Less than a year before that crisp Sunday, Brand had been publicly accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. He denied any wrongdoing. He was subsequently charged with seven alleged offenses and today stands trial for them at Southwark Crown Court on three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of indecent assault, together relating to allegations dating from 1999 to 2009.

To some, there was something opportunistic about the timing of Brand’s religious rebirth. But the more interesting story is what kind of Christian he would go on to become. For he did not simply become a tea-and-biscuits Anglican: he moved, like a moth to a flame, toward a distinctively American religious and political ecosystem, one whose ideas about rebirth, persecution and personal testimony fit both him and the American Right strikingly well — even as the same trends are now following Brand back home to Britain.

Brand came to Christianity via Grylls and Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical church in South Kensington. Yet if British Christianity offered him a font, that was about it. Within days of the baptism, Christian magazine Woman Alive cattily argued that it was too soon to hold him up as an example of God’s redeeming power. A few months later, Brand gave the publication’s pearl-clutching readers something else to worry about: he began baptizing people himself. One self-released photograph showed him officiating in a pair of white budgie smugglers. The convert was fully dressed. One vicar quoted in Premier Christian News quipped that he had baptized a great many people over the years — and had somehow always managed to keep his clothes on.

County Road 30A couldn’t be more different from South Kensington. Running for a little over 20 miles along the Florida Panhandle, following the northern spit of Florida until it reaches Alabama, 30A is lined by beach towns, whose tin roofs and picket fences evoke a dream of small-town America. Locals dart between pastel villages by golf cart, past pale quartz beaches and the Gulf’s turquoise water. Seaside, the area’s main town, was the set for The Truman Show, a 1998 film about a man living inside a television broadcast and whose neighbors, unbeknown to him, are all acting for the cameras.

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Brand moved his family here in the autumn of 2024 — a few months after his baptism, and just before Trump’s re-election — explaining that he could no longer live in a country whose media, government and judiciary would always find a way to muzzle anyone who became an inconvenience. He did not come as a man hiding from the limelight. Neighbors reported seeing him as a permanent fixture at the Saturday farmers’ market; he cycled through Seaside calling out blessings to passers-by; one morning in December, after bumping into a group of groomsmen on the beach, he accepted their invitation to the wedding later that day.

Brand worships at Good News Church in Santa Rosa Beach, which invites people to be “born again through Jesus”. In November 2025, The Times reported that he had begun baptizing willing converts in a penguin pool at the Emerald Coast Zoo, a nearby Christian-themed attraction. Never one to miss an opportunity to furnish his followers with devotional content, Brand posted the footage himself with a penguin emoji. It’s an odd thing to watch: the shirtless celebrity, the solemn words, the tilt-dunk backwards, all in the company of a colony of flightless seabirds going about their business. Then again, this is Florida, America’s great subtropical carnival of roadside oddities, religious revivalists, get-rich-quick schemes and anti-government eccentrics, a place where the sacred and the absurd have always rubbed shoulders.

A parody to many Brits, Brand is legible to Florida in a way he could never be in Henley. He has also landed in a place where his new faith sits comfortably alongside almost everything he already believed. The wealthy, photogenic beach towns of 30A are hardly a wilderness of sackcloth and penance. Here, Christianity, biohacking, hot yoga and Pelotons coexist with remarkably little friction. A man who has spent decades moving between spirituality, addiction recovery, yoga and anti-corporate politics barely has to change his clothes.

From the churches of 30A, Brand quickly found rather more powerful friends. Among the first was Sean Feucht, a long-haired, guitar-strumming evangelist and Trump devotee, whose ministry has been dogged by allegations of financial mismanagement. By February 2025, a few weeks before he was charged, Brand was lauded at a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago hosted by America’s Future, a conservative organization that campaigns for “durable institutions” and “liberty”. There, Brand was handed a glimmering “Global Defender of Freedom” award, sharing the bill with Mike Tyson and the singer Ted Nugent.

Then, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, the first since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Brand opened his speech on his knees, thanking God for the example of forgiveness set by Kirk’s widow. He told the crowd that the words “turning point”, to him, meant repentance. When he replayed the speech a few days later on Stay Free with Russell Brand, his video podcast devoted to politics, spirituality and the supposed evils of the establishment, the episode came with a giveaway promoting Reborn, his own wellness brand, and which sells the sort of biohacking supplements beloved by the American alternative-health movement. First prize was a Jeep Wrangler and $10,000 cash.

Brand’s website continues in a similar vein, inviting visitors to join Awakened Wonders, a subscription community with whom he reads and prays weekly. The mailing list promises subscribers their “place on the ark”. Videos end with a nudge towards a premium channel on Rumble, where subscribers can join the “movement”. And this spring came a book, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, 192 Tony Robbins-endorsed pages and yours for $19.79. The publisher: Tucker Carlson Books.

As these examples imply, Brand has entered a religious culture with few issues blending money and faith. From the television evangelists of the Seventies and Eighties, with their enormous hair, enormous congregations and even more enormous bank accounts, to the prosperity preachers of today’s megachurches, certain strands of American evangelicalism have proved remarkably adept at reconciling God with Mammon. Faith need not mean renunciation; it can promise abundance, better health, greater happiness and a more successful you. The language of salvation has mingled with that of self-improvement, and the American pulpit has become a platform from which to sell both.

It helps, too, that behind Brand’s swelling online following — 6.6 million YouTube subscribers and more than two million more on Rumble, a self-styled free-speech alternative — sits an architecture of belonging that he’s been building for years. Long before his conversion, Brand was cultivating a community of the supposedly awakened, first through online sermons railing against the mainstream media, then through podcasts and live events promoting his particular brand of enlightenment. Christianity has furnished the enterprise with a new vocabulary, especially given his new political contacts, but the business model is remarkably familiar.

Theology plays a role here too. “Born again” is a phrase from the third chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that no man will see the kingdom of God unless he is born anew. For much of Christian history, this was interpreted as the slow, lifelong work of worship. It was the Protestant revivalists of the 18th century who turned it into an event: a datable, theatrical moment in which a person becomes something new.

American evangelism has always had a special fondness for the “twice-born”. Take the revivalist minister Charles Finney, leader in the 19th century of the Second Great Awakening. He would seat the unconverted on an “anxious bench” at the front of a tent and publicly wrestle with their souls in full view of their neighbors, establishing “testimony” — confessional, mea culpa monologues — as a form of popular entertainment. It’s a short hop, conceptually at least, to the Emerald Coast penguin pool. The spectacle attracts the faithful; the faithful become followers; and followers, as Brand knows better than most, can be monetized.

Compare all this to British Christianity. Charismatic Anglicanism — the CofE’s emotionally expressive branch that emphasizes personal encounters with the Holy Spirit — may have given  Brand a theology of dramatic renewal. But it also came embedded in a national church whose instincts run pastoral and discreet, in a country where public displays of piety are more likely to provoke embarrassment than applause. The American habit of treating salvation as both a public spectacle and a commercial opportunity has never quite taken hold here. In Britain, a celebrity finding Jesus is more likely to raise eyebrows than confer authority. In America, though, finding Jesus can be the beginning of a lucrative new public life, even the start of a second career.

As Brand’s embrace by Magaworld implies, meanwhile, this is especially true given the broad political context. The New Apostolic Reformation, the radical fringe of the American charismatic network, whose ideas have shaped figures like Feucht, now talks about Christians conquering the “seven mountains” of culture: from government and media to education and the arts. “We want souls, and we want nations,” declares Lance Wallnau, one of the movement’s leading evangelists. And, under Trump, this vision of politics as spiritual warfare has found a receptive audience. A 2025 survey found that two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants sympathized with or embraced Christian nationalist ideas. To be clear, not all these belong to the NAR, but the numbers suggest how far this fusion of faith and politics extends. Certainly, on 6 January 2021, as rioters stormed the US Capitol, leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation gathered outside, blowing horns, speaking in tongues and praying for angels to drive a demonic serpent from the Senate. For them, the struggle for political power was quite literally a battle between heavenly forces. In this cosmology, opposition from the press or the courts can be read not just as mere politics, but as a kind of spiritual resistance, a sign the believer is doing something right.

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Some of the congregants of Santa Rosa Beach remain unconvinced by their neighbor’s transformation. Josh Parish, a local Christian real estate agent, was quoted as saying he thought Brand was “a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman”. But to those who want it, a language is available — woven through its politics and increasingly through its churches — in which demonetization, de-platforming, hostile coverage can be narrated as the familiar sufferings of the faithful.

Little wonder Brand continues to make inroads into politics. In September, he appeared at Washington’s lavish Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit, moderating a discussion on healthcare reform with senior Trump administration officials. Vice President JD Vance and Health Secretary RFK Jr were also on the program. The spectacle captured something of the new American Right: evangelical Christianity, alternative medicine, self-optimization and political grievance mingling in a movement that has made suspicion of established authority practically a qualification for belonging. Brand, whose joss-stick spirituality and conspiracy-laden sermons have made him an increasingly eccentric figure in British public life, has found himself a place amazingly close to the center of US power.

And in a sign, perhaps, of how strong American culture-war currents now are, something similar is now happening back across the Atlantic. Where the nationalist Right once invoked Christianity largely as a marker of British heritage, some of its more radical figures are increasingly embracing the language of evangelical revival. Tommy Robinson, for instance, claims to have found Jesus in prison. Last year, at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London, crosses rose above a sea of St George’s flags; crowds chanted “Christ is King”; and a minute’s silence was held for Charlie Kirk. All this dismays many British church leaders. “The church is not the chaplain to any political tribe,” stressed Mike Judge, editor of the Evangelical Times. The Church of England, from which Brand’s religious journey began, has also joined Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist leaders in warning against misusing the cross to exclude others.

Yet more than politics or commercialism, there is one more way of looking at Brand’s conversion: as the latest in a long line of reinventions. After all, he has spent most of his life killing off previous versions of himself. There was Russell Brand the heroin addict; Russell Brand the priapic MTV presenter; Russell Brand the Hollywood actor and husband of Katy Perry; the revolutionary who wanted to overthrow capitalism; the wellness guru; the anti-establishment broadcaster who railed against big pharma, big data and the global elite. Christianity has offered him perhaps his most dramatic transformation yet, albeit with the added promise of eternal life.

This was a play that people talked about, and not just theatre people but regular people — mothers taking their teenage daughters as a way to warn them about the vicious adult world, husbands and wives weighing the claims of the accuser and accused, women whispering to each other: this is how it is. So what that Prima Facie was, in some regards, more a lecture than a play? It was a lecture that audiences were hungry for.

Now, Miller is back with another one-woman show (well, nearly one woman: there are also two small roles for men) about rape and the law, once again directed by Justin Martin. Inter Alia at the National Theatre stars Rosamund Pike as Jessica, a judge/wife/mother/feminist whose roles overlap, conflict and — by the end of the play — tear her apart.

We first meet Jessica as she bawls the line “the fucking PATRIARCHY!” into a microphone in rock-goddess pose. This is the Jessica of the courtroom: a magnetic performer, a take-no-bullshit queen who uses her place on the bench to make her courtroom a “moral” place. She knows all the tricks that barristers use to trip up victims, and she takes a personal pride in her ability to undermine them, sometimes by simply reminding the complainant that she can take her time to reply (“soft skills,” boasts Jessica). She sees herself a trailblazer for women in law.

But we also see her struggling with the second shift. She tells us how she massages her barrister husband’s ego, sore from the fact that she was appointed a judge before him. And then the big twist, though you can see it coming a mile off: her teenage son Harry is accused of rape, and we learn that he has stumbled his way into the sleazy vortex of the “manosphere”. (Once again, great timing from Miller, given that this is the hot take engine of the moment.) Suddenly, Jessica finds herself relieved by the iniquities of the system, strategizing to discredit the victim, trying to convince her son of the fine distinctions between “moral” and “legal” guilt, full of grief for the innocent boy she once had. At this point, is she a mother or a judge? The insinuation of Inter Alia is that she cannot be both.

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Miller’s method in both plays is brutally effective: animate the political question by turning it into a personal one. It’s also got the sadistic logic of a Dante-esque punishment. How can the thrusting girlboss barrister learn the consequences of her actions? By having her raped so she has to experience the dock from the other side. How can the lean-in lady understand the limits of her worldview? By making her son into a predator and forcing her to fail both maternally and professionally. The sins of the system are visited on the individual woman.

In fact, Miller is so keen to make things hard on Jessica that she inadvertently makes things easy on the audience. The bits of the play that really bristle with energy are when there is doubt about what Harry’s done. When he’s first accused, he tells his parents this is all a mistake. He had consensual (albeit drunken) sex with the girl, but he didn’t rape her; he wouldn’t rape her, he wanted her to be his girlfriend. There is a possibility that this really is complicated, one way or another.

The peculiar nature of a rape conviction, as the play explains in one of its most public information-sounding exchanges, is that the difference between guilty and not guilty rests not in the defendant’s actions, but in what the jury thinks that the defendant thought was happening in the complainant’s mind. If a jury believes that an accused man genuinely and reasonably believed that the complainant consented, then that man cannot be guilty of rape. It is, as Harry’s father says, an offense where both parties can be telling the truth in their version of what happened.

But Harry isn’t telling the truth. By the end of the play, he’s admitted to his mother that he did rape the girl — and not only that, he did it when she was asleep. Now he wants to confess to the police, and Jessica has to decide whether to support him in doing the right thing and ruining his life. A dilemma for Jessica, but not for the audience, who now have access to the objective truth of the incident. This unlikely act of conscience lets the audience off the hook.

While you feel for Harry in his initial confusion and terror at being accused, there’s always the moral peril that you are extending your compassion to a sex offender. Confirming that he is, indeed, a rapist might seem to further implicate the audience; but because he is a contrite sex offender seeking to make amends to his victim, sympathy seems merited. And anyway, can he really be blamed when his parents left him to wander in the deep dark forest of the internet? A harder-edged play would make the viewer squirm more.

Like the TV show Adolescence before it, this feels like an artwork that squares up to the terrible truth of male violence and then ducks the punch. A more ambiguous Harry would be more frightening, but also closer to the truth of what rape is. A boy who genuinely believed, reasonably or otherwise, that what he was doing to a girl was what she wanted. A boy who could be both truthful and dangerous. A boy who didn’t need to perjure himself to be morally guilty and legally not guilty at the same time. As much as Miller’s work wants to confront the nightmare of justice for rape victims, this is the place it cannot go.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. Miller is a dramatist, meaning she is great at exposing the razzle-dazzle of the courtroom, and relentless at uncovering the inner lives of her female characters. She’s less adept at getting into the secret brains of men. But that, legally speaking, is where the crime of rape takes place. It is not what happens to a woman’s body that distinguishes sex from rape: it is what happens in a man’s mind, and Miller’s plays have no access there.

In the National Theatre gift shop, you can buy an Inter Alia tie-in tote bag, bright orange and printed with the play’s opening line: “The fucking PATRIARCHY!” This feels very 10 years ago: very Beyoncé dancing in front of the word “FEMINIST”, very “I’m with her” shirts for Hillary, very pre-#MeToo. It’s a throwback to a time, as brief as it was illusory, when the permanent triumph of feminism seemed so close that it could be merchandised into existence. Instead, there was a pussy grabber for president.

By the end of Inter Alia, Jessica’s defiant roar is obviously hollow — when she has to make a choice between her principles and her family, she is the fucking patriarchy. But off the stage, glib slogans and self-affirmations are all there is to offer. As provocative and effective as Miller’s plays are, it is their female characters who are put on trial. Without a serious effort to understand men (including, especially, the most dangerous men), the critique of male violence is an empty project.

Blue publicizes her own violation in ways that are unusual in traditional pornography, with its closed sets and narrative formulas. She demystifies how porn is created, hosting public events where masked men queue up to “have a go”. She is no bashful industry starlet — she is a self-made brand, a camgirl disruptor for whom discomfort is not a problem: it is the point. She has well understood that OnlyFans, Reddit and PornHub are oversaturated: big followings can no longer be won by being the hottest, the youngest, the most shiny and waxed and inflated. The trailblazers of the 2010s, infantilized e-girl Belle Delphine and hijabi porn star Mia Khalifa, showed that controversy was now the best way to build a brand.

In pursuit of further controversy, Blue is now on a podcast with Andrew Tate. The misogynist influencer — who faces 10 criminal charges in Britain, including rape, actual bodily harm and sex-trafficking, and who promotes a business model of acquiring “girlfriends” who can then be pimped out on porn sites — appeared in a promotional image with Blue and podcast host Rob Moore. Tate wears wonky sunglasses and a shirt open to his navel in the style of Jack Sparrow, looking like a man who spikes drinks in Popworld; Moore, who describes himself as a “creator/ranter/rebel”, stands awkwardly next to Bonnie Blue, who is kneeling on the floor with her tongue sticking out. In a teaser on X, Tate wrote: “Bonnie is the end result of feminism.” He is completely right.

Blue, who is my age and from near where I grew up, is the product of a feminism which has encouraged young women to prostitute themselves — and I worry for her. I see her degrading stunts as acts of self-harm. Half of her job is to receive the emissions of the worst cross-section of men in society, film it and smile about it; the other half is telling society she enjoys this, along with volleys at the women who resent or pity her. In the podcast, she discusses “what men want”, the hypocrisy and laziness of wives and girlfriends, the myriad ways “sex work” is good for society, and why it’s alright for men to override women’s consent with money. She also says she believes Tate is innocent of the charges against him (“well, why would he?”). He naturally encourages this world view, bleating a line which will be familiar to any survivors of bullshit liberal feminism. Bemoaning the men who chastise Blue for her sex stunts, he tritely says: “It’s your body, your choice, right?”

Unfortunately, Blue struggles to hold her own in the conversation. She is useful to Tate insofar as she can appear to legitimize his business model, but really she means less than nothing to him — in fact, he views her with a kind of erotic revulsion. Tate says he would not allow a daughter of his to follow Blue’s path, nor would he want a son to sleep with her. She is a useful pariah: she, like him, has understood our sexual culture better than most, to great professional acclaim. But unlike him, she has no admirers (public ones, at least). It must be lonely.

The personal consequences for Blue in the years to come are uncomfortable to consider: we can already see the psychological cost of her lifestyle ticking up like a taxi meter in her glazed blue eyes, in her monotone voice, in the frightened look on her face as she is shoved around on that bed. But she is an adult, and she is responsible — alongside Tate — for accelerating a sexual culture which has enriched her and which will harm and mislead thousands of women and girls. I have known young women who have chosen, entirely without financial need and through a vague sense that it is empowering, to set up shop on OnlyFans; one, who did it aged 21, had the standard experience: she burned through the couple of grand she made, quit after a few months and now must live with the fact that pictures of her naked body and faux-ecstatic face will be circulated around the internet forever. How many young women across the country share her experience?

But there are other consequences, too. Worse ones; ones that pertain to the magma of sex violence coursing through modern Britain, ones that begin in the low-lit bedrooms of tween boys and end in dark alleys and dorm rooms, in the bruised and violated bodies of the girls of the future.

Last week, a primary school-aged boy was filmed shouting at a woman sunbathing in her own garden in a bikini: “Give us a bit of fanny… I’ve been craving it all day. Suck my dick. Get on your knees. Give me your minge. Bend over.” In the background, a companion made moaning sounds. They cannot have been older than 10.

The video upset me for hours after. Something irreplicable about childhood, something critical about the respect between adults and children, men and women, has been spoiled — probably forever — by degrading pornography. And Bonnie Blue is partly responsible. That these boys’ instinct was to sexually intimidate a woman they saw only as a potential porn star; that they themselves have been exposed to that sort of language and material; that the generation of girls forced to sit in classrooms with them will face problems none of us ever did, is no less than disastrous.

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When children are exposed to pornography, it burdens them with psychologically troubling ideas about the women they know in real life: that they all belong in a hidden sexual world in which men turn them into pretzels and fuck them unconscious, and that they secretly enjoy it. Our safeguards against violent sexism are hopeless: primary-school boys are scolded for pulling girls’ ponytails at break time; they are given history lessons about Cleopatra and Boudicca; they sit through assemblies about women’s football and Florence Nightingale. But all of this soft-touch equality conditioning is undone the moment they see a naked woman strangled, beaten and humiliated on a screen. And how could it not be? The absorption of the worldviews of Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue is nothing short of radicalizing. Blue and Tate, and the pornography industry they represent, are directly to blame for the way Generation Alpha girls are being treated in the playground now, and will probably be treated for their entire teenage years. They will come up against a supercharged strain of misogyny which women my and Bonnie Blue’s age cannot even begin to understand.

We cannot rely on bullshit 2020s feminism to fix this — the boner-advocacy brigade which refuses to ask any difficult questions about who it represents or what it is for. As things stand, the young women of the future will be forced to fend for themselves, with Gen Z having utterly disappointed on the critical questions of gender, prostitution and pornography. So what can be done? Perhaps the only hope is that the 2030s will mark a turning point: that youngsters then will finally realize that the excesses of liberal feminism — the dogma that every choice a woman makes, however violating, is feminist — must be swept away if they are to survive this radioactive new breed of woman-hatred. Perhaps they will finally lobby politicians to accept that society simply cannot be trusted with extreme pornography; that, like other radicalizing material, it should be restricted, and that this fact is a matter of life and death. With moves to criminalize strangulation on porn sites made last week, there is a glimmer of hope in this regard. I hope that young girls of the future will view Bonnie Blue in the same way that Tate so clearly does, as a stooge for failed feminism. I hope for their sake that they do, because our culture, as it stands, will not save them.

In the carny argot of the sport, the word for this is kayfabe. Kayfabe is something more artful than a lie and more profound than a fiction. It doesn’t simply substitute a narrative for the truth: it turns the truth into an element of the storyline, and those storylines in turn shape the truth. A kayfabe feud can sour a real professional relationship. Kayfabe romances turn into real romances, and the real romance is written into the kayfabe. The end result is a world where even the most serious possibilities can be inoculated with irony.

The king of sports entertainment until very recently was Vince McMahon, who both ran WWE in real life and kayfabe played a domineering boss character called Mr McMahon. But last week, after four decades in charge, McMahon resigned, following the publication of sexual misconduct allegations against him in the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps coincidentally, just days earlier, he’d signed a major deal to take wrestling to Netflix.

The allegations are extensive and distressing: a former WWE employee name Janel Grant claims he took turns sexually abusing her in a locked room with another executive, trafficked her to other men in the company and defecated on her during a threesome. McMahon denies them all, stating: “Ms Grant’s lawsuit is replete with lies, obscene made-up instances that never occurred, and is a vindictive distortion of the truth.”

But these are not the first allegations to be made against McMahon, or the culture of wrestling he presided over. As far back as 1992, Rita Chatterton, the first female referee in what was then the WWF, gave an interview in which she said McMahon had raped her in 1986 then frozen her out of the company. (He denied this.) By then, though, the statute of limitations had expired. For the mainstream media, which had limited interest in women’s allegations anyway, wrestling was a niche concern. For the specialist wrestling press, pursuing the story would have been suicidal — McMahon controlled access, and would hardly indulge a journalist pursuing an unflattering angle. McMahon dictated the storylines in the ring, but he also had the power to control the stories told beyond it.

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A few years later, in 1999, Rena Mero (who wrestled as Sable) sued what was then the WWF: she said she’d been stripped of her championship belt after refusing to do in-ring nudity, and had been pressured to participate in lesbian storylines. The parties had settled, in an agreement that barred Mero from wrestling for three years — and even from using her ring name. As standard, WWE contracts give the organisation copyright over wrestlers’ characters. This meant that if you left McMahon’s kingdom, you’d usually leave your career behind: the “real” you was of considerably less value than the kayfabe version.

So, anyone who valued their wrestling career would be advised to play nice with McMahon. Given that WWE essentially held a monopoly over the sport, your career and reputation were in his gift. It’s understandable, then, that after her three-year ban was up, Mero returned for a storyline where she played the in-ring McMahon’s mistress. At one point, her breasts were exposed on live TV. It was a twist that reduced Mero’s lawsuit to a piece of kayfabe, effectively invalidating her claims and furthermore, those of any other woman in wrestling who might speak out about harassment. Taking your accuser back is, cynically, the quickest way to make her look like an unreliable witness; and as Harvey Weinstein’s victims would later describe, leaving is not a simple thing when the man you’re trying to leave wields absolute control over your profession.

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I knew nothing of these allegations when I was watching wrestling in the late Nineties. McMahon was protected by his power, but also by the convention of kayfabe. Wrestling fans pride themselves on their ability to suspend their disbelief in just the right amount — to confuse the ring with real life was to make yourself a dupe, or a “mark” in wrestling slang. The character Vince McMahon played was a womanising monster, but only the most childishly naive viewer would confuse that character with the man.

It’s the same gaslight logic that has sustained Donald Trump — a friend of McMahon’s and, thanks to the 2007 “Battle of the Billionaires”, the only president to also be a member of WWE’s Hall of Fame. We’ve seen it when Trump has faced his own allegations of sexual misconduct. “Grab them by the pussy” was “locker room talk” — essentially, the kind of thing that the character of Donald Trump would say. Yes, he was found by a jury to have sexually assaulted the writer E Jean Carroll, and further ordered to pay her $83.3 million in damages for subsequently continuing to insist that she is lying about it — but in Donald Trump kayfabe, he’s the victim of a leftist conspiracy and this is simply more evidence that his enemies are out to get him.

Kayfabe is a way to talk about the art of wrestling, but really, it’s a term for the ability of the most powerful to impose their version of reality, and confound everyone else’s. And every MeToo story is a story, at bottom, of who is powerful enough to dictate the truth. It’s telling that, for most men, their MeTooing coincides with a decline in their authority. Weinstein was well past his Oscar-minting prime. R Kelly had ceased to be a reliable hit machine, spending more time with his grooming victims than he did in the studio. Jimmy Savile — who was MeTooed before MeToo was a thing — had to be dead first. If Trump seems impervious, it’s because he is, so far, too big to fail.

It’s telling, too, that the men who have paid the highest price for MeToo allegations have often been low in the social pecking order. Stephen Elliott was a minor figure in literary journalism when he was anonymously accused of rape via journalist Moira Donegan’s MeToo-inspired “Shitty Media Men” open-source spreadsheet. The unsubstantiated claims led to his social and professional ruin; when he sued for defamation, that was seen as further proof of his turpitude, regardless of whether he was right. Last year, he reached a settlement with Donegan in which she would pay him damages.

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McMahon has already resigned from WWE once, in 2022, when the WSJ initially reported that the company had made millions of dollars in payouts to women alleging sexual misconduct against him. He was replaced by his daughter Stephanie, and reinstated a few months later, leaving it unclear as to whether it was a real defenestration, or a kayfabe one. But this time, the reality of Netflix’s corporate reputation appears to have imposed itself over the preferred reality of Vince McMahon. At 78, it could finally be the end of his reign.

When the reporters who broke the Weinstein allegations for the New York Times wrote a book about it, they called it She Said. It’s a title that explicitly references storytelling: who is listened to, and who is deemed an unreliable narrator. A “she said” story is one you don’t have to pay attention to, until something changes and suddenly you do. Maybe that’s why the entertainment industry is where MeToo started: it takes a storytelling business to shift a storytelling problem. And maybe that’s why it’s taken so long for wrestling to have its MeToo moment: when one man rules the narrative, his word is not only the law, it’s the (kayfabe) truth.

Now, we live in a radically different world. A world in which a generation of young women is being taught to disregard the fear they might feel in a threatening situation. They are told not to trust their intuition. And they are called bigots and sent death threats if they suggest that they feel uncomfortable in their bathrooms and changing rooms — or even in shelters for survivors of sexual abuse.

As a sexual assault survivor myself, I fought back tears while watching Paula Scanlan testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee about her experience of being on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team — with the transgender athlete Lia Thomas. “I know of women with sexual trauma who are adversely impacted by having biological males in their locker room without their consent. I know this because I am one of these women.”

I felt rage, too. How outrageous that Scanlan should have to defend her desire to be free of biological males in a female changing room. How dare her university send her to psychotherapy in an “attempt to reeducate [me] to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male”? I find it hard to believe that, five years ago, feminists’ rallying cry was #BelieveAllWomen.

Clearly, Scanlan does too. “Let us not forget the viral #MeToo movement that empowered female victims to speak up,” she said. “It trained a spotlight on the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and abuse, including in scholarly and educational institutions … many policies pushed today completely ignore my experiences and many women like me.” In the space of five years, we’ve gone from #BelieveAllWomen to: “Believe all women, especially if they are men.”

How have we regressed so rapidly? Everyone from Oprah downwards preached to my generation of women to listen to your gut; listen to your instinct; listen to that voice whispering “Get out!” Back in 1997, she interviewed Gavin de Becker, whose book The Gift of Fear — a guide to understanding how your instincts about other people can keep you safe — became a bestseller. During her show, he summed it up like this: “Someone who doesn’t hear ‘no’ is trying to control you.”

Oprah looked out at the audience. “Did y’all hear that? Gavin, you need to say it again.”

Such was the impact of the book that, in 2008, Oprah did an hour-long show to commemorate its tenth anniversary. During it, de Becker repeated a line from his book, distilled from a Margaret Atwood lecture: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”

I understood this. I was taught to get out of any threatening situation as soon as possible. If you’re alone in a room and a man enters and you don’t feel safe? Leave. If you’re walking at night and feel the instinct to escape? Just run. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, because what if you’re right? I was told to ignore that little voice at my peril. My mother raised me and my sisters to scream and run like hell if a stranger asked us to get in their car. “Because if you end up in a trunk, you’re dead.”

As de Becker says: “Can you imagine an animal in the wilderness overtaken with fear and saying ‘Oh it’s probably nothing.’ But we do that every day.” In his 1997 Oprah appearance, he argues that the real information we should be giving women and children is: “Honour your own fear and teach them that it’s important, that their own internal voice is important.”

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The message today’s young women are getting is that if their inner voice says it feels wrong when someone with a penis undresses in front of them, or is present when they undress, in a space designated for women, there is something wrong with them. Scanlan said in her testimony: “We, the women, were the problem, not the victims. We were expected to conform, to move over and shut up. Our feelings didn’t matter. The university was gaslighting and fearmongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.”

It appears that institutions, politicians and progressives are happy to sacrifice women at the altar of inclusivity. They demand we keep quiet when we feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Ironically, instead of teaching us to keep ourselves safe and fear violation, the women’s movement teaches us to fear being labelled as bigots. Paula Scanlan and collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines have been called transphobes for objecting to someone striding around with his penis on show in a locker room designated for women.

We are setting a dangerous precedent. Think about the young women watching the way that Scanlan and Gaines are being treated. They will surely conclude that they must suffer to accommodate the small handful of males that want to make everything about them. They are now being given access to female prisons, domestic abuse shelters, rape centres, locker rooms, spas and public toilets, as well as changing rooms.

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It would be absurd to assume that all trans-identified male-bodied people are looking for ways to abuse girls or women; it is equally absurd — and naïve — to think that male predators won’t exploit this system. But what I find particularly alarming is that it teaches women in general not to trust themselves. It tells us to ignore the discomfort triggered at a subconscious level. It encourages us to ignore our instincts. When a woman senses danger the last thing she needs is for her judgment to be clouded by another fear: the fear of social death if she acts to protect herself.

And all of us who witness the abuse that women who speak up are being subjected to are expected to remain silent. All of us whose little voices are telling us that there’s something wrong with prioritising men’s feelings over women’s safety are told we are wrong.

But my gift of fear is telling me to resist being intimidated into submission. To teach young women and my own daughter to honour that voice, that intuition. To stand behind women like Paula Scanlan who are also resisting. And to say, “No.”

What Martin achieved in such a short space of time is remarkable. Like the criminalisation of marital rape, it is a change that forces us to reconsider social norms. When it comes to the body — particularly the female body — what is and is not illegal matters. It shapes how we understand both ourselves and how we expect to be treated by others. Following the law change, guidance on upskirting was added to the Department of Education’s Keeping Children Safe in Education booklet. This has not led to the imprisonment of multiple snap-happy teenage boys; its punitive impact is minimal. But as my partner, a teacher, tells me, there’s now an awareness in schools that it is unacceptable to dismiss upskirting on the basis that “boys will be boys”.

So, Martin deserves to feel proud of her activism. Yet in both her recent Guardian piece and her new book, No Offence, But, one gets the impression that she now feels torn. Partly, this is because she is now defined as “the upskirting girl”, her activism reduced to what was, for her, an experience of violation. But Martin also seems to be subtly distancing herself from what she actually achieved. “I’m proud that my political activism has had a lasting positive impact,” she writes, “but I also have a complex relationship with it.”

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This complex relationship is very obvious throughout No Offence, But. Billed as a progressive handbook offering “a space to explore the problematic, distracting or lazy comments we so often encounter”, its chapters each focus on a particular phrase: “Not all men”, “I see no colour”, “I don’t do politics”. Some are written by Martin, others by guest contributors. The tone is one of preaching to the converted. In her own sections, Martin is keen to emphasise her growth, but she also seems unduly embarrassed by her former self. Both her furious feminist awakening and the visible, measurable achievements that ensued are suddenly positioned as somewhat immature, unsophisticated and, worst of all, privileged.

There’s a certain strand of social justice activism that is not always kind to feminists who get their hands dirty. Ten years ago, when Caroline Criado Perez fought a successful battle to have Jane Austen appear on the new £10 note, her detractors were keen to denounce hers as “banknote feminism”. Criado Perez’s campaign had stressed the importance of female visibility and heritage; her critics zeroed in on the fact that Austen’s image would be appearing on money, something that marginalised women sorely lacked. A straightforward achievement was belittled because it was associated with the Bank of England.

In a similar fashion, feminists who work with, or to change, the criminal justice system can find themselves denounced as “carceral feminists”. “The thrust of the accusation,” writes Julie Bindel in Feminism For Women, “is that those of us that want consequences for men who rape and otherwise abuse women are unconcerned with the fact that the prison system is a problem in general.” The accusers tend to ignore the fact that many feminist organisations, such as Bindel’s own Justice for Women, state that they would prefer it if prisons were not necessary, accepting them only as a last resort, given that no one has come up with anything more effective. As Bindel argues: “It should be possible to challenge the race and class hierarchies upheld by the criminal justice system” without putting women at risk by junking it completely.

Indeed, it is possible. But if one does not wish to bear the taint of complicity, it is uncomfortable. Unfortunately for Martin, she seems to have realised this only after she succeeded in making the world a safer place for women.

Alison Phipps, a sociologist at Newcastle University, has made herself a leading voice against so-called carceral feminists. In her 2021 book Me, Not You, she includes Martin’s upskirting law in a list of things that should be opposed on the basis that they “move us away from our ultimate goals”. (She comments, disdainfully, that the new law was announced “to loud applause from mainstream feminists”, because if there’s one thing worse than being practical, it’s being practical and mainstream.) There’s a perfect world out there, and by making it illegal for a man to stick a camera between your legs and take a photo of your crotch, Martin has apparently made it that much harder for us to find it.

Me, Not You is a difficult book to read, because it is so staggeringly misogynistic. Women who seek legal solutions to sexual violence are routinely compared to racists and fascists, their desire for justice dismissed as an unhealthy reaction to trauma. “Being raped,” writes Phipps, “often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not — it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back… And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us.”

I won’t quote the rest of that paragraph, but suffice it to say that Phipps uses the fact that accusations of rape by white women have been used to justify violence against black men to argue that “allegations of sexual violence” — by which she means real ones, as well as false — are “tools of oppression”.

Rape victims have long been demonised, the narrative being that their violation has left them damaged, vengeful and morally suspect. Think, for instance, of Medusa, known not for what was done to her, but for the literal monster it made of her. Centuries later, these myths are still with us. In Down Girl, Kate Manne describes how the rape victim who goes to court “is envisaged not as playing her difficult part in a criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution”. Contrary to Phipps’s claims, imputing vengeful urges to rape victims is not intersectional feminism — or any form of feminism — but the same old patriarchy.

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Then again, in the non-carceral world that Phipps envisages, there would be no rape anyway: “There would be no national borders. There would be no prisons. There would be accountability, but not vengeance. … There would not be powerful groups dominating more marginalised ones through violence.”

One has to admire the chutzpah of a middle-class white woman writing a book that dismisses feminists who engage with the criminal justice system as “bourgeois white women” before offering up John Lennon’s Imagine as a radical solution to injustice. Then again, what is a feminism that retreats from engagement with tainted institutions left with, other than imagination?

In her chapter critiquing the phrase “the police are here to protect us”, Martin indulges in a similar form of straw-manning, only using her younger self, rather than other feminists, as the target: “I believed the police force to be a heroic institution that worked tirelessly to make society safer. They found the murderers and locked them up, they stopped violence before it got out of hand.” Did Martin really have such an idealised vision of the world? Or is it just necessary for her to pretend she did, in order to justify her earlier work? Has she heard the other feminists whispering behind her back, and decided to redeem herself, by rejecting carceral complicity?

I find it hard to believe that someone who went on to achieve so much was ever as naïve as she now implies. And I find it hard to read her undermining her activism. “It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I started to be more of a critical thinker,” she writes — meaning “someone who recognises cultural, social and geographical contexts and applies theories”, as opposed to someone whose analysis is “determined mostly by their automatic emotional response, their personal context and existing opinions”. Of course, Martin’s anger at being upskirted was an “automatic emotional response”; her highly successful legal campaign was rooted in her “personal context and existing opinions”. But now, it seems, she knows better than to let her feelings get the better of her.

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How is this anything other than a step backwards? Society has long taught women to consider our emotional responses unreliable, to view ourselves as less rational than men, less capable of seeing things objectively. The feminist claim that “the personal is political” is turned against us, as though somehow, anything that is too informed by what has happened in our own lives cannot be truly relevant to anyone else.

In this feminism designed for utopia, theory is always more attractive than flesh-and-blood human beings, especially the female body, which is too messy, too unsophisticated, too implicated. It is not a coincidence, I think, that anti-carceral feminism finds common cause with trans activism, both movements raging against the inconvenient women who continue to assert the boundaries of their bodies and the validity of their trauma.

This version of feminism is, in the end, not a turn away from complicity with power, but a turn away from women. It tells us to stay quiet in the aftermath of violation, for the greater good; it tells us to bear the costs of doing nothing, so that we may be pure enough for an imagined utopia. It tells us to behave as if we don’t have bodies, as if we can exist somewhere beyond the world as it is. Imagine there’s no upskirting. Imagine there’s no rape. Imagine there are no women. It isn’t hard to do, for some.

As a reporter, I am supposed to bear witness: to expose the truth relentlessly and seek justice. I thought I could cope with seeing such horrific things; I would reassure friends that I was fine and point out that I was not the victim in these scenarios. Over the years, I have avoided examining how being immersed in a world of rape, child abuse and femicide has affected me. I would always support those feminist activists who threw in the towel to retire to Spain, but I would feel a bit bemused by their actions. Why would you want to take up gardening, instead of being an agent of change?

Then something shifted. Investigating yet another atrocity, over the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, unable to sleep. I now understand why some activists retire.

It began with the murder of a seven-year-old girl. Nikki Allan lived with her mum and three sisters in a run-down block of flats in Sunderland. One day, in 1992, a man took her to the wasteland outside a derelict warehouse and sexually assaulted her. When Nikki screamed, he pushed her through a window into the building, chased her into a far corner, and shattered her little skull with a brick. He then stabbed her 37 times, before dragging her into the basement. There he left her, propped up against the wall like a rag doll.

Police focused their investigation on a man named George Heron, seen as the local oddball. They effectively coerced a confession out of him. The following year, he was acquitted of murder at trial, after the judge ruled the confession out, but was forced to go into hiding because people in the local community were convinced of his guilt. Nikki’s mum, Sharon Henderson, believed Heron had got away with her daughter’s murder, because the police repeatedly told her that there were no other suspects. The media reinforced this narrative.

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I picked up the story in 2006. Visiting my parents in Darlington, not far from where Nikki was murdered, I saw a photograph in the local paper of a woman standing by the grave of a child. The headline read: “Mum’s bid to dig up daughter”. Sharon was asking police to exhume Nikki’s body, in order to test it for DNA evidence, following a change in the law on double jeopardy, which prevents someone being tried again on charges of which they’ve been previously acquitted. More than a decade after her daughter’s murder, Sharon was still fighting for justice.

“I always said I would never, ever give up campaigning for Nikki until her murderer was locked up,” Sharon told me. “Not until the police answer for that first so-called investigation.”

I first interviewed Sharon shortly after reading that newspaper story. A single mum from a rough part of town, she felt that the police weren’t taking her seriously. Over the years, I’ve kept in contact with Sharon, admiring her tenacity, and her refusal to accept that the police had done right by her daughter.

And then, in May 2022, the unexpected happened. A man named David Boyd was charged, 30 years after Nikki was murdered. A child sex offender, with convictions dating back to 1986, Boyd lived three doors down from where Nikki disappeared, and had moved away from the estate shortly after the murder. When questioned, Boyd had lied, presenting a made-up alibi. So focused were the police on Heron, they didn’t even bother to check it.

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By this point, I had started working on a podcast series about Nikki’s murder, originally with the intention of marking the 30th anniversary, and to give Sharon’s campaign a boost. It felt like we were close to getting justice. I attended every day of the trial, renting an apartment close to Newcastle Crown Court. Sharon and her family would come there between sittings, for respite. I saw, as I had over the previous 17 years, how much pain Sharon was enduring. But here she was, struggling on. The evidence at trial was harrowing. Sharon did her best to listen. But most of the time she would leave the public gallery after only a few minutes, sobbing. “Imagine listening to what that bastard did to your bairn,” says Sharon. “The details of how he murdered her will never leave my mind.”

Day in, day out, the particulars of the murder were played out: the forensic pathologist who examined Nikki’s body in situ back in 1992 came to repeat her evidence, 31 years later. A blood splatter expert, she painted a vivid picture of what had happened to Nikki in life and in death. We saw video footage of the crime scene. Nikki’s body was pixelated out, but the brick that had killed was in plain sight.

“Vicarious trauma” is a term used by psychologists to describe the effect of witnessing or hearing horror stories. It is increasingly recognised as a potential consequence of working directly with seriously hurt and injured individuals — an occupational hazard among Accident and Emergency personnel, for instance, or social workers who witness child cruelty. With wider recognition of the condition, it is becoming more commonplace for employers to offer counselling to staff who encounter atrocity in their working lives.

I feel uncomfortable claiming to be experiencing “vicarious trauma”. I’m not the victim here. I have always felt it important to be resilient, when focusing on the women and girls directly affected by a crime. But something snapped in me, with this story.

During the trial, I would find myself crying at home for no apparent reason. I would be too tired to blank out the stories I’d heard, but then have trouble sleeping. I’d stay awake watching Netflix as a way of escaping my intrusive thoughts, my hypersensitivity, and a feeling of deep, deep despair. I suffered extreme neck and shoulder pain, attributed partly to five weeks of scribbling in a notebook every day in court, but also to the tension of hearing the evidence, and trying not to cry on the press bench. I started getting headaches. I would imagine all kinds of horrific things happening to my loved ones, anything from car crashes to brutal murder.

What was it about the Nikki Allan case that kept me awake night after night, driving me into a depression? It was not the first time I had reported on the case of a murdered child, or seen such terrible evidence in court. But in time, I have come to realise that so many aspects of the case resonated with my own childhood experience, and what I escaped. Growing up in the North East, I witnessed how the police dismiss working-class women, in particular single mothers; I saw how child sexual abuse was minimised. Boyd was free for 30 years to abuse girls a short drive from the rough housing estate I grew up on, where men targeted me and my friends.

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I was first flashed at when I was nine years old. Aged 12, a man violently grabbed my breast as he walked past me in the middle of the town centre. At 16, I was raped by an older man I considered a friend. My job cleaning in a pub ended abruptly when a campaign of horrific sexual harassment culminated in an attempted rape. By this time, I was 17, and had recently joined the ranks of feminists fighting against sexual and domestic violence.

I was drawn to the cause partly because of my own experiences, but also inspired by the widespread protests about the police investigation into the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. The misogyny and class prejudice that underpinned this investigation — the idea that the victims were “common prostitutes” and were therefore somehow complicit in their fate — felt familiar to me. Many of the women I was raised among would be seen as the kind who would be “asking for it” simply for going to the pub alone, when they should have stayed safely at home.

Returning to the North East, spending time so close to where I was raised, amid Nikki’s grieving, traumatised family, I sometimes caught myself wondering how my life would have turned out had I stayed put in Darlington. Had I never found feminism. Sharon’s life could have been mine.

But anyone doing this work, immersed in the harsh reality of it, is bound to struggle with the toll it takes on our mental health. I see rape and domestic abuse routinely dismissed and minimised. Victims are dismissed, disbelieved, or blamed for their own predicaments. I also see men excused. They are reassured that what they have done is “not so bad”. Meanwhile, women such as Sharon Henderson are fighting against a system that views them as irritants.

And if the crimes themselves aren’t taken seriously enough in the mainstream, why would those of us reporting on them be given any consideration? Instead, we see the trivialisation of both sexual violence and of the hellish side effects of campaigning for change. I will never understand how Sharon must feel, having lost her seven-year-old daughter to murder; I do know what it is like to be silenced and misrepresented when speaking out against atrocities committed by men, and police inaction.

So, I will always be inspired by women like Sharon (in May, Boyd was found guilty of Nikki’s murder and jailed for life, with a minimum term of 29 years). One positive I cling to, in this bleak state of affairs, is the sense of solidarity that often flourishes between women. Sharon may never have considered herself a feminist campaigner until the unimaginable happened. But the rest of us have so much to learn from her tenacity.

‘Three doors down‘, Julie Bindel’s podcast series on the case of Nikki Allan, is out now

This was where some women, usually but not always older, rolled their eyes. Did an awkward joke, a bad date, or — as one memorable entry in the infamous Shitty Media Men list alleged — a “weird lunch” really constitute a form of harassment, let alone a cancellable offence? But other women, usually but not always younger, clucked their tongues: it was only because women kept putting up with such behaviour that men kept thinking they could get away with it.

At the time, the younger cohort appeared to the older like a bunch of hypersensitive harpies, retreating to the fainting couch at the slightest whiff of insult. The older, according to the younger, were cosying up to the patriarchy, in a desperate attempt to stave off their own irrelevance.

“We’re tough enough to take it,” said the Olds.

“It’s sad you think you have to,” said the Youths.

This early rift in the movement represented a deeper philosophical disagreement, about the nature and importance of resilience. The narrow question is, when does an annoying man becomes an evil harasser? The broader one is, when does a tolerable nuisance cross the line to become an intolerable transgression?

This question has been on my mind this week, for the most tragic of reasons. On 1st May, a 30-year-old man named Jordan Neely was choked to death on a crowded New York City subway train by a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny. Neely, who was homeless and mentally ill, was reportedly screaming and confronting passengers; he was killed after Penny put him in a chokehold, while two other passengers held him down. Penny, in a statement released through his lawyers, said he did not intend to kill Neely.

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This incident was preventable. Long before his death, Neely was known to New York City authorities as a person who could not manage independent living, and who had been spiralling in recent years, desperately in need of help. For him to die on the dirty floor of a subway car, screaming and defecating on himself while three strangers held him by the arms, legs, and neck, he had to be first failed at every turn by a system that was supposed to shelter and protect him — not just from doing harm, but from being harmed by others when his mental illness manifested in frightening ways.

That Neely slipped through the cracks is not the only sign of institutional failure here. As ridership on the NYC subway has increased in the wake of Covid, so too have instances of violence, including several high-profile incidents in which people have been attacked or killed. New York City mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021 on a campaign that promised to flood the subway system with uniformed police officers, to combat both crime and the perception that the subway has become wildly more dangerous in recent years.

To what extent this campaign could succeed is not clear. There has always been a baseline level of criminality and antisocial behaviour on the subway; sexual harassment and assault is so ubiquitous that brushing up against it is all but inevitable. I was groped, flashed, or masturbated at probably two dozen times during the seven years I spent living in New York. When a friend moved to NYC last year, I told her that she couldn’t truly call herself a New Yorker until she exited a crowded subway car to discover that someone had ejaculated on her coat. (I was only partly kidding.) It’s not that anyone thinks these things are okay; it’s more that they’re expected, a sad fact of life in a city of 8.5 million people, one of those things you cannot change and hence have to find a way to put up with. You look away, you shrug it off, you don’t let it ruin your day because if you did, it would ruin all of your days.

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Here is where the notion of resilience enters in. New York City residents have perhaps a higher tolerance than most for antisocial behaviour in public places, on the subway in particular. Warm and dry, with a captive audience, it attracts all kinds of colourful personalities: panhandlers and performers, pickpockets and preachers, as well as people like Neely who are in the grips of something darker. Until recently, it was standard practice to meet the arrival of one of these people on a crowded carriage with downcast eyes and silence; there was a tacit agreement that you neither react to nor acknowledge the transgressor. That agreement remained in place as crime rose, and as NYC saw a marked increase in behaviour that, even if it started out as merely weird, could — and did — escalate rapidly to violence. In 2022, for instance, a video did the rounds, of a woman begging for help while a deranged man hauls her around a train car by her hair.

But if it was difficult to know exactly where a tolerance for breaches of decorum became apologia for criminal harassment, it was even harder to identify, after Jordan Neely’s death, where the tacit agreement to tolerate becomes a duty to intervene. How do we know when to stand by, when to step in, when to look away, when to be afraid?

Here, one might have expected that many of the same voices who argued so vehemently against the notion of resilience in the midst of MeToo — the ones who believed that the solution to harassment lay not in teaching women to be assertive, but in teaching men not to abuse — would now demand zero tolerance for male aggression on public transit. If you argue that a woman can be traumatised by bawdy humour in the office or awkward come-ons in a bar, surely you would agree that she’s entitled to be fearful when trapped underground on a metal tube with an erratically-behaving stranger twice her size.

But, no: instead, many of the people who once insisted that men who slid into DMs deserved the complete destruction of their professional reputations became passionate advocates for toughening up when it came to dealing with volatile people on public transit. Coverage and commentary from the Left downplayed the possibility that Neely’s behaviour was frightening; instead, he was “acting erratic“, or “houseless and crying for food“. One viral tweet suggested that tragedy could have been averted with “a dollar and granola bar”. The New York Times guide to navigating similar scenarios on public transit took it a step further, imagining someone like Neely as a wild animal it is everyone else’s duty not to provoke: “Don’t make eye contact — especially prolonged eye contact, which might be perceived as threatening.”

Meanwhile, threads proliferated mocking the notion that New York’s subways might be a dangerous place: “I’ve safely ridden the subway for 23 years and my child has never been menaced by a half naked lunatic, but these imaginary monsters in your head are addressable with therapy,” wrote Elizabeth Spiers, a founding editor of Gawker and journalism professor at NYU. This is a remarkable sentiment, and not just because of its stunning reversal of the MeToo-era catechism that allegations should be believed. Less than a year ago, Spiers was among those advocating for the suspension without pay of journalist Dave Weigel after he retweeted what some perceived as a sexist joke, owing to the way this was allegedly received by his female colleagues (“[Every] woman who works with you thinks you’ve telegraphed publicly that you don’t respect women.”)

To sum up: a man who reposts an off-colour joke is advertising his innate misogyny, to the point where women should feel uncomfortable sharing a workplace with him. But an agitated and clearly unstable man announcing to a crowded subway car — as Neely reportedly did — that he’s been pushed to the brink and is ready to die, or go to prison for life: why in the world would you find that menacing?

This sudden rediscovery of the merits of resilience would have been almost refreshing, if not for the whiplash of its promotion by people who up until very recently were arguing that a tweet made them unsafe. There’s even something to it: the ubiquity of certain kinds of boundary-challenging behaviour in big cities makes it not just impractical but impossible to treat every incident of one-off harassment from a stranger as if it’s the end of the world. And of course, once you’ve survived a run-in with the mystery subway ejaculator, sexist microaggressions are unlikely to faze you: cultivating resilience is how we learn to recognise that a situation can be both genuinely alarming but not materially unsafe, or to make peace with the fact that many things which make us uncomfortable should nevertheless be allowed.

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But this mindset was considered anathema during MeToo. With trauma allegedly lurking just around the corner of every heterosexual encounter, distrust became the default. Not just the default, but celebrated — “men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter,” intoned Vox‘s Ezra Klein, in a proto-MeToo celebration of this new, terrified paradigm for intimacy. The idea, of course, was that women already felt that fear, living as they did at the eternal precipice of victimisation by the patriarchy; in a truly equal society, everyone would be scared.

Of course, today’s 180-degree pivot to brash fearlessness is identitarian horse-trading: MeToo is out, BLM is in. The dynamics of any conflict must be considered along these lines, and the narrative must be massaged accordingly. This was true in 2020 when a white woman called the police on a black man who threatened her in a public park; it is true now, as piety demands that the behaviour of the black, homeless victim of this terrible tragedy must not be scrutinised in any way. On the Left, that is; the Right has spent the past few days waving Neely’s criminal history in the air, singing “He Had It Coming”, in an absolute spectacle of ghoulishness.

In the end, neither the malicious glee from the Right nor the aggressive minimisation from the Left are treating this case with the sensitivity it deserves. The truth is, eyewitnesses did report that Neely was behaving in a threatening way, and other people on the train were calling 911 well before his confrontation with Penny, suggesting that whatever was happening, it was a cut above the ordinary subway madness that New Yorkers are usually so good at ignoring. But it is also true that the tragic conclusion of this incident seems, at least in part, like the result of a cultivated fragility — the kind that results when you encourage people to view every uncomfortable situation as a trauma in the making, every unpleasant interaction as a precursor to a far worse harm, every upset as an offence for which there must be consequences. That mindset, so ubiquitous in the wake of MeToo, so popular among progressives in general, says that no breach of decorum or moment of discomfort is too insignificant to ignore. It must be registered. It must be punished. It’s nothing more or less than a call for constant vigilance. The thing about that: when you demand vigilance, you get vigilantes.

This new festive tradition, where we tell our wizened elders to piss off and keep their grubby hands and lips to themselves, obviously has its roots in the all-consuming contemporary dialogue about consent. But this holiday season it hits differently. Rejoice, for gone are the grim days of socially distanced drive-by birthday parties and Thanksgiving over FaceTime; once again, Grandma can be treated like an avatar for child molesters the world over right to her face. The recirculation of articles like these coincides with another notable entry into the every-touch-is-a-bad-touch canon, triggered by a recent update on the MeTooing of author Junot Diaz. Diaz, a Pulitzer-winning fiction writer, was mostly (not fully) cancelled in 2018, after an accusation from writer Zinzi Clemmons that he had once “cornered” and “forcibly kissed” her. Accounts of verbal abuse and interpersonal cruelty from other women swiftly followed, along with rumours that dozens of additional allegations were coming down the pike — or would, if not for the victims’ fears of retaliation for speaking out. As summarised by Ben Smith of Semafor, a media firestorm ensued: “Publications from The Washington Post to New York Magazine ran with headlines about allegations of ‘sexual misconduct’.”

The bombshell, four years later, is a heretofore-unreported revelation in Smith’s article: that the kiss in question was not the open-mouthed, tongue-thrusting assault most readily conjured by the word “forcible”, but a peck on the cheek. Yet for every person who was thrown for a loop by this information, there was another just as willing to die on the hill of “A kiss on the cheek without explicit prior consent is assault, actually”. In the former category was the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, tweeting bewilderedly: “Imagine getting up and preparing to publicly accuse someone of assault and knowing full well that what you were actually referring to was a kiss on the cheek.” In the latter category was Diaz accuser Monica Byrne (who described a public but heated dinner party conversation with the author as “verbal sexual assault”), as well as recently-fired Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez, herself one of the #MeToo movement’s more controversial figures.

Needless to say, such assertions might (and did) invite a certain amount of snark (France, anyone?) — but there’s also a sober, and sobering, discussion to be had about what this all means in a diverse, high-trust society. The planet is presently home to more than eight billion people, and some fraction of these are bound to behave in ways that are grating to some fraction of the other eight billion; the cultural norms surrounding a kiss-kiss greeting notwithstanding, the world is also full of close talkers, arm-touchers, people who spit a little when they get excited. Annoying? Yes. Within tolerable limits of human diversity? Ah, well, they used to be.

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But that was before we became so accustomed to the total elimination of quotidian friction from our lives that even the most fleeting moment of irritation or discomfort began to feel like a tragedy. This is not the first time I’ve observed that the notion of a voicemail as a violation arose roughly in tandem with our ability to use an app to replace an ever-growing list of interactions, but it did. The lack of an online option has become so unusual that when I discovered a local pizza place that still takes orders exclusively by phone call, it felt like an aggressive albeit implicit declaration that those under the age of 35 should get their pepperoni-and-stinger pies elsewhere.

There’s a metaphor here about sensitivity, vulnerability, and how insulating oneself in a bubble can yield the opposite of the desired result, except that the metaphor is lately made real: the US, like many other countries, is currently weathering a wave of infections from all the diseases we didn’t get for two years while we were hiding out, trying not to get Covid. (In the UK, the surge in cases of Strep A among kids has been attributed to the fact that they weren’t allowed to mix in lockdown.)

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This was entirely predictable, and yet a remarkable number of people seem to believe that the solution is not to resume normal life and regain normal immune function, but to make our socially-distanced and sanitised bubbles a permanent state of affairs. Some of America’s top pandemic pundits are begging us to bring back masks and other distancing measures, while others appeared to praise China’s draconian Zero Covid strategy, even as the country was rocked by protests. In Los Angeles, home to a particularly relentless public health apparatus, a mandate remains in place that if a person has been infected with Covid, everyone in the household must wear masks at all times, including at home. It is a new vision of normal: Safer. Healthier. Cleaner. Lonelier.

Here the fear of Covid becomes difficult to disentangle from the creeping influence of consent as a framework to govern any interaction in which another person might hug you, touch you, or breathe on you. There’s a sense that if we just create enough rules, enough boundaries — confining every visit, every conversation, every human interaction sexual and non-sexual, within a set of strict limitations — the ordinary discomforts of coexisting with other people could be eradicated.

It does, however, have the peculiar side effect of making every instance of physical touch both existentially fraught and sexually tinged. This is not just about the inexpressible, ugly weirdness of kids being instructed that it’s okay to recoil from Grandma because her hugs are non-consensual (while Grandma is in turn instructed that if her feelings are hurt, she’s guilty of the same horny entitlement that leads men to commit sex crimes). It’s about the pathologising of normal human togetherness, and the normalising of an extremely online brand of misanthropy, all with the pretence that this is the only way to be a decent human being, the only way to show you care.

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One of the most remarkable responses to the Junot Diaz cheek kiss was: “It’s okay not to want any intrusions into one’s space and that should be in fact, the standard.” It’s the “standard” that gets me, which if implemented would establish those of us who enjoy physical contact as deviations if not deviants, in need of stern correction. But this idea, so strange by ordinary measures, became truly ascendant during the pandemic: that the emergency-induced state of isolation is better, actually, both scientifically and morally. That we should, indeed, recalibrate society in accordance with the preferences of the most anti-social people in it, the ones who don’t especially like or trust other human beings, the ones who don’t want people in their space. You’d think the paradox of this would be cause for reflection. Reorganising society per the preferences of the anti-social seems, at the very least, a self-contradictory endeavour — on the same level as putting a vegan in charge of the menu for your Festival of Meats. And yet, the beat goes on.

Much has been made in recent weeks of a study showing that Americans now spend an increasing amount of time alone. This was a trend exacerbated by the pandemic but not original to it. I suspect it has been taking root for at least as long as the social web has existed, or perhaps longer, dating to that first moment at which the internet turned society’s shut-ins from solo hermits into a global community — a community with an outsized voice, owing to the propensity of its members to never not be online.

The writing of our impending isolation was surely on the wall amid the unofficial introvert awareness movement of the early 2000s, which led to a Tumblr-fuelled fetishisation of solitude that turned pathological reclusiveness into a point of pride, even an identity. (Sure, sex is great, but have you ever canceled your plans and stayed home on a Saturday night wearing fluffy socks?) Granted, the meme-ified introvert persona was in many cases indistinguishable from a person with clinical depression, but dressing up social withdrawal as an adorable and extremely online personality quirk made it all but impossible to criticise. Those who found it alarming just didn’t understand; they were probably (ew) extroverts.

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It’s that frictionlessness again: here is a social milieu where everything from intellectual debates to sexually-charged banter can be shut down at the literal click of a button. Where there’s no threat of folks touching you, breathing on you, or noticing that you’re not wearing pants. Where other people are not only not in your space but cannot be, ever.

Is this better? We certainly tried to convince ourselves as much, in those long months when staying in went from choice to necessity. In addition to fear and stress and Tiger King on Netflix, the pandemic was characterised by an almost frantic forced enthusiasm for the concept of being alone together, the operative word being alone. Browsing the art museum’s collection online was all the culture, without the crowds. Streaming services introduced “group-watch” features to replace going to the movies; rowdy trivia nights at the local pub turned into sterile (but safe!) late-night Zoom affairs. Anything you could do in the real world, you could do better in virtual space: happy hours, birthday parties, conferences. School, work, therapy. Funerals. Especially funerals, given what a veritable minefield they are of both germs (all that sniffling and sobbing) as well as all kinds of nonconsensual hugging and hand-clasping.

In trying to persuade ourselves of the superiority of a socially distant life, we gave our most anti-social tendencies not just a pass but the imprimatur of moral authority. And while the threat of Covid has receded, this new paradigm has not. As recently as two months ago, the advice given in a national newspaper to a person whose continuing reluctance to socialise indoors had left her struggling under “waves of misery and loneliness” was to recast herself in her own mind as a heroic martyr to the cause: “It might help to see your decisions as marks of solidarity with people who do have underlying conditions,” wrote the Guardian‘s columnist. “If you can see these things as badges of consideration for the people most hurt by the pandemic, it might be something you feel happier to be conspicuous for.”

I wonder if it helped this woman even a little to be told that her aching loneliness was actually a badge of honour, that the best way to show her care for other people was to hide herself away from them. I wonder what kind of person would be comforted by this. And I wonder: until when? Having successfully flipped the script so that those who yearn for human contact became the avatar for destructive selfishness, while the recluses in their hermetically-sealed bubbles are the heroes holding society together, how are we meant to come together again?

An introvert and a misanthrope are two different things, but the discourse around how we should live now leaves little distinction between the two. The question of how the lines became so blurred is one thing. The question of how to rediscover the distinction, let alone rediscover the goodness of gathering, of holding each other close, and of refusing to abandon each other to the sanctified isolation of eternal quarantine, should perhaps be answered first.

***

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To Elliott, this incident didn’t come as a complete surprise: it was the second time his property had been subjected to vandalism in three months. In October of the previous year, someone had sprayed the word “SCUM” across the facade of his house.

In both cases, the perpetrator’s identity was a mystery, but his or her motivations were not. Elliott had been accused of rape in 2017, in an entry on the now-notorious Shitty Media Men list — a Google document of crowd-sourced, anonymous allegations of bad behaviour. The apparent crimes were usually (but not always) sexual. The list triggered investigations into the conduct of various male professionals in the media world, including The Atlantic’s Leon Wieseltier, who was fired afterwards, and The Paris Review’s Lorin Stein, who resigned. Elliott, who in addition to the rape allegation was accused of sexual harassment, coercion, and unsolicited invitations to his apartment, says that his agent dropped him after he was named, and that friends and professional opportunities alike suddenly disappeared. At the time the list emerged he had been hoping to launch a career as a screenwriter (his memoir, The Adderall Diaries, had been recently made into a film starring James Franco). His move to New Orleans came after he concluded that this was no longer possible, that he needed a fresh start.

Elliott isn’t the only man to maintain that the allegations against him are false. “I didn’t do what I’m accused of on the list. But obviously I wronged somebody to the point that they want to mess with my life,” one anonymous man told The Cut in 2018. But in a world where the accused talk about quietly moving on from the list as an act of feminist solidarity — in that man’s words, “taking one for the team” — Elliott is alone in his relentless desire to clear his name.

One of his earliest attempts came in the form of an essay in Quillette titled “How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life”, which was published in September 2018. The response was heated. But it was the lawsuit he filed a year later, just before the statute of limitations for such a case expired, that caused the biggest uproar — maybe even more so than the list itself. “Stephen Elliott Continues to Be a Shitty Media Man,” read one representative headline. It was not the alleged rape, but the news that he was suing the list’s creator, Moira Donegan, for defamation, that triggered the vandalism to Elliott’s home and car.

Elliott reported those incidents to the police, a fact he tells me he recently shared with Lila Shapiro, a journalist from New York Magazine who was writing a five-year retrospective on all things Shitty Media Man. But when that story was published last week, there was no mention of the vandalism. Rather than bringing readers up-to-date, the story dwelled deeply on the circumstances surrounding the original creation of the list — and in Elliott’s case, assembled prior reporting, previously published accounts, and testimonials from his former friends and colleagues to paint a picture of him as a man with a long, fraught history of overfamiliar, boundary-challenging behaviour.

Elliott was the kind of colleague who would hold your hand, climb into your lap, overshare about his sex life and ask impertinent questions about yours, oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making you. He doesn’t dispute this — “I can be needy, I can be clingy,” he tells me, though he believes that there’s some context missing: “The cues I misread were more like, I thought we were friends. It’s never a sexual situation.” But this is the thrust of the piece, more or less: in choosing to focus on Elliott’s personality, his way of moving through the world, it suggests that we can elide the problem of his having been accused of a crime that not even his fiercest detractors actually seem to believe he committed.

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Full disclosure: Elliott and I have several friends in common, and my husband and I met him once for a drink near his home in New Orleans when we were there in 2019. I found him appealingly guileless, but I also did not struggle to understand why some people don’t; Elliott is notoriously open about the topics most people keep under wraps, and it’s not hard to see how that frank vulnerability could seem, or be, manipulative under the proper circumstances. (The New York Magazine piece includes a quote from memoirist Elissa Bassist, who describes failing to set firm boundaries with Elliott because “I was so afraid of hurting his delicate feelings”.) Even his defence against the allegation that he raped someone is kind of a kinky overshare: where other men on the list described racking their brains to figure out which sexual encounter might have spawned the accusation, which woman had come to see what happened as nonconsensual, Elliott says he has no such back catalogue of encounters to pore over because he doesn’t have penetrative sex with women.

That, he tells me, is what makes the framing of this story so frustrating. A woman who felt uncomfortable about Elliott’s over-familiar behaviour “has a right to her interpretation. What you feel about what happened, it’s not invalid. It’s not really objective,” he says. “What is objective is rape.”

But this is what’s so strange about this case: not that Elliott’s sexual history makes the rape allegation implausible, but that nobody seems to care. Hence the focus on his documented history of making women uncomfortable, which is supposed to be understood as different in degree but not in kind from the felony of which he’d been accused. No charges were ever brought against him, and no other women alleging rape or even sexual misconduct ever came forward, anonymously or otherwise. As novelist Claire Vay Watkins said: “Stephen Elliott did not rape me, did not attempt to rape me. I am not anywhere close to implying that he did. I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement.” It’s a neat rhetorical trick: in one breath, Watkins emphatically does not accuse Elliott of raping her, while also emphatically suggesting that he’s the type of guy who would.

The New York Magazine piece seems to confirm this with a previously unpublished and fairly shocking allegation from a woman identified as R.D., who said that when she walked into a writing class hosted by Elliott, he “stopped the class and dove at me and threw his face into my tits and started moaning”.

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Elliott has been generally candid since his cancellation about when and how he’s crossed the line with women: yes, he was pushy about asking to sleep in women’s beds. Yes, he put his hands in people’s pockets. But this, he says, categorically did not happen — and he also says something else: “Does that even sound plausible to you?”

He has a point: the story is outrageous. But not only that, it’s the one testimonial against Elliott that genuinely supports the conflation of a creepy person with a rapey one. Amid multiple reports of Elliott wheedling and whining to sleep in women’s beds (but then relenting, albeit poutingly, when told no), here was a legitimate instance of nonconsensual sexual contact, an incident that seemed to truly bridge the gap between “boundary challenged” and “violent felony committed”.

In other MeToo stories, this is where you would often see a quick journalistic aside: that another member of the class remembered witnessing this incident, or that R.D. told a friend about it at the time. Corroboration lends credibility, especially when the accused flatly denies it. But the this story contains no such note, and here’s where things get weird: Elliott says that not only is this story false, but that the accuser (whose identity he learned during fact checking) is someone with whom he had a multi-year sexual relationship. He also says that the woman in question violated him by carving the word “owned” into one of his buttocks with a needle while he was tied up and either blindfolded or wearing a hood, he isn’t sure which. (A friend of Elliott’s from the BDSM scene confirmed to me that he told her about the ass-carving incident several years ago during a conversation about his experiences as a submissive. R.D. did not respond to a request for comment. Shapiro declined to answer questions about her reporting process via email.)

Of course, none of this is to say definitively that Elliott didn’t abruptly halt a writing class to molest a newly-arrived student, nor can we know for certain that said student later carved the word “owned” on Elliott’s rear end. The only thing clear from these conflicting accounts is that the truth, buried as it is in a miasma of old grudges, kinky sex, and a transformative reckoning with the norms that govern relationships between men and women, is extremely complicated. But this is what’s striking about the Shitty Media Men list — and to a certain extent, the coverage of it ever since: it not only eschews nuance, but displays a practiced incuriosity as to what the truth might be. And when questions arise as to the veracity of the list, or the fraught implications of making it, the response is to downplay its seriousness until it sounds less like a groundbreaking movement for social justice and more like something a bunch of girls did at a slumber party. “That first night? It was the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says one woman quoted in the New York Magazine piece.

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Illuminated here is the fundamental tension at the heart of MeToo: it is very difficult to demand that sexual assault be taken seriously, but simultaneously insist that false allegations thereof are no big deal. At the peak of the movement, it was not unusual to hear that it was “worth it” for a few innocent men to be ruined for the sake of social progress. In Elliott’s case, there’s also a heavy element of victim blaming: a representative tweet from literary influencer Maris Kreisman expressed that it was “infuriating but also mildly fun to watch Stephen Elliott place blame on everyone but himself”, as though being falsely accused of a serious crime were simply the natural, even entertaining, outcome of having a difficult personality. And indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other criminal allegation being treated this way, with the accused expected to fall on the sword for the sake of the greater good, guilty or not.

There’s something about this that recalls the famous scene in the movie The Fugitive, where Richard Kimball, played by Harrison Ford, is cornered at the precipice of the Cheoah Dam. He turns, pleading, desperate: “I didn’t kill my wife,” he shouts.

His pursuer replies, “I don’t care.”

That’s when Kimball jumps, but it’s not the leap that’s shocking; it’s the apathy that precedes it. The notion that innocence doesn’t matter, that the truth doesn’t matter. Stephen Elliott isn’t accused of murder, but there are nevertheless echoes of that same apathy in the public exhortations — of critics, of former friends, even of fellow accused men — to just stop fighting, already. To accept the rape accusation as a fair cop for all the discomfort he might have caused. To “conduct yourself with grace in the court of life”, as one former colleague puts it, “rather than the court of law”.

But for whatever it gets him (and it’s not likely to be much), Elliott’s determination remains a thorn in the side of that satisfying narrative about women coming together to take down the bad men once and for all. The idea that there should be serious consequences for serious crimes — and by extension, serious repercussions in the event that an accusation is made falsely or frivolously — isn’t just alarming, but a buzzkill. The idea of wielding one’s power responsibly, and being held accountable when you don’t, is not part of the patriarchy-smashing vibe we’re trying to cultivate, here. And on this front, it’s impossible not to notice the role reversal, and the parallels, between this and how women have long suffered for reporting sexual harassment.

The Shitty Media Men list might have been the outrage du jour, but it wasn’t until Elliott filed his lawsuit that people really got angry. Why did he have to ruin the fun? Why couldn’t he just take a joke? Why, in the age of MeToo, are you taking accusations of sexual assault so seriously?

It was not long before this that the neuropsychiatrist Dr Colin Shapiro had coined the term “sexsomnia”, and it was he who carried out a thorough investigation into the incident. He interviewed the defendant’s friends, family, and ex-girlfriends, and monitored his brain activity while sleeping. At trial, he expressed the view that the attack had been committed during an episode of parasomnia, otherwise known as sleepwalking. Several well-known triggers were present: alcohol, exhaustion, emotional stress.

The prosecution denied that the attack had been involuntary, but did not call on any other expert to contradict Dr Shapiro. The judge agreed with the defence, and the defendant walked free. A judge in the Court of Appeal, which examined the case comprehensively, deemed sleepwalking attackers “one of the most difficult problems encountered in the criminal law”. A sleepwalking victim is perhaps an even more troubling proposition, because a further question arises: could there have been a “reasonable belief in consent”? And can a complainant suspected of sleepwalking be expected to provide contact details of ex-partners, or submit to intrusive testing? One case of a sleepwalking victim — or so the defence argued — is the subject of a recent BBC documentary, Sexsomnia – case closed?

The facts are similar to the Canadian croquet case. Jade McCrossen-Nethercott — who has waived anonymity — fell asleep on a sofa at a small London house party in 2017. She had not drunk a great deal. When she awoke, she felt as if she had been penetrated. Her trousers and underwear were off. The man responsible was beside her. She challenged him. He said he thought she had been awake.

The documentary tells the story of her contact with the criminal justice system following this horror. We are shown an extract from her video-recorded account to police, in which she discloses a history of parasomnia. The defence, seeing this, instructed a sleep expert, who said there was “a strong possibility” of “sexsomnia”. But the phrase “strong possibility” comes from this media report; the documentary puts it much lower: “consistent with”. This is not the only piece of apparent one-sidedness in the programme. When we are played the recording of the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer telling Ms McCrossen-Nethercott that they are going to drop the case, the clear impression is given that the decision was based on only a single expert report, from the defence.

In fact, as is later written in a super-imposed caption, there was a report from a second expert. Not included in the caption is the fact that the report was commissioned by the Crown itself. An expert’s first duties are to the truth, and to the court, but it is not uncommon for bias to creep in. So it was quite proper for the Crown to obtain a second opinion — which, it turned out, also supported the “sexsomnia” theory. If I were the defence lawyer in a case like this, armed with two expert reports that suggested a real possibility of sleepwalking, I would be feeling very confident. As the CPS explained to Ms McCrossen-Nethercott, the expert reports meant that the evidential threshold of a 50% chance of conviction was no longer met. The court duly recorded a Not Guilty verdict. There would be no trial.

But Ms McCrossen-Nethercott challenged the CPS’s decision. In particular, she felt that the strength of the sexsomnia contention was not enough to end the case before trial: there was no evidence that she’d engaged in sexual activity during any of her previous sleepwalking episodes. One of the experts had said that this could have been her first episode. Ultimately, the Chief Crown Prosecutor who performed the review agreed with Ms McCrossen-Nethercott: these difficulties should have been examined in court. Small comfort, of course, when the defendant had already been formally acquitted. Ms McCrossen-Nethercott is now suing the CPS.

Her case is thought to be the first in which the complainant’s alleged parasomnia, rather than the defendant’s, is central. But there is no doubt that sexsomnia exists, and is not all that rare among those who sleepwalk. And although it is about three-times as prevalent among men as it is among women, it certainly affects both sexes.

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In an appearance on Woman’s Hour, the director of Sexsomnia — Case Closed? said she had found about 50 cases over the last 20 years in which the issue has arisen. In one of them, a young Yorkshireman was acquitted of raping a woman in his flat on the expert evidence of Dr Irshaad Ebrahim. It was slightly disappointing, therefore, to see Dr Ebrahim in the documentary telling Ms McCrossen-Nethercott that “there are a lot of lawyers trying to get business out of it [i.e. sleepwalking defences]… The ones who are enabling it are the ones who are advertising they can get you off”. A lawyer with experience in this niche area must surely be permitted to advertise their competence — how else is an innocent sexsomniac to choose a representative? And I doubt many, or any, lawyers are claiming that they can use the defence to “get you off”.

Other 21st-century parasomnic rape acquittals include an RAF serviceman, who in 2006 had sex with a 15-year-old girl after a party, and whose longstanding somnambulism earned him the nickname “nightrider” from his colleagues; a drama student who had sex with a non-consenting woman at a house party in 2008; and a roofer who in 2007 had sex with his friend’s wife after a barbecue. All these cases, and many others like them, have one startling thing in common: the defendants were acquitted entirely, with no requirement to submit to treatment, or to avoid the triggers that increase the chance of parasomnic attacks occurring.

And this is the issue that the Ontario Court of Appeal had to grapple with in 2008, after the croquet party acquittal. The trial judge’s finding that the attack had been involuntary was not open to challenge. But the prosecution argued on appeal that he had been wrong to find that parasomnia should result in an acquittal; rather, they said, he should have been found insane — and therefore liable to be detained. The Appeal Court agreed.

In Canada, as in the United Kingdom, the law divides involuntary acts into two separate categories of automatism: insane, and non-insane. And there were two recent precedents on how this should be done. First, R v. Parks (1992), in which a sleeping man drove ten miles to the home of his mother-in-law and bludgeoned her to death with a steel tyre lever. There, the Supreme Court had upheld the finding of non-insanity. Secondly, R v. Stone (1999), in which a man stabbed his wife 47 times after suffering an abusive tirade (she said, he claims, “that she couldn’t stand to listen to me whistle, that every time I touched her she felt sick… that I had a little penis and that she’s never going to fuck me again”). The judges in that case shifted the law firmly in the direction of insanity for such cases.

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The Supreme Court in the croquet case expressed the view that part of the reason for the shift in Stone had been the contemporaneous softening of the sentencing options available for “insane” defendants. The Court in Parks, they noted, had had an understandable reluctance to condemn a sleepwalker to indefinite detention in a mental institution. Post-Stone, however, outcomes became more flexible.

Here, “insanity” in the criminal law requires a “disease of the mind” — an outmoded phrase from an 1843 opinion of the UK Law Lords — but neither concept matches any medical definition. The legal distinction between insane and non-insane automatism has been described in various different ways over the years, but the real nub of it was captured by Mr Justice Bastarache in Stone: “The fundamental question … at the centre of the disease of mind enquiry [is] whether society requires protection from the accused.”

And so it should be. But in the United Kingdom we do not seem to have caught up. In 1991, in a case in which a 32-year-old man attacked a young woman he fancied with a rock and a video-recorder, apparently in his sleep, the Court of Appeal held that sleepwalking violence should generally be regarded as insanity rather than automatism. But as press reports of sexsomnia acquittals suggest — and as the Law Commission has since confirmed — common practice in the trial courts is to allow verdicts of non-insane automatism for sleepwalkers, as if they are no threat to society.

Automatism is better for the defendant in terms of outcome — acquittal rather than detention in a mental hospital — but also because of the different burden of proof. A mere doubt is enough for a non-insane automatism acquittal, whereas the defence have to prove insanity to be likely. There are, therefore, sound conceptual and public protection arguments in favour of treating sleepwalking as insanity. (Not that it would have helped Ms McCrossen-Nethercott: the defendant cannot be expected to disprove the absence of reasonable belief in consent.)

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If we did treat sleepwalking as insanity — as many argue we should — there would at least be the possibility of giving violent sleepwalkers medical and other treatment, forcibly if need be, in order to protect the public. The case of former soldier Joseph Short illustrates the potential benefits of this approach. Short was accused of a 2011 rape in Scotland, but the Crown dropped the case after leading expert Dr Colin Espie supported a diagnosis of sexsomnia. He was then tried in Hull for a further rape, and acquitted on the same grounds. In 2016, he was tried in Birmingham for another two sex attacks.

This time, he was convicted, and received a 15-year extended sentence. Dr Espie had new evidence to give: Short had not followed his advice on how to reduce the risk of a sexually violent parasomnic episode. But some more formal constraints on his freedom might have saved Short’s later victims, assuming (which we should not) that he was in fact a somnambulist rather than a lying rapist from the start. In 2013, the Law Commission recommended a wholesale reconsideration of the law in this area. It has not been followed up. There is no evidence of an epidemic of false sexsomnia defences, but such cases ought to be dealt with consistently, and with public protection foremost in mind.

The law’s response to one of the earliest well-documented cases of violent sleepwalking may serve as inspiration. In 1843, a doting father, 28-year-old Simon Fraser, got up in the middle of the night, picked up his 18-month-old son, and killed him by repeatedly smashing the boy’s head against the walls and floor. He thought he had been fighting a monster. The jury found him not guilty, and — following some dispute between experts — not insane. There was, however, according to some reports, an informal arrangement agreed: for the rest of his life, his wife would lock him in his bedroom at night.

But these days it might be best if the Courts could deal with those who commit involuntary violence by subjecting them, in appropriate cases, to the enforced supervision of medical professionals and probation officers. It is unwise to leave even an accidental rapist’s remedy to his own sense of personal responsibility.

What I got were more questions. “Is this ok? And this?” Soon I began to wonder: “Is it ok?” I’d thought it was when I’d told him to come over. But it’s one thing to want someone in an unspecified way, quite another to start itemising what it is you actually want from them. With my own desire in doubt, I started to feel the very thing this line of interrogation had been meant to avoid. Instead of making consent as simple as saying “yes”, these questions had plunged me into a deeply unsexy uncertainty.

In reading me his sexual questionnaire, my partner was showing me that he’d internalised the ethic of “consent”, which over the past decade has emerged as the dominant liberal framework for distinguishing between moral and immoral sex. At the core of this ethic is explicitness. The purpose is to make sex — and all of its constituent acts — something one can and should directly say “yes” or “no” to, a contract negotiated between individuals.

This model of consent has been roundly criticised for deflating erotic tension, leading to sometimes-cringeworthy campaigns to insist that “consent is sexy” (“If asking for consent ruins sex you’re what? A rapist who sucks at talking dirty?”, reads one viral Tumblr post). But the deeper problem with this model is that it produces, or rather reveals, exactly what it is meant to avoid, which is the ineradicable ambivalence at the heart of sex. In other words, while we can and should maintain a distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts, there is an important sense in which we are never able to say “yes” to sex. Indeed, enjoying sex seems to involve a certain suspension of our usual relationship to ourselves, one in which we are overtaken not so much by the other person as by sex itself.

The original sexual relation — prior to the one we have with any particular person — is our relation to sex itself. This relation is not consensual but something we experience as a given. We are born, we mature, and at some point in this process we discover that we our prisoners of our sexuality. Sex, after all, makes us uncomfortable. It can conjure feelings of disgust and embarrassment. It can be a distraction, an excruciating deprivation, even a source of catastrophic humiliation. We notice how attractive the “wrong” person is — a boyfriend’s brother, an ex, a colleague, a student — and feel violated by our own urges. Sex with a partner works, when and to the extent that it does, in part by letting us suspend our inhibitions and want things without having to admit to ourselves that we want them.

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René Girard's apocalypse is now

By Blake Smith

There are several ways in which we try to ignore the non-consensual core of sex. One is to separate “good” sex from “bad” sex, a strategy familiar to both conservatives and progressives. Growing up in an evangelical community in the American South during the Clinton and Bush years, I was often told by teachers and pastors that sex is a wonderful, beautiful experience — for married straight couples. They’d quote the Song of Solomon or, worse, talk about how great sex with their spouses was. It was more effective pro-abstinence education than all the videos of STDs and abortions they showed us. They’d warn us, however, that sex outside of marriage is degrading. Once after chapel, they organised a skit in which a girl held a rose. Its petals were plucked off one by one by a line of boys, leaving her with a bare stem. The lesson: that’s what will happen to your soul, and possibly your genitals, if you don’t wait until marriage.

Progressives in their churches — universities — also believe in a magical boundary that transforms the degrading into the delightful. For them, this boundary is consent. But consent is a more difficult concept than it seems. Already in 1981, feminist legal theorist Catherine Mackinnon argued that any sex after which a woman feels “violated” is rape, whether she consented to it or not. She extended this point in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, where she claimed that women, as a group, lack “power” relative to men and thus cannot ever consent. Here, the search to give consent a solid foundation, to divide good sex from bad sex, tips over into a totalising conflation of sex with rape.

Taking up this conflation another way, more ostentatiously radical thinkers have agreed with Mackinnon that sex is inherently abject and violating. Unlike Mackinnon, however, they take this to be a good thing. Sex shatters our egos, and the acts that are most revealing of this fundamental truth are the most apparently degrading ones. Kinky, violent, and otherwise non-normative sex is, according to this view, not only more theoretically interesting than, but in some sense morally superior to, the merely “vanilla”.

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What we get wrong about Solzhenitsyn

By Blake Smith

This is the position taken by a strain of American queer theory. Grasping the truth that sex is messy, ambiguous, and difficult to “consent” to, these thinkers ironically make it into a falsehood by eliminating that very ambivalence with their strident declarations.

The disturbing pinnacle of this kind of thinking is the work of Andrea Long Chu, who in such writings as her 2019 pamphlet Females affirms that sex makes us pathetic, debased, and powerless, or as she puts it, “female”. Perhaps Chu, a transgender woman, has changed her gender in order to affirm grotesque “truths” about women’s condition that she would not have been allowed to state otherwise. Indeed, Chu’s work invokes the range of contemporary fetishes — such as sissy hypnosis, bimbofication, and cuckolding — by which men and women eroticise powerlessness. We do so perhaps because we are uncomfortable with the actual, but never total, powerlessness that is inherent in all sex. But the truth is that we cannot simply lie back and wallow in domination or debasement, since we can never fully escape the self. This is as much a misguided fantasy as the idea that we can be completely in control.

What would a decent approach to sexuality look like — one that acknowledges that sex undermines our attempts to maintain pristine egos without tipping over into a celebration of the grotesque? There may be a clue in Hatred of Sex, a recent book by Tim Dean and Oliver Davis. Looking at widespread paranoia about bad sex, from #MeToo to QAnon’s conspiracy theories about child sex-trafficking, Dean and Davis argue these cultural phenomena, like our efforts to sanitise sex through consent or marriage, show how intolerable we find the combination of freedom and unfreedom inherent in any sexual experience. Afraid to acknowledge our own conflicted yearnings, we hunt for villains — men, in the case of #MeToo; global elites like Hillary Clinton in the case of QAnon — who we blame for ruining what would otherwise be a safe and pleasurable experience.

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Middle-aged women don't want sex

By Mary Harrington

We can escape the constitutive tension of sex, Dean and Davis warn, neither by trying to cordon off good sex — that is, sex within contractually defined relationships — from the bad and dangerous outside, nor by trying to affirm and reclaim the aspects of sex that we cannot help but experience as degrading, disgusting, or disappointing. What we can perhaps do is ease some of the pressure off of sex by refusing to allow such an inherently contradictory thing become the platform for so many political, ethical, and identitarian projects.

Absent such a reprivatisation of sex, Dean and Davis argue, we will continue to allow emerging “sex bureaucracies” to regulate previously intimate aspects of our lives. These bureaucracies, which in the United States include university Title IX offices and corporate human resources departments, acquire power by framing an ever-increasing array of sexual acts and speech as “harmful”. They insist sexual relationships need to be based on the model of the contract, with swift punishment for anyone who violates the contract’s terms.

To resist this encroachment, we must accept that there is a wide domain of what Dean and Davis call “benign sexual inappropriateness”. This is behaviour, such as unwanted flirtation or mildly obscene display, that violates politically correct or conservative propriety but does not merit formal sanction. To deal with such behaviour, they argue, we must abandon our urge to go running to the manager and instead begin to recover the informal tactics of “discretion and dissent”. No bureaucracy can save us from the inherent ambivalence of sex, but we can, perhaps, still save sex from bureaucracy.

Weinstein’s guilty verdict remains unusual. Despite the precedent it set, and successful efforts to reduce the stigma of reporting a sexual assault, most accused rapists still never see the inside of a courtroom. It’s not just that criminal prosecutions of sex offenders are few and far between, owing to the difficulty of proving a crime that usually leaves neither witnesses nor physical evidence. Even civil lawsuits usually end before trial: with a mutually agreed-upon settlement.

Settlements, and the NDAs that often accompany them, have long been a thorn in the side of those who want to see sexual assaults taken seriously and punished in the same way as other crimes. Weinstein’s ability to pay off the women who threatened to sue him for sexual harassment — and the women’s willingness to accept money in exchange for their silence — allowed his predatory behaviour to continue unchecked for ages, an open secret that actually acted as the punchline to many a Hollywood in-joke. And while the #MeToo movement might have ended Weinstein’s reign of terror, it hasn’t ended the practice of paying victims to shut up and go away.

We’ve been reminded of this most recently with the resolution of Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew, Giuffre having agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum. Although the media response has been painstakingly charitable to Giuffre, suggesting that the settlement is close enough to an acknowledgment of wrongdoing on Andrew’s part, and she has good reason to be satisfied, one still senses the disappointing spectre of the trial-that-never-was lurking unrealised in the background.

After it was reported that he had demanded a jury trial, there was much speculation about how he would perform on the witness stand, some of it almost gleeful. But unlike Weinstein, Andrew will never suffer the humiliation of a trial, never be subject to excruciating questions under penalty of perjury, never have the stain of a guilty verdict affixed permanently to his name. An expression of regret is still not an admission of guilt, no matter how you slice it. Giuffre’s choice might be good enough for her, but it leaves a number of questions unanswered.

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What's the point of Prince Andrew?

By Sarah Ditum

The question of how best to make men answer for the sexual violation of women is age-old, a conundrum that humans have been trying and failing to solve since the dawn of time. The Bible, for instance, suggests punishing rapists by forcing them to marry their victims, a “you break it you buy it” policy rooted in the archaic notion that a woman deflowered, even against her will, has been stripped of her most vital asset.

Until a woman was recognised as a person with bodily autonomy, sexual assault was seen as a crime against her keeper — a husband or father — rather than the woman herself. It’s an idea that is spectacularly offensive today, dehumanising and trivialising at once. There’s a jaw-dropper of a moment in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, a film based on a true story and billed as a sort of fourteenth century #MeToo saga: the heroine Marguerite is informed that her rapist will only answer for what he’s done if her husband is willing to bring charges for her defilement as his property. In reality, she would undoubtedly have been aware of this fact already; a male character only needs to explain it to her for the benefit of an audience who might not have realised how bad the bad old days actually were for women. It’s not Marguerite’s suffering that must be answered for, but her husband’s wounded ego.

The Last Duel was meant to be an Oscar contender, but instead of accolades and nominations, the film was scrutinised for its #MeToo relevance and met with questions about whether its content was meant as an apology of sorts for its stars’ former affiliation with Hollywood’s most notorious sex offender. (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who wrote the film, won a Best Screenplay Oscar back in 1998 after Weinstein rescued their script for Good Will Hunting from production purgatory.)

Damon dismissed that notion, instead citing the real Marguerite’s heroism — continuing to speak truth to power, even though her husband’s loss in the titular duel would have seen her burned at the stake for bringing a false accusation — as the impetus for making the movie. And right on: after what she went through, Marguerite deserves better than to have her story subsumed into a redemption tour for male filmmakers who are discomfited by their one-time relationship with Harvey Weinstein.

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By Jenny McCartney

In highlighting the horrors of sexism in the fourteenth century, and one woman’s courage in the face of them, The Last Duel shines a light on the ways in which things have changed — mostly for the better, but not entirely. Implicit in our admiration of Marguerite is a sense that this, really, is how a victim should behave: speaking truth to power at any cost, even if it means sacrificing her own life in the process. Why? Because we, the people, want to see justice. And even in a post-MeToo world where we treat sexual assault with the seriousness it deserves, justice has nothing to do with ensuring a good outcome for the victim; all that matters, all we care about, is that perpetrator meets a bad end.

This desire, not just for punishment but the public spectacle of a brutalised victim standing up and demanding recognition, has reigned throughout the contemporary quest to topple predatory men from their positions of power. Witness the lionisation of Christine Blasey Ford for her choice to testify publicly against Brett Kavanaugh. See the two books written by the journalists who exposed Weinstein, in which the women who spoke on the record, despite the risks and their fears, are rewarded with glowing profiles (while those who were, by implication, too cowardly to speak out sometimes seem like roadblocks in the path to justice). One of the key sources, Rose McGowan, wrote a memoir that was called simply: Brave.

For a period of time, the #MeToo essay was a genre unto itself, as women laid bare their sexual trauma for an insatiable, slavering audience. The movement demanded martyrs: the more a woman suffered to tell her story, the more heroic she was. And implicit in this conversation was that those who didn’t destroy their lives for the cause — who stayed silent, who took money, who signed NDAs — were the opposite of courageous, even selfish, allowing the men to get away with it and perhaps even enabling them to do it again. A peculiar twist in the Virginia Giuffre story is that once she stopped pushing for a trial and accepted a settlement, the greatest praise for her bravery came not from the media, but from the man she had accused.

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How feminism ate itself

By Kat Rosenfield

The desire to punish rapists comes from a good place, of course: a necessary correction to a system that too often failed to punish men for sexual assault. But, in our all-consuming quest to punish the man, the woman he hurt is once again forgotten. Like Marguerite’s husband, we pursue justice in the victim’s name, but not her best interests. No longer is rape seen as a property crime; it’s more traumatic, more terrible, on a par with murder or perhaps even worse — and the man who did it has to pay. But the very idea of compensating the woman seems impossible, given the magnitude of the offence.

And so, in our attempts to construct a new narrative around sexual assault, we have managed to reinforce the worst conclusions of the old one: where a rape victim used to be seen as so debased by the experience that she could no longer move in polite society, now we imagine her pushed to the margins by the magnitude of her trauma. The nature of the damage has changed, but the song (and assumption of irreparable ruin) remains the same. Like the Biblical woman deflowered, the victim can never be whole again. No, she’s not dead, but the unspoken subtext is that she might as well be — and so, like the victim of a murder, the system seeks only to avenge her.

But unlike the murder victim, the woman who’s been sexually assaulted still has a life to live. And what if her vision for that life doesn’t involve sacrificing herself a second time over on the altar of society’s thirst for vengeance? What if a trial, traumatic in its own right and with no assurance of a good outcome, is something she’d rather not endure? What if she prefers to sue, and settle, in a more private process that centres her desires and offers material reparations for her suffering?

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Ghislaine Maxwell's guilty soul

By Will Lloyd

Ultimately, Weinstein’s victims got both the satisfaction of a guilty verdict and the recompense of a financial award, albeit one litigated (and hence reduced) by the bankruptcy court. There’s a poetic justice there: Weinstein extorted sex by promising success and stardom for those who cooperated, alongside the threat of financial ruin if they didn’t. For him to end up incarcerated and destitute, while the women he harmed walk away with millions, feels like the proper conclusion.

But the victim who keeps on living after being assaulted, let alone one who demands compensation in order to live well, remains deeply inconvenient to a society that wants to punish its criminals with little thought for the people they’ve hurt. When all is said and done, it’s the bad men, not their victims, who we tend to remember. And so, rather than heaping scorn or judgment on women who settle out of court, who seek reparations on their own terms, maybe we should see them as taking back something vital: their agency, their freedom to move forward, and their right to decide how trauma does (or doesn’t) define their lives.

What’s the point of Prince Andrew? I don’t ask this only to be cruel, although there is an obvious cruelty in suggesting that an actual person might be pointless. But Prince Andrew isn’t just a person — he’s also a prince, elevated by birth to a strange prominence in an institution that turned out to have no need of him.

He’s the redundant spare, not even useful for making dynastic alliances, since there are no royal houses left worth allying with; and anyway, diplomacy by human meat market was out of fashion before he was born. He doesn’t even have the dignity of being a working royal, since 2019 when he stepped back from all public duties over his “association” with the late sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Although Prince Andrew remains close to the Queen, the exact nature of that “association” continues to hang rancidly over the royal family. Was he just hanging around with Epstein, or did he — as Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Guiffre states in a lawsuit filed on Monday — take part in the sexual abuse of teenage girls? Was he somehow ignorant of everything he was adjacent to, or actually corrupt? Stupid, or degenerate? (Prince Andrew denies Guiffre’s claims.)

There’s a photo of Prince Andrew from 2001 with then 17-year-old Guiffre. She beams at the camera, long blonde hair hanging below her collarbone and a flash of midriff exposed; he stands side-on, arm around her waist, adult fingers touching bare childish skin, an expression of dazed expectation on his face like a man who can’t believe his luck. And in the background, Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who allegedly groomed and recruited the girls (Maxwell denies this), smiling happily — the smile of a complacent friend or a satisfied madam, depending on what you choose to read into it.

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Prince Andrew’s response to this photo has been to suggest that it has been “doctored”, claiming: “I am not one to, as it were, hug.” (Pictures of him taken at various nightclubs suggest that he is very much one to, as it were, hug.) As defences go, it’s only marginally less hard to swallow than the Pizza Express alibi or the claim he cannot sweat. Still, you can understand his desperation to argue it away: twenty years on, the picture looks grotesque, his age an obscenity next to Guiffre’s youth.

Would it have looked that way at the time it was taken? The millennium was a strange, unsettled moment for talking about girls and sex. On the one hand, the tabloids had picked out paedophiles as the villains of the moment (the apotheosis of this came in 2000, when a paediatrician’s home was vandalised with graffiti reading “paedo”: police confirmed that the perpetrators had confused the job with the crime). On the other, the titillating concept of the “barely legal” girl was firmly established in pornography and spilling over into popular culture.

And at the same time, the American evangelical movement had been doing its part for the fetishisation of virginity by promoting “abstinence-only” education and coaxing teens into wearing “promise rings” that showed their commitment to no sex before marriage. Britney Spears wore one: it seemed to be taken less as an assertion of her innocence than as a provocation to those who fantasised about despoiling her.

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Matt Hancock's casual cruelty

By Sarah Ditum

In 2000, a businessman allegedly offered Britney $7.5m for the honour of deflowering her. Two years later, the DJ Chris Moyles was chatting about another teenage singer’s virginity on his Radio 1 show: on the day Charlotte Church turned 16, he volunteered to “lead her through the forest of sexuality”. (Moyles was censured by the Broadcasting Standards Commission, but he kept his job.)

The physical ideal of the late twentieth century and early noughties was nymphet-esque — slim hips, pert tits and, most important of all, a set of taut and unstretchmarked abdominals to make clear that all fecundity was as yet untested. The line of girl and woman was blurred and blurred again. In an early Kate Moss photoshoot that I’d see regularly on halls of residence walls later, the then sixteen-year-old model wears nothing but black knickers, stockings and heels, and holds a teddy bear to cover her breasts.

The taboo on underage sex was strong enough to make the idea of breaking it exciting, and no stronger. Even the wholly un-edgy indie band Travis (a kind of John the Baptist before Coldplay’s arrival as the Jesus of inoffensive guitar music) had a song called “U16 Girls”.

Prince Andrew now denies that he visited West End nightclub Tramps with Guiffre. But if he’d been there in the late 80s, he could have shared the dancefloor with Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and his girlfriend Mandy Smith — she was thirteen when they got together, and he was 47. When the relationship became public after she reached the age of consent, it was treated as a joke rather than a sex offence, with him the randy old man and her the canny little starfucker. Friends of the couple from that era look back and feel ashamed for turning a blind eye, but still, they turned a blind eye.

When, in 2012, the extent of Jimmy Savile’s predations became obvious and the complicity of the BBC undeniable, journalist Rachel Cooke wrote this in the Observer:

“Our outrage, in truth, has little to do with any institution, however remiss. It’s born of bewilderment that something so terrible could be in plain sight. Why, we wonder, did we not notice? Yet even this idea, if you unpick it, is kind of phoney.”

What Savile was had always been obvious. But for decades, it was seen as an ugly but acceptable peccadillo for a man to have sex with a girl. And then, one day, it wasn’t seen that way at all anymore.

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By Terry Eagleton

How we think about age, power and sex has changed immeasurably over the last decades. When I saw the revival of David Mamet’s sexual harassment drama Oleanna — currently running in London — it seemed flat, despite the sparring dialogue. In 1992, when the play debuted, audiences saw genuine ambiguity in the relationship between a professor and his wounded female student. Did he cross the line? Was she coaxed into seeing herself as a victim of campus politics?

In 2021, the moment he steps up behind her and places his hands on her shoulders, he’s lost. We know, now, that a tutor doesn’t touch a student that way. Even if she’s technically an adult, her comparative youth and institutional inferiority are blatant. The violation is unarguable.

What a shock, I suppose, to be one of the men around whom this cultural shift took place. To be, say, Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2008 used a plea bargain to wriggle out of being prosecuted for procuring a minor for prostitution, and was able to return to his life of wealth and high-rolling connection, until in 2019 he found himself imprisoned and facing a similar set of charges all over again.

The taint of connection with Epstein spilled out, with Prince Andrew alongside Bill Gates and the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret in the list of those whose reputations have turned to dirt. Epstein’s suicide hastened the civil suits such as the one against Prince Andrew, which would otherwise have had to wait for the criminal trial to conclude. It also made them more urgent: from the perspective of Epstein’s victims, with him dead, they must look to the living for someone to hold accountable. For Guiffre, suing Prince Andrew is the next best thing to justice.

So maybe this will be the point of Prince Andrew. His relationship with Epstein, and its transformation from something that could be winked at to something that could potentially soil the entire royal family, could prove to be a measure of the change in his lifetime. There’s plenty still that’s grim in the treatment of girls, but at least today if someone were to be proven to have knowingly had sex with a trafficked teenager — even if that someone was a prince — there’d be no laughing it off.

They’ll be sitting outside the school gates, or in the resort where they are doing holiday work, or on a bench at a summer camp. Head down in a book. They want to be singers, or anything to get away from home.

The approach is made by a couple, or by an older woman on her own. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell: friendly, worldly, wealthy. Ghislaine is armoured with a classy accent, a Yorkshire terrier, and expensive clothes. She plunges into their lives. One of the accusers did not “have the reading ability” to say Maxwell’s first name. But forget that. Ghislaine wants to play the giggly older sister; pal and confidante.

The accusers’ testimony suggests that Ghislaine seemed young in herself. She offered wooing gifts: preppy shirts, loafers, Victoria’s Secret underwear, cashmere sweaters. They become friends with her in malls and cinemas. Their ages when Ghislaine allegedly facilitated, and occasionally participated in, Epstein’s sexual abuse of them, were: fourteen, fourteen, sixteen and seventeen. Jane, Carolyn, Annie, and Kate.

Ghislaine Maxwell was from a different universe. The question of her trial was whether she, like the girls, is a victim of Jeffrey Epstein too. Ghislaine, daughter of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and variously described as Epstein’s girlfriend, madam, employee, best friend, pimp, and general, was arrested in 2020. She was accused by the US government of gathering up Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Anne over a decade, like a beachcomber, and delivering them to Epstein.

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Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

For four weeks, the trial in lower Manhattan has been watched with awe. Outside the courthouse stand placards and protestors and paranoiacs. Three overflow rooms inside contain the world’s press, concerned private citizens, and podcasters. They are drawn there for irresistibly tabloid reasons: the downfall of rich people in heavenly places who did evil things.

Epstein and Maxwell were high society floaters, who bobbed unflushably in transatlantic streams, fishing for famous friends. (Taki says she was “not a bad girl” — I suppose we’ll have to take his word for it.) By the time Epstein earned his first conviction for sex crimes in 2008, the couple had collected an entire Met Gala of chintzy brilliancies: actors, publishers, royals, writers, scientists, academics, and politicians. That constellation has blinded many to the couple’s more gothic collection of broken young women. Why care about them, when they are landmines lying in wait for Prince Andrew, Ariana Huffington, Geordie Greig, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton?

These embarrassing links, the dozens of embarrassing photos that accompanied them, and the embarrassing circumstances surrounding his death, transformed Epstein. In the world’s imagination he was no longer a rich bullshit artist and an abuser. He became a popular demon, a supervillain, a Halloween costume. Writers polished their 24 Carat allusions: Epstein was Machiavelli, he was Mephistopheles. He was the ultraviolet scan that illuminated a rotten system of perversion and power. Maxwell’s trial was widely considered to be the last chance at justice for many of the women who claim to have been abused by Epstein.

But Epstein is dead. This was Ghislaine’s trial, and throughout she has been circumspect, almost dignified, and given nothing away. Videos outside the courthouse showed her old and arthritic and beaten down. She does not look like she will ever adjust to thinking of herself as a dangerous criminal. She appeared tired of being herself. Sooner or later, compassion was bound to be felt for the accused. It’s only natural. Old university acquaintances suggested they felt pity for her. Others wondered what went wrong, without ever probing the circumstances of Maxwell’s alleged crimes. Friends anonymously briefed glossy magazines, and said they could never imagine her scoring trailer trash by skulking around outside public schools. It just wasn’t her style, darling. None of them ever took the stand to defend her though. That just wasn’t their style.

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By Kat Rosenfield

These disposable, costless emotions were a perfect echo of the defence put up by Maxwell’s attorneys. They said she had become a bullseye for the limitless greed, pointless anger, and false memories of the accusers. Maxwell was the real victim here. This was whiplash; an acidic backwash from Epstein’s death that mistakenly threatened to dissolve their client, because he could never stand trial. Eternal archetypes were invoked. “Ever since Eve was tempting Adam with the apple,” said one Maxwell lawyer, “women have been blamed for the bad behaviour of men”.

The men were Epstein, and at a more distant remove, Robert Maxwell. To believe in the defence, you had to believe that Ghislaine had been without a sense of her own interest for decades. That she was helplessly shaped by these amoral patriarchs. Her father and Epstein were eerily similar, if not the same man. Both escaped obscurity and exchanged it for wealth. Both courted ‘brilliant scientific minds’ with praise and parties. Both were talented at exploiting the weaknesses of rivals they destroyed on their way up. “You’re talking about a sociopath,” said Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner. “Every component of his existence was the destruction of other people.” Hoffenberg might have been describing Maxwell.

How much of their behaviour was for show, and how much was real, and whether they knew the difference, was unclear. A bewildering aura of fantasy surrounds them. They had a curious shared interest in the Marquis de Sade, and they inhabited airlessly Sadean worlds of selfishness, injustice, and misery. In de Sade’s pages nobody ever changes. His characters are glazed and flat; moral development is an impossibility. As one of the libertine monks in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) — a novel Epstein displayed in his home and proudly showed off to a journalist — rhetorically asks: “Can we become anything other than we are?”

Maxwell and Epstein answered that question with an emphatic no. They would forever be outsiders who shredded convention, determined to consume whatever and whoever they found once on the inside. Each was regarded with a mixture of dread, sarcasm, and awe. Their most credulous, generous supporters came from the top. Epstein, as Maxwell did the British establishment of his time, regarded them with contempt. He once told his brother that if the public knew how corrupt his Wall Street friends were, there would be a revolution.

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Prince Charles has finally won

By Will Lloyd

Above all these men lied, unstoppably and uncontrollably. They lied to business associates, mistresses, journalists, judges, creditors, and lawyers. They lied about money to make more money. Their skill was faking and lying uncommonly well enough to create new, unstable realities. Their lies became eight-storey yachts and the largest townhouse in Manhattan. Every new acquisition was honeycombed with surveillance equipment; recording devices and teeny tiny cameras. This is usually considered further evidence of these men’s perfidy. Blackmail gatherers, Epstein and Maxwell, working on another sick angle, preparing a new front in their war on everyone they ever met. But they were not spying on their guests.

The evidence that Epstein blackmailed his friends is thin, and has fallen apart before. Maxwell used his devices to track a secretary who didn’t love him around London, as she slept with one of his underlings. They surveilled their environments because all their lies made their environments, and themselves, insecure. Each was one or two discoveries away from the collapse of their entire world. The footage and the recordings were not made for blackmail. It was a form of consolation. It proved that for all their lies, they were still real. One of Epstein’s homes was lined with framed glass eyeballs made for injured English soldiers from a deadlier century. The display was a warning to his guests, and a reminder to himself: watch your every move.

Are we supposed to paint Ghislaine Maxwell on this bleak canvas as the feckless girl next door? A crass ingénue, an Eve who didn’t know any better? It is closer to the truth to say that both men needed her as much as she needed them.

Maxwell family legend has it that Ghislaine was anorexic as a very young child. She was probably abused by her father, as he was by his, when she was an adolescent, with riding crops and shoe horns. But by the time she arrived, fully formed and totally integrated, at Oxford during its woozy Brideshead revival years in the early Eighties, Ghislaine’s dramas of individuation were over.

She was ahead of the pack, imperious from the off. She spoke five languages and was the director of a football club. The beautiful “glamazon” rested a boot on Boris Johnson and parties with Gottfried von Bismarck. She was inadvertently to blame for the creation of George Monbiot. Her father kept one photo of his nine children on his desk — a portrait of Ghislaine. As his mania grew and his business empire fell apart in the later Eighties, she remained good, pure, true. His colleagues thought him “pre-moral”, disconcerting, disgusting, and frightening. And he was fond of saying “I have a beautiful daughter who is just like me.”

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Ghislaine was already in New York when her father died in 1991. Supposedly adrift, grieving, and broke, the conventional narrative has Epstein performing a bat-like swoop and winging Ghislaine off into his cave. “He saved her,” one Maxwell friend told Vanity Fair, “Jeffrey took her in. She’s never forgotten that, and never will.” In this telling Ghislaine is another picked-up, pitiable woman, ensnared by a master manipulator. Whatever crimes she involved herself in later could almost be excused. They were payments for a debt.

All you have to do to believe that is forget she was Robert Maxwell’s daughter. She had a glittering upbringing. She was skilled at getting what she wanted, at reeling people in, at throwing parties. Epstein was cash rich but class poor. Described in these early years so often as a “schlub”, he needed a charismatic partner to launch his conquest of Manhattan’s charity auction set. Otherwise he was just another nerdy dogsbody who helped plutocrats avoid paying tax. Every bank in the city had a thousand of those.

Ghislaine helped propel his somersault into the ranks of the super wealthy. He valued her as his equal: “Ghislaine is the best at what I need,” he said in 2002. “Ghislaine speaks five languages fluently… She’ll come to a meeting, and not only will she be able to translate what the person’s saying… but she can also give me a sense of is the person telling the truth.” All she received in return were private jets, lavish estates, and vast sums of money.

This world melted away, like her father’s did. The trial came long after the deluge. It was mind-numbing. There were endless examinations of flight logs, property portfolios, and financial transactions. The accusers were tortured on the stand by Maxwell’s lawyers. To save their Eve, they had to destroy the credibility of four others. The women sobbed; it sounded like the air around them was being eaten by the sadness they felt. We learned that post-Epstein, Carolyn went on to become a drug addict, prostitute, and single mother. Facing Maxwell a few weeks ago, she pointed at her and shouted: “You broke my soul.”

If Ghislaine still had a soul it was well hidden in the courtroom. You had to look for it elsewhere. The dozen pictures of her and Epstein released during the trial are a good place to start. She has the same face in every photo. A greying man and his partner, affluent and easy, sitting in a grass field with a dog; as perfectly self-possessed and unreal as a couple in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

This was the only reveal from the trial. There were no big prizes, no doomily grim revelations about paedophile rings operating at high altitude, among the jet set, that the placards outside the courthouse prayed for. The apocalypse never arrived because the apocalypse had already happened: it was the afterlife of the four accusers. There was no final answer to the mystery of Epstein’s death. Only the look Maxwell gives him in each image, taken over the span of their eleven-year relationship. Love. Nothing could be guiltier.

The acceptance of pornography as part of everyday life, available freely and constantly via our private devices, was based on a compact that should always have been obviously implausible: that the media you consume will not change you in any way. That you can log out after orgasm touched only by yourself. And that anodyne outcome was considered possible even when the material being consumed was the most depraved imaginable.

A 2003 column by David Aaronovitch probably conveys a lot of my own thoughts about the subject at the time. Worries about the number of men accessing images of child sexual abuse were, he wrote, a “panic”. Such material was obviously harmful to the children depicted in it and should be prohibited on that basis, but it would be a mistake to automatically classify those men as paedophiles. They might, he conjectured, “be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release”.

A line is quietly drawn here: on the one side you have the “genuine paedophiles” whose interest in sexual images of children reflects their authentic interest in sex with children, and on the other you have the “strangely curious” who will never present an in-person risk. Implicit is the idea that there is something essential and stable in the individual’s nature which controls their relationship to pornography. Your sexuality pre-exists and overrides your media exposure. In other words, nobody becomes a nonce because of the internet.

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To think this way felt knowing, authoritative. The world was full of seamy horrors, but I was equal to comprehending them — and not liable to be shocked into overreaction. To recall that way of thinking now is to feel naive, unworldly. Exposure to extreme material reformulates desires, and desires can become actions.

Talking to the Guardian this year, Michael Sheath of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (a charity which aims to prevent potential child abusers from becoming actual ones) explained the relationship of cause and effect like this: “Of course most people can watch extreme porn and walk away, but I don’t see those people. What we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography, and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous.” There’s a consensus among professional organisations that lockdown has heightened the risks by intensifying immersion in online existence.

Why was this so hard to see coming? By the end of the twentieth century, society had reached a broad accommodation with pornography in its print and video forms. Even if you didn’t use it personally, you probably owed something to it in your everyday life: pornography had driven the adoption of VHS, cable TV and the internet. Its online iteration would be a revolution in convenience but nothing else. To be against it wasn’t just to be a miserable dried-up prude, it was to have turned away from everything modernity had to offer.

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she put anti-porn feminists in the authoritarian camp, happily building bonfires of smut that would light the way for Gilead. The narrator Offred’s mother is one of the book burners, and she takes her daughter with her. In one of Offred’s memories, a friend of her mother’s gives her a magazine to add to the pyre:

“It had a pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from the ceiling by a chain wound around her hands. I looked at it with interest. It didn’t frighten me. I thought she was swinging, like Tarzan from a vine, on the TV.
“Don’t let her see it, said my mother. Here, she said to me, toss it in, quick.
“I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash in the air, before my eyes.”

In this scene, the symbolic violence to women is done not by porn, but by the destruction of porn. And Offred’s exposure to it does her no harm at all: she sees a woman bound for male pleasure, and imagines her as the hero of an adventure story. That resilience is a quiet and total riposte to her mother’s entire politics.

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It seems strange to me now that a novelist should argue, effectively, that culture has no influence. And perhaps even stranger for a political writer to have believed it — someone whose life is spent in the work of persuasion, whose business is using words to change the way people think. But I believed it too. Twenty years ago, I thought that whatever the internet might do to porn, the porn would do nothing significant to us.

***

It’s hard to be a liberal. Free speech can be a dangerous thing. So can sex. Andrea Dworkin — one of the anti-porn feminists Offred’s mother would have read — understood that men use sex as a vehicle for domination precisely because they fear the vulnerability it engenders. As she wrote in her 1987 book Intercourse:

“Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close.”

And she knew that exposure to pornography changes people too, because she had undergone it herself. Her analysis of the pornographic classic The Story of O, from her 1974 book Woman Hating, contains a brief but striking aside: “O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and sacral destiny of women.” O’s sexual apotheosis comes when she asks her lover for permission to kill herself, finally becoming the nothing she was born to be.

The fact that Dworkin was speaking from experience when she spoke about porn is inconvenient for pornography’s defenders, whose usual defensive strategy is to say that anyone who criticises it must be speaking from fear and repression. Don’t like what you’ve seen? Then you simply haven’t seen enough. When the singer Billie Eilish described recently about how her consumption of porn from the age of eleven had, among other things, distorted her idea of what “normal” female genitals look like, one female adult performer responded with disappointment that the “vulva diversity” in porn was being overlooked.

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But no one actually paying attention to what Eilish said could genuinely think her problems would be resolved by more porn. “I think it really destroyed my brain,” she explained. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn… I would just watch abusive BDSM… it led to problems where, you know, the first few times I had sex I was not saying no to things that were not good. And it’s because I thought that that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.”

It’s something Eilish has talked about before, but one of the things that made it so impressive this time was where she said it: in an interview with Howard Stern. Throughout his career as a shock jock, Stern has proudly stood for the crassest in free speech. (A typical Stern stunt: in 2014, the blogger Perez Hilton fingered one of Stern’s male writers live on air.) Before the internet, he was one of the main forces in creating crossover stars from the adult industry. An invite onto his show was a way to break into the mainstream.

Not that his support necessarily translated into respect for those who worked in the industry. When the performer Sasha Grey (famous for her extreme BDSM scenes, in which she was choked, punched and slapped) accused Stern of being a “closet racist” in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2009, he didn’t just defend his own honour, he attacked hers: “What a genius… Please. Just tell me how much cock you can suck and how far you can swallow a hot dog.” But he liked porn, and helped create a society where porn was the norm.

And yet, confronted with Eilish’s story, his response was absolute agreement. “When I was little, the only thing you had was, like, a New York Times girdle ad… The first time I had sex, I had no clue what the fuck I was doing. There was a certain innocence about it. And I often say, if I had porn when I was a kid, I mean, I would run around spanking people thinking that this was what they would like.”

What he says here is a betrayal of the underlying fantasy of porn. Porn deals, of course, in many different fantasies — fantasies of what women are like and what men are like, different kinks and fetishes — but underlying all of that is a fantasy of inert sex. Sex that, however physically demanding, only reveals and does not change the people involved.

In the same interview in which she insulted Stern (an interview which was, it should be remembered, a shop window for her work and persona as much as a genuine revelation of herself), Grey delivered a perfect articulation of that fantasy. “I am a pervert,” she told the journalist, rejecting the idea that women enter porn because of trauma. “If I am working out any issues through porn, it’s anger at society for not being open about sex.” She claimed her interest in BDSM dated to her childhood — that what she showed in porn was her authentic, inherent self, and that whatever she did was in the service of her own desire to get off.

At least one person who had worked with her expressed scepticism about this. A producer quoted in the article said that he thought her “extreme presence” was a calculated means to raise her profile. Certainly, all the incentives aligned to make extremity work for her: as the “dirtiest girl in the world” (to quote the title of the Rolling Stone interview) she won mainstream attention and breakthrough roles, including the lead part in Steven Soderbergh’s movie The Girlfriend Experience.

