as powerful as anything, and still quite easily sit in a taxi keeping my hands to myself.
I’ve been watching Made in Chelsea, the surprisingly gripping new E4 reality show based around the lives and loves of contemporary Sloane Rangers. I stick it on while waiting for Newsnight, and then periodically flick back to it whenever I get bored. I did the same with its forerunner, The Only Way Is Essex, which was similar but set among the nouveaux riche out East, and thus not really the sort of thing one writes about in The Spectator.
What’s striking is that you see these young, beautiful, often quite stupid people, and you just know you haven’t seen the last of them. The Essex ones are plainly all destined for MTV, or QVC, or tabloid stories about superinjunctions. Whereas the Chelsea set are going to other places. They’ll be columnists in Vogue, or Tory MPs, or the future girlfriends of Lucian Freud. And yet, in a room, right now, you couldn’t really tell the one from the other, probably even if they had their wallets open. Class is not dead. It has just grown canny.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
Comments