How to be a gentleman rapist. An observational study by a woman (me).
How to be a gentleman rapist. An observational study by a woman (me).
The answer. Be rich, entitled and powerful. Equipment required: aggressive lawyers and pricey silk carpets for everything to be swept under
"All men are rapists... They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.”
Marilyn French, The Women’s Room
Tangential introduction employing a headline news angle
The torrent of bloviations from actual experts and self-appointed experts about the US election result has not preoccupied me. I received copious crying emojis from Americans and others, and a couple of extremely telling single thumb up emojis from acquaintances in finance.
It’s the economy stupid.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you my tuppence ha’penny of ignorance on the trillion dollar US economy. But that’s why Trump got in. Not his fake love of Jesus or probably genuine dislike of brown and black people, and women, obvs. Bloviating on that subject, like Regan with the pea soup in The Exorcist is not my skillset. I know money trumps everything, almost always, even the sordid shame of having a president who is a known sexual offender, a known fraud, a known inciter of violence and racial hatred, a known spreader of dangerous misinformation, a man with a spun sugar covfefe atop a wincing orange scrotum, a man who capitalises on the beliefs of morons and vulnerables. It’s none of that. It’s money, bigly.
Money isn’t good or bad. It’s just money. Everyone wants some. Even people with loads already want some more. I want some money. The more money you have, the more power you have. We all want stuff, and social status, and money. Who knows, perhaps I would have voted for him too.
Segue smoothly into the main thrust of the piece
And if you’re a man with money, which you probably are (they seem a lot better at having a lot of it than women) you may well want to grab yourself some pussy too. And the good news is, when you are rich and famous, “You can do anything…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” [As someone so famously said on the set of the TV show Access Hollywood]
Since the US elections, researchers at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (which monitors online hate and misinformation) tracked a 4,600% surge in misogynistic vitriol online, with delightful rapist hashtags, like, “your body, my choice” and calls to repeal the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote. These gloating battle cries of the extremist wing of a winning side that was already pretty extreme in the first place. Are we really looking to the reestablishing of traditional values that have no value to anyone except misogynists. It’s surreal. And real.
Take an ill-advised dogleg into cheese and protectionism
The ‘murican people had better all get used to a new kind of wedge, the wedge of forms that protectionism invariably brings and wedge they’ll have to shell out if they want some our primo quality European stuff. The fromage trolley at your favourite restaurants in America will morph into a tariff-free cheese-like product trolley with cheese strings, neon orange cheese in a can and those slices they put on burgers; either that or will cost more than a three bedroomed house in Grimsby.
(delete distracting diversion into cheese plz, Ed)
Anyhoo, no one’s here for my A level Economics with a capital E grade or my cheese-based jabs at protectionism. No sireeee, I am here to talk about power and money and being male, and how it enables you to do whatever you want, as the president elect says, “Grab ‘em by the pussy.” Go ahead, do it. Help yourself. Stick your dick in if you want. We can sort it out later if there’s any kind of awkward rape allegations or sexual assault kerfuffle.
The fact that Trump is implicated in near enough 30 pussy grabbing accusations just isn’t that big a deal. It should be a big deal. But come on, we know it isn’t.
Now go in hard with the top line of the thing
Sexual assault remains a no big deal situation. Rape happens all the time, it happens so often sometimes women don’t even think it’s rape, they just think they made a bad decision, or they were drunk, or that they just don’t enjoy sex that much, or that perhaps they asked for it because they like flirting but not then getting pounded miserably until it’s over, or maybe they just needed the money because as I said, men seem to have an awful lot of it. Maybe they liked spending time with the boss, and felt giddy getting drunk with him but really didn’t want him sticking his dick in her to be part of the occasion.
In recent years the number of people charged with rape has increased, women are reporting it more, but the number of completed prosecutions has decreased. Go figure. I guess there’s load of a women who were asking for it walking around. Only 2% of reported rapes end up with a prosecution in the UK. So, looking at the evidence, the data, and the fact a sex pest is the new POTUS (again!), we can only conclude no one gives a toss about sexual assault. Indeed, why toss off, when you can rape a woman IRL and probably get away with it. Don’t give a toss, give a fuck. Double thumbs up. Skillz.
This isn’t about Trump. It’s about the extremely strange sexual dynamics between men and women, everywhere. My point is, some men’s approach to sex is no much different the the one you see in nature documentaries. They’re animals.
Rape isn’t party political. Bill Clinton had a posse of women riding after him crying rape and assault, and then of course there was the comment that the dead sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein made about Clinton, “He likes them young.”
Of course we don’t have to believe one of the most epic sex traffickers high society has ever used, I mean, “met once and didn’t like him”. But, as Hillary Clinton says, victims of sexual assault should be believed - unless, that is, they are accusing your husband. In which case SILENCE THEM.