Sex is not a solo activity, and her partner in this case was not another person but a whole industry. Whatever interests and inclinations she arrived with, only some of them were valuable enough to be encouraged.

***

Sometimes it seems there’s a conspiracy between the people who make porn and the people who don’t actually watch much porn to maintain the fiction of harmlessness. For the former, the idea of porn as a vast and effective subterranean propaganda network is a threat to their bottom line; for the latter, it’s a threat to their sense of security in the world. But the people who use it know otherwise, even if they don’t often admit it publicly.

The horror filmmaker David Cronenberg is not anyone’s idea of an anti-porn feminist, not least because his films are insistently, gruesomely pornographic. My favourite of them is Videodrome from 1982. It’s the story of a cable TV executive called Max Renn, played by James Woods, who is searching for something genuinely hardcore to give his small channel the competitive edge. When he stumbles across a scrambled broadcast called Videodrome which shows highly convincing scenes of women being bound, beaten and killed, he’s transfixed.

As Max tries to learn more about these strange films, he is warned that he’s messing with something dangerous: “It can programme you. It can play you like a video player,” murmurs one of the many shadowy people he meets. It contains coded signals that cause Max to hallucinate and, eventually, to undergo physical changes. In the film’s most disgusting, and brilliant, scene, a vaginal opening develops in Max’s abdomen into which a writhing, pulsating video cassette is inserted by one of the Videodrome operatives.

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Whichever way you turn it, the symbolism of this is unambiguous when it comes to the politics of media consumption. You could neutralise it by arguing that it’s a satire on alarmism about the corrupting influence of media, but if the film is satirising anything it seems to be Max’s platitudinous justifications for the sex and violence he traffics in. He talks about “catharsis” and “outlets” and “providing a social good”; he ends up trapped helplessly in fantasies that leach into his real life.

Porn here isn’t just something you watch. It’s something that acts on the viewer, that transforms him in the most literal way. It’s a more sinister vision of what porn does than the one implied by Cronenberg’s contemporary and fellow Canadian Atwood in Handmaid’s; it is nearer by far to the analysis Dworkin puts forward. And, as with Dworkin, it’s born from a frank acquaintance with the complications of his own sexuality and the influences at work on it.

“I’m not Max,” Cronenberg stressed in the book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, but “that isn’t to say I haven’t noticed that I’m attracted to images of sexual violence, and wonder what that means about myself.” Videodrome is, obviously, about the institutional shifts of video and cable TV, not about the then-non-existent internet. But the way Max chances on Videodrome, rather than seeks it out, and the way it’s stripped of all marks of who made it and where it came from, makes it extraordinarily prescient about the way porn sites would reshape consumption.

Now extreme porn is so pervasive that whenever it’s implicated in some terrible crime, the easy way to dismiss the link is to say — well, everyone watches it, so there’s no significance if violent criminals do it too. This is a cop-out. Media does not exert influence absolutely or in the same way on everyone, but we accept that racist media can engender racism and sexist media can engender sexism. Why should an exemption be erected for erections?

“People who say ‘Revolution now’ and aren’t worried by it are foolish,” said Cronenberg (also in Cronenberg on Cronenberg). “The lesson of history — early, middle, late — is that revolution brings with it death, pain, anguish and disease: often nothing positive to replace what was destroyed.” We are two decades now into revolution in media that was also a revolution in sex, and there is no room left for naivety about what that means.

Before Wayne Couzens committed the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard this year, he watched extreme porn. While the double murderer and mortuary employee David Fuller was committing routine necrophilia against the corpses in his care, he was also recording his offences and adding them to a meticulously maintained library of the most horrific pornography, his trial heard this year.

And regular men choke regular women because they’ve seen it in porn, while regular women accept regular violence as sex, because that’s what they’ve learned to masturbate to. The desire, the fantasy and the act create a self-inciting feedback loop. In what Dworkin called the skinlessness of sex, participants are vulnerable, penetrable.

Whatever your sex is, porn can fuck you.

The police officer gives her a hard, cold answer: “That’s rape.”

This is a scene in the Emmy-winning I May Destroy You, which last year served to briefly focus the conversation about sexual violence on the underreported crime of “stealthing”. In the UK, where it is set, removing a condom without the consent of your partner is illegal. The same is true in Germany, and one jurisdiction in Australia. Recently, California became the first US state to ban stealthing — or removing, damaging, or otherwise interfering with the integrity of birth control during sexual intercourse. And a few weeks ago, Chile became the latest nation to follow suit.

But the fact that stealthing is a crime doesn’t necessarily help Arabella. She does not press charges, as she no longer has any physical evidence. She is not compensated for her purchase of emergency contraceptive. And the law doesn’t act as an arbiter between herself and the man who harmed her. It does help her in one way — by telling her definitively that her intuition is right: this act was wrong and hurtful and should not have happened. But is that enough?

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When we look to address wrongs — and to expand our understanding of what causes harm — we so often look to the creation of rules, laws and institutional responses, and stop there. The act of criminalising stealthing is meant to announce to perpetrators and victims alike — who, like Arabella, and possibly her own rapist, might not know — that it is classified as rape, and comes with potential consequences. When Chilean deputies put forth the bill, lawyer and politician Gael Yeomans followed up the announcement with, “Yes, gentlemen, that is a sexual assault even if you do not like to hear it.”

All this allows politicians to say: “we are taking this seriously.” But the promise of justice is a difficult one to keep, in practice. The United Kingdom has only had one successful conviction of stealthing. In that particular case, a man removed the condom in the midst of an engagement with a sex worker, continued to have sex with her despite her protests, assaulted her, and left without paying. His overt aggression and violence — he reportedly threatened to murder the judge presiding over the trial — made it easy to find him guilty.

But the overwhelming majority will not find justice within these systems — partly because it’s a crime that can happen without the victim noticing. In Alexandra Brodsky’s survey of people who were victims of stealthing, many of them didn’t realise the condom had been removed or tampered with until after the completion of the sexual act, sometimes not even until the partner had left. This makes it almost impossible to prove it happened.

People have long struggled to prove they have been raped for the very same reason: lack of corroborative evidence or witnesses. But with stealthing, it’s even harder to prove the intention to do harm. Condoms come off and they break. Making a case that the removal or damage wasn’t accidental or inadvertent is harder even than making a case that you said no when your rapist is insisting you said yes.

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The consequences of stealthing are very real, though. Those who spoke with Brodsky report scrambling for health resources after discovering what their partner had done: making appointments for STI tests, procuring PrEP to protect against possible HIV exposure, buying the morning-after pill. Some of these medical interventions have debilitating side effects, like cramps and headaches. Some might not work, meaning more medical interventions.

And all of these services can be difficult, expensive and occasionally impossible to access, depending on the victim’s location and financial situation. Even in cases of forceful rape, hospitals in America are not legally obligated to give victims PrEP or emergency contraception — Catholic hospitals in particular make it difficult to procure any medication that might interfere with a potential pregnancy.

So often, then, when citizens find themselves in crisis, they discover there is a wide gap between what is available and what is accessible, and between what might be useful to them and what they are told they can have. This is reminiscent of the pro-choice politicians who give lip service to “protecting Roe v. Wade,” while doing nothing to make abortion affordable for people with low incomes, or to restore clinics that have been shut down by anti-abortion activists’ nuisance suits, or to decentralise services away from abortion clinics — which are often the targets of harassment and threats of violence.

Sure, abortion is available — if you are lucky enough to live in a city that has a clinic or wealthy enough to travel for it, and of course if you have the funds to pay for the procedure. But it’s not accessible — doctors should be able to offer medical abortifacients directly to patients, or mail them to those in rural environments or in abusive situations.

This state of affairs has become so acceptable to most of the politicians in power that it’s very rarely discussed — even by those who say they care about reproductive justice. The subject is left to Hollywood: trying to access abortion services is so commonly understood as an arduous and complicated process that it’s become the plot of multiple films — Happening, Four Months Three Weeks and Two Days, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Plan B. In most cases, the primary character is finally able to find the care they need, even if it drains them financially, emotionally and physically.

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The new law in California makes stealthing a civil matter, giving the victim the opportunity to sue for damages in civil court. If the crime led to the transmission of a disease or an unwanted pregnancy, there is at least the chance of compensation, even if that chance is slim. The burden of proof is less heavy in civil courts than in criminal ones, but it’s difficult to imagine scenarios in which the judgement didn’t come down to trusting one person’s word over another’s — which historically hasn’t gone well for victims of sexual assault.

And this might be especially true if there isn’t a tangible result to the stealthing — no infection or pregnancy: if the victim did not accrue costs in the pursuit of health services. Was harm still done? Clearly, yes: trust has been violated, emotional fall out is likely. But when we try to convert that experience into dollars and cents — when trying to define the precise dimensions of the damage done — we reach for clarity and find only more murk.

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In her 1998 essay, “The Secret Sharer: Sex, Race, and Denial in an American Small Town” — recently collected in What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about MeToo — JoAnn Wypijewski told the story of Nushawn Williams, a young black man who infected multiple women with HIV through unprotected sex, knowing he was positive. The small town of Jamestown, New York, wanted to show it was taking the harm done to these young women seriously — and prevent any more women from being infected. And so, it filed criminal charges against Williams for reckless endangerment and statutory rape (two of his partners were underage).

Many of the townspeople had opinions on the case — about how evil Williams must be, about what was “wrong” with the women and girls who had unprotected sex with him when HIV/AIDS was all over the media. Few paid much attention, however, to what those women and girls might need now that they found themselves infected — or even what could have helped them before their encounters with Williams. There were free condoms available through the health clinic, but they weren’t accessible, because there was so little outreach in the community.

Plenty of politicians contributed to turning this local case into a nationwide scandal — Rudy Giuliani said Williams should be charged with attempted murder — but few showed any interest in expanding medical access or offering childcare services to those low-income women who had had HIV+ babies from William. Everyone got what they wanted out of the situation: the politicians burnishing their reputations, the TV commentators using the AIDS panic to gain attention, and the media who made money by creating a scandal. Everyone except the women most affected.

It’s not that these scares were completely unfounded. People have been convicted for deliberately infecting others with HIV, albeit through sex, not needles. And in 1989, a group of teenage girls were arrested for jabbing women with pins in New York “for fun”. But if there was ever a case of someone infected with HIV by a deliberate needle attack, I can’t find any record of it. The panic was essentially an urban legend, like razor blades hidden in Halloween sweets.

Now, students are reporting being jabbed with needles in nightclubs, not to spread HIV but to drug them. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has called for the police to look into it. It’s part of a wider concern about drink spiking, which recently inspired a national boycott of nightclubs, “Girls Night In”. But how worried should we be?

First, let’s talk about needle druggings. There are stories. In the US, for instance, eight people died at a festival, apparently crushed during a crowd surge. There were unrelated reports of a security guard and others being jabbed with a needle. But none of them have been confirmed.

And jabbing someone with a needle is not easy. One academic I spoke to said that “incapacitating someone with a needle is something the NKVD [the Russian secret police] would have to do”. It hurts, for a start; and getting it into the bloodstream via the leg or back is “really inefficient”. The dosing would be amazingly hard to get right, as would doing it without someone noticing for the several seconds it takes to press the plunger on the syringe. The idea that it’s widespread is incredibly unlikely.

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But there are claims, meanwhile, of an “epidemic” of drink spiking. There’s certainly been an increase in the number of cases reported — Harry Sumnall, a professor of substance use at Liverpool John Moores University, says that the number of police-reported incidents has gone up from about 150 in 2006 to 500-600 a year more recently. Of course, that’s not the same as the actual act becoming more common.

Academics and experts I have spoken to are all careful to say that it is important to listen when people say they’ve been drugged. But it’s also important to remember that people’s subjective experiences are not always reliable. As Paul North, a former drug treatment worker and the director of non-profit advocacy organisation Volteface, told me, there are a huge number of anecdotal reports. But it’s really hard to get any data.

So, you can record the number of people who think they’ve been spiked — about 5% of victims of rape and sexual assault think they were drugged, as Sumnall points out. But we know from every other area of psychological science that self-reported data is really unreliable. Ivan Ezquerra-Romano, co-founder and director of the social enterprise Drugs And Me, is also doing a PhD in cognitive psychology, and he says “self-report is something that we as psychologists try to run away from”.

There are a few studies that take toxicology samples from people who come to A&E reporting that they have been spiked, but not very many. Those that do exist tend to find little evidence of drugging. This one from 2007, for instance, sampled the blood and/or urine of 75 suspected spiking cases. They found unexplained drugs (that is, drugs the patient denied taking) in eight of the samples; three of them were cannabis and three were MDMA. GHB and benzodiazepines were each found in one. The report concluded that the use of sedatives to spike drinks “​​may not be as common as reported in the mainstream media”.

A more recent review of the literature, which looks at a variety of studies from around the world, found similar results. It concluded that drink-spiking “appears to be an un-common occurrence in drug facilitated sexual assault”. “In the majority of cases that get investigated, the substances are impossible to detect,” says Giulia Zampini, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Greenwich.

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There are possible explanations for this, of course. One is that GHB, in particular, is very quickly metabolised, especially if authorities are slow to take samples; so perhaps there’s under-reporting of spiking incidents. But equally, as an academic I spoke to pointed out, sometimes it’s easier to say – to the police, or one’s parents or employers – that you were drugged than that you took drugs recreationally.

This doesn’t mean that “drug-facilitated sexual assault” isn’t a real and widespread problem. It’s just that on the whole, the people — the, let’s face it, men — who are doing it don’t need to use fancy drugs, and don’t need to slip it into a stranger’s drink in a nightclub. The focus on one particular archetype of “spiking” — the stranger slipping a clear liquid into a woman’s drink in a club, as in the BBC drama I May Destroy You — distracts from a more complex social problem.

“The stranger-danger archetype is very rare,” says Zampini. “In every aspect of rape and sexual assault, it is much more common in an environment where there’s a relationship of some kind.”

And in most cases of drug-facilitated sexual assault, the drug is alcohol. Sometimes it’s the perpetrator buying stronger drinks than the victim expected — a double instead of a single, say. Sometimes it’s that the victim voluntarily drinks more than they are able to handle, and the perpetrator then takes advantage. “There’s a lack of recognition of how vulnerable alcohol can make you, if consumed in large quantities,” says Zampini. “And there is a dangerous binge drinking culture in universities — drinking is down compared to past generations, but still prevalent. And people can confuse the effects of alcohol with other drugs.”

But as North and Zampini say, the important thing is the intent to harm, not the particular drug used to do it. If a man buys a woman drinks with the intent of getting her too drunk to consent, or takes advantage of a woman who is already too drunk to consent, that’s just as bad as slipping illicit drugs into her drinks.

The concern is that, in a rush to be seen to be doing something, authorities and nightclubs might start cracking down on drugs — more CCTV, more searches at the door. “These tougher responses don’t work,” Zampini says. “If people want to sneak drugs into clubs they’ll do so.” What should be happening — and pleasingly is happening — is a focus on protecting people rather than cracking down on drugs. “There have been some recent good steps that have been taken in providing harm reduction,” says Zampini: things like identifying harassers on the dance floor, and throwing them out, rather than throwing out people for “taking half a pill”.

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Even if drugs were eliminated, as long as there’s a binge-drinking culture in UK universities, drug-facilitated sexual assault will remain a risk. Spiking probably isn’t a major driver of it — although Ezquerra —Romano notes that on the gay scene, where GHB and GBL are used recreationally for chemsex, it’s more likely, because the drugs are widely available. But in the university-nightclub scenario that most of the recent media attention has been on, alcohol is probably the main cause.

We can’t blame victims, but we shouldn’t be reluctant to suggest measures to protect themselves. “There’s nothing wrong with encouraging people to take steps to ensure their own safety,” Zampini says. “But the onus of responsibility shouldn’t be on women. Otherwise it’s like the old idea of women dressing provocatively and asking for it.” So the authorities need to facilitate those steps. For instance: if we’re going to say to women that they should cover their drinks, then clubs should provide lids.

And it’s worth getting better data on drink spiking, in case it’s more common than we think. That’s something Ezquerra-Romano is working on: for instance, he suggests drug vapes that record the amount you’ve taken via a smartphone app, so that if you do a blood test later you can compare the expected blood concentration for the amount you’ve taken with what is actually found. (Existing “colour dye” tests for spiking drugs are “worse than useless,” in Sumnall’s experience.)

But it’s more likely that drink spiking is rare, focused on by the media because the narrative is simple: the innocent victim and the calculating, predatory stranger. I worry (and everybody I spoke to for this piece agreed) that focusing on these sympathetic but unrepresentative cases is a bad idea. A woman who gets drunk voluntarily is just as much a victim, if a man takes advantage of her, as is someone who is drugged. It’s not that drink-spiking victims are the “real”, or the virtuous, ones.

The Nineties-era HIV scare died away. But fascinatingly, the recent surge in “jabbing” scare stories has revived it: false stories of young women infected by HIV in UK cities have been circulating alongside the drug-scare ones. Those stories we know are untrue; I suspect that drink-spiking is real, but rare. But it’s definitely true that men take advantage of drunk women. That’s just as bad, and far more common. Creating extra reasons for women to feel afraid does not seem wise.

What’s even more appalling is that Couzens had apparently committed indecent exposure twice: once in 2015 and once three days before Everard’s murder.

Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said in an unfortunate phrase a few months ago that there is the occasional “bad ‘un” in the service. She did go on to say that they are “intolerant” of violence and that they “​​work to identify and tackle and prevent any such behaviours”. But the impression was given that the occasional bad ‘un is an inevitable part of the institution.

It appears to be rather more than one, for the record. Apparently, 27 serving Metropolitan Police officers have been convicted of sex crimes since 2016. At least one is still on the force as an unpaid special constable, having joined the Met after his conviction for indecent exposure. (A simple criminal conviction does not automatically bar you from joining the police.) Another Met officer, who worked in the same unit as Couzens, is facing rape charges this week.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Metropolitan Police has been accused of institutional misogyny — and of needing drastic reform. In the wake of an awful story, there is an understandable, human need to want to make sure it never happens again. Specifically, we feel the police should, of all professions, be the one without a single “bad ‘un”.

But it’s also worth remembering that, in the coming years or decades, no matter how well we vet police officers, you’ll read some horrible story like this again. Hopefully we can reduce the likelihood; perhaps even reduce it a lot. But the numbers involved are just too large for it to be realistic that we can bring it to zero. So we need to have some idea – with this, and with every movement campaigning for some social good, from public health to racial justice – of what success looks like. And if we want to aim for zero, then we have to be honest about what the costs of that aim are.

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Here’s why I think it will be difficult to reach zero: the numbers. About 120,000 sexual offences were recorded in England and Wales in 2017, of which 40,000 were rapes. That’s a huge undercount of the actual figure committed (the Crime Survey of England and Wales estimates the true figure at four million), but let’s use it.

Presumably some of those 120,000 were committed by the same people — there probably weren’t 120,000 recorded perpetrators — but even if we half that number, we still end up at about 0.1% of the entire population of England and Wales recorded as committing a sex crime each year.

Let’s take that 0.1%, and pretend that the whole population is equally likely to commit sex crimes. There are about 160,000 police officers in the UK. That means that if police officers commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population, you would expect about 160 sex offences committed by police officers every year.

I sincerely hope that police officers don’t commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population. But even if they only do it 1% as often, you would still expect one or two every year; easily enough to fill newspapers with appalling stories. At those rates, you’d expect even rarer crimes such as rape and murder once every few years.

So let’s return to the question: what does success look like?

This is a difficult conversation for any reforming movement.Because there are costs that come with demanding too perfect a victory.

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Take a topical example: Zero Covid. You can say what you like about the movement’s aims, but at least it was explicit about them: it called for the “elimination of the virus from the UK”. If there’s still a single case of Covid in your country, you have not achieved Zero Covid, and you keep trying until you have.

