On Violence and On Violence Against Women Read online

  If sexual violence always tends to spiral out of control, it is because the agent of that violence must know deep down he is on a losing wicket (an English cricket term which means your turn at batting will fail). Jessica Mann, one of the two main witnesses in Weinstein’s rape trial, stated that he lacked testicles, appeared to have a vagina and was therefore intersex – to the objections of Weinstein’s lawyers, sketches of his anatomy were then distributed to the jury.20 The point is not whether the claim was correct but the unstable, sexually uncertain image of the human body which had suddenly erupted in the courtroom. Seen in this light, Weinstein’s physical collapse after his arrest should be read not just as a staged plea for sympathy – a day after photos were released showing him using a Zimmer frame on his way into court in December 2019, he was seen walking around a supermarket unaided – but also as an inadvertent display of the fragility and eventual bitter truth of the human body, a truth which his predatory behaviour was designed to conceal from the women he abused, from the world, and from himself. In which case, for him at least, the party is truly over. (‘I feel like the forgotten man,’ he said in a December 2019 interview with the New York Post.21) This suggests to me that one reason why he got away with it for so long, why so many people in the profession chose to turn a blind eye, was not only brute negligence towards women, nor fear of the career-destroying consequences for anyone who dared to speak out, but also because no one wanted to open the Pandora’s box of a man like Weinstein’s inner world, to look too closely at his greatest fears, any more than they wanted to recognise what, given half a chance, such a man might be capable of. ‘The #MeToo movement’, writes novelist Anne Enright, ‘isn’t just a challenge to male entitlement; it may also pose a general question about male sanity.’22 Although not the sanity of all men, as she is careful to qualify.

  In 2012, Jimmy Savile, British TV comedian, charity entrepreneur and chat show host, was found to have run a regime of systematic sexual abuse for most of his fifty-year career, including the abuse of patients at Leeds General Infirmary ranging in age from five to seventy-five. Savile had been the cherished mascot of two of the UK’s most venerable and prized institutions, the National Health Service and the BBC, though many people – myself included – had always found him repellent (and not just with hindsight). Pretty much everyone he worked with, certainly at the BBC, had had some inkling of his crimes and misdemeanours, a fact which suggests that the worse, and more blatant, the offence, notably in the domain of sexual life, the more the blindness seems to increase. Like Weinstein’s, Savile’s acts of violence had hovered for decades on the threshold of the visible world. He had been hiding in plain sight.

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  This puts anyone seeking to combat these forms of violence in something of a double bind, or at least imposes on us the need for special vigilance. If, as I argue here, sexual violence arises from a form of tunnel vision, on burying those aspects of the inner life that are most difficult to acknowledge or see, it is also the case that raising violence to the surface of public consciousness is not always transformative in the ways we would want it to be. Perhaps nowhere so much as in the field of sexual oppression does the adage apply that recognising an injustice, bringing it to the world’s attention, does not mean in and of itself that the offence will be obliterated and justice prevail. Despite the sea-change of #MeToo for the film industry, across the run of the 2019 festivals, there was still a palpable ‘predatory vibe’ (Roman Polanski was welcomed and awarded the Grand Jury Prize in Venice while Weinstein awaited trial).23

  Meanwhile, from the summit of English sport, another of the UK’s celebrity-packed and most venerated institutions, cricketer Geoffrey Boycott, who had been convicted in a French court of assaulting his girlfriend in 2014, was knighted in Theresa May’s 2019 resignation Honours List. The French judge responded that she stood by her decision to find him guilty. When told that a leading domestic violence charity in the UK had condemned the award, Boycott replied that he did ‘not give a toss’.24 The sporting world would seem to be another domain with a special proclivity to sexual abuse, which cannot be unrelated to the superhuman prowess that athletes are meant to have on permanent display. Certainly this expectation, compounded by his disability, was central to the life and stellar sporting career of Oscar Pistorius, whose killing of Reeva Steenkamp in 2013 and the trial that followed is the subject of a chapter here. In April 2018, Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding, defendants in the notorious Belfast rugby rape trial, were acquitted, to the consternation of many who had watched the sustained ritual humiliation of the plaintiff in court, and listened to the verbal violence of the defendants towards her (in their shared messages, they boasted of having ‘pumped’ and of ‘spit-roasting’ a bird). According to journalist Susan McKay, ‘they had been treated like young gods’ from the moment they showed signs of real talent on the playing fields. ‘All of them had the macho swagger that goes with it.’25