None of the Clinton rapey stuff has ever been verified as satisfactorily as E Jean Carroll did Trump’s.
No one really cares about the molestation of women and young girls by rich and powerful people. And Trump knows it. Trump’s people know it. And to be fair, no one really cares about the molestation of women and young girls by anyone, but especially not by powerful men.
Now you have to discuss Russell Brand
Which brings me, sadly, to Russell Brand. A man with a litany of accusers, a man anyone he has worked with at XFM, MTV, BBC, C4, knows gets off on making people feel very uncomfortable, which need not be illegal, but often is. A man who frequently flopped his dick out for fun in front of women, a man who was very recently in the vanguard of J Corbyn supporters and is now a stalwart of the American Christian far right because his movie career tanked as his toxicity rose higher and higher. Katy Perry says after they broke up, “I found out the real truth, which I can’t necessarily disclose because I keep it locked in my safe for a rainy day.”
The Met Police have just handed the CPS all they have on the man. A man who is a piece of criminally abusive, sexually cruel and controlling shit. who calls accusations against him, “very very hurtful” and “very very painful”. Brand has ingratiated himself with Elon Musk, among others, who thinks Brand being brought down by the British media for serial and serious sexual allegations just makes him even more of a winner. These are the most powerful men on the planet, bowing and scraping to a court jester dancing around with his dick dangling out of his pants and a crucifix dangling round his neck. One twitter user called him, an “oligarch shoe polishing moron,” which was sweet. A number of women just call him, “a rapist”.
He is a man, clearly who does not think he has ever done anything wrong. But who has aligned himself with the most powerful family in the US, just in case the CPS come for him. And in the eyes of so many, he will not have. It’s just being a bit of a bloke, taken a little bit too extreme. A bit of a naughty boy. “Your body, my choice”.
How can we move away from a culture that valorises the rapists. Lily Allen said in a Grazia interview last year, “I was on a chat show with Russell Brand and Noel Fielding and Jonathan Ross [in 2007]. And there are comments, I think, about me being raped or something. And I laugh along with it. In retrospect, that’s horrendous. It makes me uncomfortable but I don’t think I felt that at the time because it was the culture.”
It’s PC gone mad. Can’t you make a rape joke any more? Well, I don’t know if you can. I used the word rape recently with a 35 year old, as an alternative to using a more sensible word, like can I pick your brains. I don’t know why I did it, she was German and humourless and it was just embarassing. Made me act all, I dunno, all Nineties. In the nineties it was really only rape if a nasty man came up behind you in a park and held a knife to your throat.
Here is where you start going a bit weird and scary
Even grown up and confident, strong women just suck it up. Like the very powerful woman I know who woke up to find a guy raping her, who just, sort of, dealt with it - miserably shamefully regretfully silently. Or the vulnerable woman I know who was raped while passed out drunk by a powerful man who then silenced her by stuffing a court order in her mouth, metaphorically obviously. The court order was actually served by his aggressive lawyers and despite the police believing her story and wanting to help her press charges, all they could do once this legal gag was served was give her the number for Rape Crisis, shrug, and send her with sad sympathetic faces on her way to lick her wounds alone. Rick James, Diddy, Weinstein, BIll Cosby, Savile, Mohammad Fayed with his doctors checking his female staff members were free of sexual disease so he could tuck in without fear of a pox on his apparently minuscule button mushroom.
Most of the time I really can’t be bothered to even think of these characters that have so much power yet still feel like complete losers. Perhaps that’s why they do it.
Those are just the big name big numbers guys. It’s Substack, FFS. You know what I’m talking about. Raping and discomfort around sex, for women, it’s EVERYWHERE. So everywhere we don’t even think about it.
Because while women like sex, they tend not to be like men, a certain type of men, and need it all the time everywhere with everyone and especially if they don’t really want to have it with you. They certainly don’t want to bond with you, or make you feel safe. Oh God no, that would ruin it. Your utter discomfort is what’s so cute about you.
And it’s all OK with the people. And it’s not going away. Certainly not now there’s a convicted rapist getting ready to re-enter the White House. Every time there’s a massive sex case, we convulse and cry, and we all share our tales of abuse and rape and discomfort. And then we vote one in because he might put your taxes down
“I feel bad I’m kind of shrugging about all this, bad sex, especially drunk bad sex, used to happen all the time.” But we are so so glad the younger generation are a bit wiser then we were. Or are they? Because a certain type of man still doesn’t seem to be able to view women as human beings, rather they are something to ogle, move on, take down, crush, bully, parade around with, use, abuse or just kill. Men are fucking animals. (Not all men) And a new energy of this being OK is rising up and we should ensure our daughters know this, are prepared for it, and grow up prepared to tell those men to FUCK RIGHT OFF OR THIS CUNT RIGHT HERE, ME, IS GOING TO BLOW YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF.