“It has been very interesting, clearly it spoke to their fear that the woman is only tolerating sex.”

A conversation about sex. Must we live with and expect the shadow side of sex in order to have it at all?

I was just about to publish this post when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned. The Church of England had failed hundreds of children, despite formally knowing John Smyth, a barrister and Church of England reader was a violent serial abuser, and the most prolific to ever be associated with the Church of England.

In the words of Keith Makin, the former social services director who led the independent review into Smyth’s crimes he was was an appalling abuser of children and young men. “His abuse was prolific, brutal and horrific. His victims were subjected to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks. The impact of that abuse is impossible to overstate and has permanently marked the lives of his victims. John Smyth’s own family are victims of his abuse. John Smyth's activities were identified in the 1980s. Despite considerable efforts by individuals to bring to the attention of relevant authorities the scope and horror of Smyth's conduct, including by victims and by some clergy, the steps taken by the Church of England and other organisations and individuals were ineffective and neither fully exposed nor prevented further abuse by him.”

The report, published a few days ago, is 253 pages of grotesque and grim detail of a mature man assaulting hundreds of men and boys. “John Smyth would drape himself over the victim before and after the beating, sometimes kissing them on the neck or back. The accounts from victims and the details which follow…describe an aberrated and clearly sexually motivated, sadistic, regime.”

The facts of Smyth’s brutal violence have been out there for decades: a report in 1982, a series of reports by Channel 4 in 2017, and Welby himself, according to the report (page 52), knew in 1978, when, ‘Justin Welby was overheard…having a “grave” conversation with Mark Ruston, about John Smyth.’

Welby signed his resignation letter with the words, “my deepest commitment is to the person of Jesus Christ, my saviour and my God” but I am sure Smyth’s victims would rather, for once, he might have put young innocent boys first.

But that’s religion for you, it’s been justifying the abuse and subjugation of women, boys, children, animals, whatevs, since long before prim and proper monotheistic Abrahamic religions became the natty thing. Before Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the Greek Gods were forever raping, brutalising and punishing women. Dial up the Wikipedia page, List of rape victims from ancient history and mythology. Violence and rape has figured in Western culture everywhere, the Bible, Greek mythology, Hollywood movies. Women are forever being beaten, raped and punished by men.’d like to see some proper evidence for the authors of Genesis’ claims that a drunken Lot was raped by all his daughters. But hey, I’m not one for interpreting religious texts. Let’s not go there.

Sadistic male sexual pleasure has been something of a jolly theme to my week. On Sunday I bumped into Rachel Johnson on the street. In her podcast earlier this year, Master, the allegations against Neil Gaiman, Johnson investigated allegations that the literary megastar Gaiman sexually assaulted and abused women while they were in consensual relationships with him. Master explored that massive grey area where a man’s fame, power, age, money, cunning, brute strength, entitlement, et al, allows him to let’s use a nice word like persuade a woman to submit to acts she really would rather she did not have to.

The podcast, “dropped like a doodlebug,” she says. Standing there, outside the Fara second hand shop on Elgin Crescents, she described Gaiman in unequivocal terms to me as a, “sadist, someone addicted to violence.”