  Harvey Weinstein’s February 2020 conviction for criminal sexual assault in the first degree and rape in the third degree, together with his jail sentence of twenty-three years the following month, are a victory for women. He was, however, cleared on the two most serious charges of predatory sexual assault, which means that one of the women – the actress Annabella Sciorra, who had been the first woman to testify against him in a criminal court – was not believed. The suggestion by Weinstein’s lawyer, Donna Rotunno, that she would be an ‘excellent witness’ as she had spent her whole life ‘acting for a living’ appears to have been effective, as if only liars make acting their career. The idea that this trial dismantled once and for all the image of the ‘perfect’ rape victim – unknown to the assailant, certainly not in a relationship with him that continued after the rape, able to recover and recount her experience with perfect clarity almost from the moment it happened – might also have been premature. There is also the risk that the celebrity which put him under the spotlight might turn out to have served as a distraction from the perennial, ‘mundane’, nature of sexual crime.

  In this case, revulsion against a sexual felon – the revulsion that also appears to have fuelled his own desire – and the law were on the same side. But time and again in what follows, we will see the legal struggle for redress against sexual assault brought up against the most stubborn forms of resistance and sidelining, due at least in part, I suggest, to the fact that human subjects can be roused by what disgusts them, that licentiousness, even in the political order which is meant to tame and subdue it, can be a draw. This certainly seems to have played a part in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, when his ugly misogyny was either dismissed as mere masculine playfulness or else championed, and positively fired up his base (in the same way as the charge of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh did nothing to damage, and may indeed have increased, his chances of being elected to the US Supreme Court in 2017). Chelsea Clinton has described such misogyny as ‘the gateway drug’, a soporific which lulls the senses and opens the door to greater nastiness to come.26 Permission granted to a vicarious frisson of erotic pleasure and rage, so often directed towards women, which no one is in a hurry to admit to. In her article on the Belfast trial, McKay describes how much she enjoyed watching, as a form of ‘light’ relief, the popular Irish TV drama The Fall, notably the episode in which the main detective, played by Gillian Anderson, undresses for the camera unaware – unlike the viewer – that she is being watched by the serial killer she is hunting and who has just rifled through her clothes: ‘I hated the show’s pornographic gender politics, the way it made me feel like a voyeur, but did not miss a single episode.’27 She is trying to understand why the trial had become a major tourist destination, the vicious communal sexism of the defendants seeming to have been part of the appeal.

  By common assent, Trump is a law-breaker: two rape charges, one made and then withdrawn by his first wife, Ivana, and one from the journalist E. Jean Carroll, who has sued Trump for defamation on the grounds of his denials and aspersio
ns; multiple cases of sexual harassment, by his own boastful acknowledgement; numerous alleged illegal and exploitative hiring and financial practices swept under the carpet or settled out of court, but still publicly known; not to mention the grounds for his impeachment in 2019 – abuse of power for political gain (passed by the House of Representatives and then blocked in the Senate). ‘Obstruction of justice as a way of life’ is how his conduct is described by former national security adviser John Bolton, who alleges that Trump promised to halt criminal cases against one Turkish and one Chinese company to placate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Xi Jinping.28 Likewise Boris Johnson: there is the strongest evidence that on one occasion in 1990, he agreed to provide the address of a journalist to a friend who wanted to arrange for the journalist to have his ribs cracked as revenge for investigating his activities. In the transcript of the conversation between them, Johnson asks, ‘How badly hurt will he be?’ He then insists, ‘OK … I’ve said I’ll do it. I’ll do it, don’t worry’, when he is reassured that it won’t be that bad. (The journalist’s requests for an apology from Johnson have so far been without effect.29)

  To say they get away with it is therefore misleading. In the case of Trump’s impeachment, for example, it was not that his supporters even necessarily agreed with him that the charges were a ‘hoax’, as he repeatedly claimed in the face of mounting evidence against him. Or even that he could do no wrong. But rather that he was adulated in direct proportion to the wrong which he clearly could do. It is because he was transgressive – because, in the words of US TV host Rachel Maddow, he could be relied upon to do something ‘shocking, wrong or unbelievably disruptive’ – that it became ‘a rational newsworthy assessment to put a camera on him at all times’.30 A law-breaker at the summit of politics is enticing. Arendt wrote of the danger to the social fabric posed by a world in which state authority and its laws have degenerated to the point where it is civil order and democracy, or even mere decency, that come to be felt as treacherous: ‘Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognise it – the quality of temptation.’31 A lawless regime relies on the hidden guilt of human subjects, drawing them into the illicit, dissolute world to which everybody already at least partly belongs in the unconscious (no one is fully innocent in their heart of hearts; forbidden thoughts are the property of everyone). Or, in the words of a Southern Baptist woman, asked on BBC television how she could vote for Trump given his moral failings, ‘We are all sinners.’32

  ‘Why’, asked German columnist Hatice Akyün in the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, after the murder in June 2019 of Walter Lübcke, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), ‘are the people of my country not flooding to the streets in disgust?’33 Lübcke had been killed by a neo-Nazi as revenge for his sympathetic stance on migration. In October 2019, a video was released by a pro-Trump group with connections to the White House which showed Trump killing opponents and political journalists (in one sequence, the faces of all those shot, stabbed and punched were covered with the logo of CNN). When challenged, the organiser of the website insisted that the video was merely ‘satirical’: ‘Hate-speech is a made-up word. You can’t cause violence with words.’34

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  There is a poison in the air and it is spreading. This world of sanctioned violence, violence elevated to the level of licensed pleasure, is by no means exclusive to Trump and Johnson, even if, by general recognition, they uniquely combine the qualities of self-serving autocrat and clown – the glow of attraction between them now rivalling that between Reagan and Thatcher, whose belligerent neo-liberalism in the 1970s prepared the ground for so much of the destructive global order that has followed. But the rise of dictators across the world who boast of their prowess and nurse their distastes – in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, India – suggests that we are living, or may be on the verge of living once more, what Arendt described as temptation gone awry. In Brazil, President Bolsonaro has proclaimed that he will finish the task of the military regime that ruled Brazil for two decades from 1964 to 1985 – ‘if a few innocents get killed, that’s OK’; he states openly that he is in favour of torture (only acknowledged by the military in 2014).35 In 2003 he told Maria do Rosário, a fellow member of Congress, that he could not possibly have raped her because ‘you do not deserve it’ (shades of Trump telling E. Jean Carroll that he could not have raped her as she was not ‘his type’).36 Perhaps most telling of all, he once quipped that only a ‘moment of weakness’ can explain why one of his five children ‘came out a woman’.37 The formula ‘came out a woman’ is the real giveaway, as if an infant’s sexual destiny as woman were fixed from the beginning and she has no right to any other ideas. His words resonate with potential sexual violence, not just because he clearly holds all women in such brazen contempt. Ensuring that women will be women and nothing else, pinning them down as women, can be seen as one of the core motives of rape, which is why all rapes, not only those which are targeted at lesbian women, should be defined as ‘corrective’ (in Brazil, a woman is the victim of physical violence every 7.2 seconds).38 All of which makes the struggle for redress against injustice, especially when charged with sexual valency, more pressing – even though, or rather because, it has another hill to climb.

  In what follows, trans experience will be central as it crystallises so many of these concerns, and clearly binds the issue of sexuality to that of political struggle – freedom achieved and withheld. Despite being far more widely accepted than ever before, trans people are still the target of violence for daring to present the world with the mostly unwelcome truth that sexual identity is not all it is cut out to be. Not everyone comfortably belongs on the side of the inaugurating, sexual divide where they originally started, or to which they were first assigned. Some cross from one side to the other, others see themselves as belonging on neither side, others on both (these options are by no means exhaustive). Sexuality creates havoc. Kicking it back into place – a doomed project – is one way in which an oppressive culture tries and fails to lay down the law. Bolsonaro has explicitly stated that removing ‘gender theory’ from the university curriculum is a chief objective of his educational reforms (cutbacks to the cultural humanities in favour of increased spending on national history subjects in schools). For ‘gender theory’, we can read a reference to the work of philosopher Judith Butler, who argues that our polarised gender identities are as unstable as the performance we muster to sustain them.39 Just over a year before Bolsonaro’s election, at the end of 2017, Butler visited São Paulo for an international conference she had co-organised, where effigies of her were burned on the streets to the chant: ‘Take your ideologies to hell.’40 In fact, the conference was not on gender but on the topic of democracy, which indicates how hard and fast political freedom under threat slams up against virulent sexual hatred.

  Repeatedly we see what intimate companions political and sexual coercion can be. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party placed the demonisation of LGBT people at the centre of its 2019 election-winning campaign, together with an assault on the independent media and judiciary, the cornerstones of liberal democracy. In October 2019, Marek Jędraszewski, Archbishop of Krakow, issued a pastoral letter – one of many such interventions on his part – describing LGBT ‘ideology’ as a ‘new form of totalitarianism’, which required parents who truly love their children to protect them from falling victim (there could be no greater tragedy).41 In São Paulo the demonstrators attacked the conference agenda as ‘Marxist’, and as supported by foreign money, while holding up placards inscribed with the words ‘family’, ‘tradition’ and ‘In favour of marriage as God intended, 1 man, 1 woman’. In Spain, the ultra-right Vox party made huge gains in the April and November 2019 elections (in November it entered the Congress of Deputies for the first time). Visiting Madrid in April that year, I was handed one of its flyers, which specifically targeted ‘supremacist feminism’, ‘radical animal rights activists’ and the LGBT lobby. ‘Supremacist
feminism’ is the sister term to ‘feminazis’, coined by the US right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh to describe radical feminists – by which he means militants and extremists – who, he claimed, ‘want to see as many abortions as possible’.42 In March 2019, the ultra-right Catholic organisation Hazte Oír – ‘Make Yourself Heard’ – campaigned for the repeal of Spain’s laws on gender violence by driving through cities in buses sporting a picture of Hitler and the hashtag #Feminazi painted underneath. (A Barcelona judge rejected a call for the buses to be banned.)43

  In fact, the rise of Vox in Spain was propelled by the increased visibility of feminist protest against sexual violence, notably the nationwide demonstrations following the infamous manada or ‘wolf-pack’ rape of a young girl at the annual Pamplona festival of the running of the bulls in 2016 and the trial that followed two years later. When two of the judges ruled that the men were not guilty of rape as there had been no violent coercion and a third absolved the defendants completely of the charge, thousands of protesters filled the streets (‘Spain’s largest spontaneous feminist uprising in living memory’).44 A year later, in September 2019, protesters in more than 250 towns and cities across Spain declared a ‘feminist emergency’ after a series of high-profile rape cases and a summer in which nineteen women were murdered by current or former partners (the worst figures for more than a decade). Similar demonstrations have taken place across the world, in countries including Mexico, India, Italy, France, South Korea and South Africa, in each of which the incidence of violence against women over the past couple of years has visibly increased and is being recognised like never before.45 Addressing the protesters in Cape Town, Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that South Africa was one of the ‘most unsafe places in the world to be a woman’, one reason why the country will provide a test case for this book.46 In Seoul, South Korea, at a rally to legalise abortion in April 2019, most of the women wore black surgical masks (before Covid-19) in order to prevent identification. Isabel Cadenas, one of the organisers of the annual march on International Women’s Day in Madrid, praised a younger generation of feminists – sixty-five per cent of Spanish women under thirty describe themselves as feminist: ‘They know violence for what it is, in a way that we didn’t.’47