New Zealand was always the Zero Covid paragon, along with Australia and Hong Kong and a few other places. As recently as August, a single Auckland case that couldn’t be traced to a point of origin led to a several-week lockdown. But this week, the Wellington government formally abandoned its policy of eliminating Covid, and moved to a plan to live with the virus (albeit, no doubt, at a much lower level of the virus than we have to live with). The costs of maintaining Zero Covid in the face of the Delta variant — and the reduced threat of the virus itself, given the vaccines — led them to decide that going for absolute zero wasn’t the best policy anymore.

In the UK, we have decided that a certain mortality rate is acceptable. Professor Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said recently that “living with the virus” will probably mean about 100 deaths a day, or more than 30,000 a year. It’s a grim thought, but we have to be clear-eyed and say that the elimination of risk is probably impossible, so we have to tolerate some level of it.

But when it comes to violence against women and girls, what is an acceptable number of murders every year? It’s an appalling question, but it’s one we have to ask, just as we had to with Covid. And it’s worth stopping at this point and asking whether you know how many women are murdered each year right now. Give a figure, in numbers per 100,000 per year. And then say how many you think is acceptable, again in numbers per 100,000 per year: 10 per 100,000, one in 100,000, 0.1 per 100,000?

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Here’s the real figure: according to the ONS, there has been an average of about 200 women and girls murdered each year in England and Wales for the last 10 years. Out of a population of about 31 million, that is a little under 0.7 women per 100,000 per year.

To be clear: I’m not saying that’s acceptable. But if you’d just said that you thought about one woman in every 100,000 was killed every year, and you wouldn’t rest until the murder rate was below one in 100,000, then we’re already below that.

If you said one in a million, then we’ve still got some way to go. But soon you’re going to start hitting up against some really hard limits. According to the World Bank, only two countries in the world recorded 0.1 murders per 100,000 female population (that is, one in a million) in their most recent data, and those two countries were Oman and the Palestinian territories, which makes me think that the data might not be entirely reliable.

Other countries manage 0.3 per 100,000: Singapore, Japan, Macao, Norway, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But most of the countries we tend to think of as our peers — France, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Canada — have roughly similar numbers. Getting the numbers much below that seems to be very difficult.

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You could argue that it does no harm to aim for zero, even if you know you won’t get there. But it’s not as simple as that. Reducing some societal harm costs money and time, and at some point, you’re going to hit diminishing returns. You’ll have to spend ever more resources for smaller and smaller improvements.

Maybe you’d say that you can’t put a price on a human life, and that’s understandable. But the reality in which we all live puts a price on human lives for you, via opportunity costs. If you spend the money on street lighting, you can’t spend it on dialysis machines, or early years education, or renewable energy subsidies. At some stage, because of diminishing returns, you’ll reach a point where spending more money on reducing murder rates means that more people die (or more people are harmed) elsewhere.

Whatever social problem you’re talking about fixing — obesity, police brutality, inactivity, racist abuse — we need to be explicit about whether we’re aiming for zero, and facing up to all the costs that will come with, or admit that you’re really aiming for some more achievable (but more painful to accept) figure.

When it comes to police reforms, there are all sorts of trade-offs to consider. One obvious reform, for instance, might be to impose stricter rules on recruitment — such as that no one with any criminal record at all can be a police officer. But I imagine that would hinder the efforts to increase the number of non-white police recruits, since young men of colour are the most likely to have criminal records. How much it would hinder them I don’t know, and perhaps the trade-off would be worth it, but you need to start by acknowledging the trade-off.

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I’m really, really not saying there’s nothing that can be done. Couzens turned up to a police work party with a sex worker, and his colleagues “jokingly” called him “the Rapist”. There is something wrong with a culture that allows that, and there are clear failures on the part of the police in investigating his earlier offences.

Most importantly, we need better data on how many police officers do commit crimes, so that we can get a sense of whether they’re more or less than we would expect. Profoundly affecting though they are, policymakers can’t make these decisions on the back of high-profile anecdotes and shocking individual stories.

Any group made up of thousands of people, such as the police force, will include some number of dreadful individuals, however hard you try to keep them out. And every so often, a dreadful person will do something dreadful.

Uganda has some of the worst legislation on — and social attitudes toward — lesbian and gay rights on the planet. In 2014, the nation’s Parliament passed an anti-homosexuality bill, which introduced the death penalty for homosexual encounters. It has since been declared “null and void” by a constitutional court, but there have been several attempts to reintroduce it since then.

The ugly, often deadly, anti-gay bigotry in Uganda is notorious amongst the international human rights community. The latest atrocity to befall gay Ugandan men will be reported on worldwide, but little has been written about the horrific abuse of lesbians here — which includes forced marriage and punishment rapes — nor their almost equally awful treatment in neighbouring nations.

I recently spoke to several of the 25 lesbians in Kakuma, via shaky Zoom calls and WhatsApp. They explained that LGBT refugees were segregated, in Block 13, meaning it is easy for other camp inmates to identify — and harass — them. Everyday activities such as gathering water, washing and shopping have become dangerous for these women because of the risk of further assaults. “We are in the same block as gay men,” Juliet, who is from Mbale in eastern Uganda, says, “and they mostly take the night shifts of watching over us and whenever we are attacked, they try to help us.” But they never feel safe.

Dire living conditions compound the issue. “Some of us sleep outside in the open space. There are not enough tents for everyone. We wake up early in the morning, we get water as soon as it is available, we do some cleaning, take a shower, feed the children.”

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Juliet was forced into marriage when she was 17. Her husband worked in the United Arab Emirates and only spent one month a year with her. And so she became close to his sister, with whom she started a relationship. After her husband died in 2018, “my father-in-law found me with my sister-in-law and told the police. Even if the men stone you to death there will be no punishment for the men, only for us.”

“I decided to leave Uganda because my father-in-law paid someone to come and kill me and my two sons,” she says. “I have four children, three boys and one girl, but my husband’s father took the girl from me after he realised that I’m a lesbian. They say that I’m a bad person and they can’t let me be with that baby girl. She is four now, my youngest child.”

“We didn’t know much about Kenya’s stance on lesbians,” says Juliet, “but in Uganda you are killed, you are hanged for being lesbian, and we were told, ‘Go to Kenya, they will take you in’.”

After she arrived in Kenya, Juliet was told that in Kakuma refugee camp, she and her children would have access to schools, hospitals and food. Above all, they would be protected. But after living in the camp for three years, she has found that Kenya is just as homophonbc as Uganda. “I thought that maybe if I come here, the UN will move me somewhere where I can be safe and live my life with my children. I thought maybe I would be safe and protected.”

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In reality, she’s in mortal danger. “In June, I was in my shelter sleeping, when someone came and poured petrol all over it, but before it was lit someone smelled the petrol and shouted. There have been multiple assaults on lesbians. There is never a week when we are not attacked. There have been rapes.”

“The most common problems we get here are rapes, attacks and beatings,” says Latifah, another young lesbian who fled Uganda because of threats to her life. “Many of us have been attacked and assaulted, but the only people we can talk to are the police at the camp, who tell us we are not human beings and they don’t help us at all.”

Her testimony is corroborated by Kevin (a common girls’ name in Kenya). “When you go to the police to report an assault, all they do is say, ‘Why don’t you get married to a man? Why did you choose to be that?’ So they end up not helping you,” she says. Kevin is from Kampala, and has been in the camp for three years.

“We were told the police would give us protection but they don’t send their reports to UNHCR. When you reach the police, you can be arrested for going to report. Realising we are lesbian they say, ‘Why do you pretend to be a boy?’” Kevin has tried to leave the camp at Kakuma several times, but is never given the necessary documents to do so. This signals another sinister form of persecution: not only do the authorities fail to protect women in the camp, they trap them there.

Annie-Marie, another lesbian I spoke to, says the women are in desperate need of support from feminists around the world. “We feel panicked all the time. We need to get out of Kenya. It has reached a point that we cannot be protected anymore,” she says. “We are alone in this world, no one has our backs. We have tried to cry out to everyone and tell them what we are going through.”

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Some feminist groups in the UK, such as FiLiA, are calling on people to speak up on behalf of lesbian refugees and demand action from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But, Annie-Maria tells me, “our attempts to make UNHCR listen have been ignored. We call and call the UNHCR helpline but no one answers. The switchboard person just tells us to ‘wait your turn’.”

When I approached UNHCR to ask about Block 13 and the allegations of assault and intimidation against lesbians, I was simply told that: “UNHCR acknowledges the challenges faced by vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers in Kakuma, including some with an LGBTIQ+ profile, and is closely following their security situation. UNHCR encourages anyone facing security issues to report to the police immediately and UNHCR for any protection and legal assistance.”

Despite such assurances from human rights organisations, the women in Block 13 tell me they fear for their futures and even their lives. “We have run from one dangerous situation into another,” says Latifah. “We are in limbo, and feel like no-one wants us, and we are hated wherever we go. Surely it is time for lesbians to feel safe in the world, in 2021?”

This is the story of one block in one refugee camp in one country. But violence and oppression of lesbians does not just happen in East Africa. I have personally encountered sexual and physical violence, as well as harassment and intimidation, at the hands of men since coming out in the 1970s in the UK. I have also witnessed it in countries that are supposedly benchmarks of social equality, such as Norway and Sweden.

I have heard distressing tales from women in Brazil who experience punishment rape and forced into marriage. And in the United States I have met many lesbians whose families force them into gay “conversion therapy” in order to try to force them to be straight. But there are at least laws to prevent such abuses in many countries around the world, thanks to the lesbian and gay liberation movement. But in Kenya and Uganda, there is little or no protection for these women.

They deserve better; they’re not asking much. “We dream that we can get to countries where we can express our feelings and they accept our sexual orientation,” says a resident of Block 13. “It doesn’t matter where it is, but what we need is a place for our life to go on.”

It was 1991, the height of the Gulf War, and the debate on militarism, masculine stereotypes and violence towards women was punctuated with references to testosterone. At one point, after he had nipped to the loo and topped up his glass, Reed leant over to kiss Millett — much to her disgust — leading one male guest to pronounce: “A man can never have too much [testosterone].”

In her new book, Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole Hooven explores how the hormone is often presented as both a justification and excuse for male dominance over women. Women have far lower levels of testosterone, so it has often been argued that housework and childrearing come naturally to them. Men, on the other hand, are programmed to be hellbent on impregnating as many women as possible, fighting off male rivals and dragging a carcass home for dinner.

But as Hooven acknowledges in her fascinating book, despite the undeniable effect of the hormone on our behaviour, how we relate to others is based on evolving and complex external forces.

Both sexes produce testosterone, though men create up to twenty times more. Testosterone, then, is at the heart of the nature versus nurture debate. For feminists, it is our culture, rather than hormones, that most influences gendered behaviours. There are, for instance, enough studies which show that women enjoy plenty of sex and risk on par with the most testosterone-fuelled men.

It’s the same with male and female behaviour, neither of which can be reduced to binary Ken and Barbie stereotypes. As a lesbian and gender non-conforming feminist, I know this only too well. When I rejected traditional female toys and dress, I was frequently told I had too much testosterone and that was what made me a tomboy. Even into adult life, I have lost count of the times I have been told I’m a lesbian — or that I will grow a beard and never feel a desire to reproduce — because I have “too much testosterone”.

It’s a load of nonsense, but it raises an important question: how is it that the genetic and hormonal components of sex can create two distinctly different reproductive systems, and yet human male and female behaviour shows itself to be flexible, diverse and often surprisingly similar?

Hooven’s expertise is in natural sciences and biological anthropology — and the answer, she suggests, is that testosterone might strongly influence how we behave; too much of it can make males more aggressive, and those with raised levels often end up taking too many risks so they tend to crash and burn.

That may seem logical, but it does not explain violence against women or rape. As Cordelia Fine, author of the acclaimed Testosterone Rex (2017), points out most men are not violent, which leaves a hole in the theory that testosterone drives behaviour.

Nevertheless, if we are to properly understand sex differences, we still need to educate ourselves about testosterone. Crucially, the controversy around trans women in sport — namely that going through male puberty results not just in far higher levels of tesosterone but also greater bone and muscle mass — is tackled head-on by Hooven. “You may be wondering if natural variation in T [testosterone] levels has anything to do with being transgender in the first place,” she writes. “And given what we know about testosterone, that’s a logical question. The answer is, we don’t know.”

Indeed, Hooven found that there is not much relation between higher testosterone levels and performance among professional athletes when compared to others of the same sex. Between the two sexes, however, “the link is very much stronger”. And this is because “T levels are dramatically higher in males, and have a lot to do with the fact that they are stronger, faster and more aggressive than the vast majority of their female counterparts.” That is, of course, why we have sex-segregated sports in the first place.

If we accept that testosterone can cause aggression in males and change behaviour, which Hooven does, should it be used as an excuse in cases of male sexual assault? No, says Hooven, because even behaviour related to biology is not hardwired and unchangeable. Even if biology is a factor in social ill, it does not make it determined.

Yet it is disappointing that Hooven relies on questionable data to challenge the reality of male violence. For example, in picking apart the trope that male violence towards women is inevitable because it is hormone-driven, she looks to the violence perpetrated by women on male partners and concludes that, with caveats, women are as likely to be violent to male partners as vice-versa, but less likely to kill. I have campaigned to end violence towards women and girls for 40 years, and every bit of evidence from around the world concludes this is simply not the case.

But how much does testosterone affect the way men view women? One example Hooven relies on is that of trans man Griffin Hansbury and his reaction to T injections during the early days of his transition:

“I remember walking up Fifth Avenue, and there was a woman walking in front of me,” says Hansbury. “And she was wearing this little skirt and this little top. And I was looking at her ass. And I kept saying to myself, don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. And I kept looking at it. And I walked past her. And this voice in my head kept saying, turn around to look at her breasts …. It was like being in a pornographic movie house in my mind. And I couldn’t turn it off. I could not turn it off. Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.”

While even I, a hard-line social constructionist, concede that testosterone can cause strange behaviour and be as potent as oestrogen is for females, I strongly suspect there are other explanations for his behaviour. Surely, for example, we should put at least some of it down to the privilege and arrogance afforded to men, including trans men.

After all, Hansbury is still living in a world where male entitlement and lack of punishment can lead to the dehumanising and over-sexualisation of women. Hansbury’s testosterone-induced journey from his previous life as a self-described “butch dyke” who used to perform poetry about street harassment cannot be blamed on T alone.

As Hooven observes: “To bring about changes in male behaviour it is not necessary to depress testosterone. Changes in attitudes and culture can do that all by themselves.” She is right, even if the likes of Oliver Reed may suggest otherwise.

This looks to be how it’s going to end for Andrew Cuomo, the New York state governor who resigned this week after an investigation by New York State Attorney General Letitia James found that he’d sexually harassed eleven women over the course of his political career. The report detailed a pervasive pattern of harassment that included everything from overfamiliar touching to suggestive comments; the most serious allegation was that he’d put his hand up a woman’s shirt and groped her breast.

Cuomo has flatly denied some of the allegations (including the groping charge); others, he’s tried to contextualise as the innocuous byproducts of his affectionate, gregarious nature. The governor argued that he’s always hugged and kissed people, men and women alike; he simply hadn’t realised how much he’d fallen out of step with the norms of a more enlightened age.

“There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate, and I should have,” he said, in a statement that utterly failed to win over his detractors but did launch a cottage industry of I’m not perverted, I’m just Italian T-shirts.

But even as it’s being treated like a bombshell, the 165-page report raises at least as many questions as it answers. Tablet‘s Michael Tracey has pointed out several oddities and inconsistencies, including the fact that some of Cuomo’s behaviour was found offensive by James but not, remarkably, by the women who were subjected to it — and that despite accusing him in a press conference of having violated federal law, James has not brought charges against the governor.

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In this way, the Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment scandal contains echoes of an earlier, hastier takedown: in 2017, at the height of MeToo fervour, Democratic Senator Al Franken stepped down amid multiple allegations of harassment and intense pressure from his peers on the Left. His case followed a similar trajectory to Cuomo’s, beginning with an allegation from a former colleague-turned-political rival. In Franken’s case, conservative talk-radio personality Leeann Tweeden accused the senator of having forced her to repeatedly rehearse a kissing scene against her will during a USO tour in 2006; in Cuomo’s case, the controversy began with allegations from Lindsey Boylan, a former aide who was now running for office herself.

Boylan complained on Twitter about a toxic work environment at Cuomo’s office before upping the ante with a claim of sexual harassment, then famously refused to elaborate or cooperate with journalists who were attempting to report the story. But as with Franken, once the first allegation drew attention, others followed. And as with Franken, it wasn’t the details of any one incident but the sheer volume of women claiming to be harassed that made all the difference.

The most charitable reading of this #MeToo trajectory is that there’s safety, and courage, in numbers — that women are empowered to come forward with allegations once they realise they’re not alone. The cynical one is that #MeToo-ings have a certain glow — one that attracts not just true victims, but also attention-seekers and fabulists, like moths to the flame. Look at these brave and valiant women speaking truth to a powerful, abusive man; who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Anyone over the age of 40 will recognise Andrew Cuomo as the sort of old lecher whose behaviour is grossly inappropriate by the enlightened standards of the current year, but who was quite recently considered tolerable and toothless if not charming (and some people did find him charming, including those now pretending otherwise). He’s also not the first politician with a long history of displaying open affection for constituents and staff to get tripped up by evolving norms; after all, it was only last year that we were still trying to decide if Joe Biden’s handsiness was an encouraging sign of human warmth or something more sinister.

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For Biden, warmth won out. But Cuomo, for reasons of both identity and self-presentation, couldn’t project that same grandfatherly vibe. He was younger, rougher, and unmarried after a notoriously acrimonious split from his wife in the early 2000s. And far from being cautious about how these things might impact his image, he leaned into it: “I’ve always been a soft guy,” he joked with his brother, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, early on in the pandemic. “I am the love gov. I’m a cool dude in a loose mood.”

Of course, until about five minutes ago, people were eating this up — which explains why it took nearly nine months between those first allegations of misconduct and Cuomo’s unhappy ouster from office. It’s not that Andrew Cuomo was a good guy; it’s just that we desperately wanted him to be. New York was one of the first states to be hit hard by the pandemic, and before long, New York’s governor was being hailed as a Covid hero. Andrew Cuomo developed a reputation for taking the virus seriously (unlike those science-denying yokels in, say, Florida, who wouldn’t even wear masks at the beach), and for taking control of a population that refused to control itself. In hindsight, it was all a bit much.

“I love Governor Cuomo, his soothing Queens accent, his stories about his dad Mario (himself a three-time governor of New York) and his 88-year-old mother Matilda,” gushed Molly Jong-Fast at Vogue, while Jezebel’s Rebecca Fishbein swooned over his “measured bullying, his love of circumventing the federal government, his sparring with increasingly incompetent city leadership.” The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah declared himself a proud Cuomosexual. When a photo surfaced that suggested the presence of nipple piercings under Cuomo’s polo shirt, media Twitter lost its mind for three straight days.

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And as long as Andrew Cuomo said all the right things, nobody seemed to care much that he was doing all the wrong ones. This was the man who mandated that Covid-infected patients be admitted to nursing homes without testing, resulting in tens of thousands of fatalities, and then tried to cover up the scandal by undercounting the dead. In the early days of the pandemic, when tests were scarce, he diverted them away from essential workers and gave them to his friends, family, and administration VIPs. This was the man who got a $4 million book deal to write a pandemic memoir about his amazing leadership, then violated the ethics of his office by making state employees work on the manuscript.

And yet, throughout all this, he continued to play moral authority — and the media, including his brother Chris at CNN, colluded to reinforce the message. Without this MeToo moment to interrupt his stride, who knows how long New York’s naked emperor would’ve kept on strolling?

Cuomo has raged that the allegations against him are politically motivated. And in truth, yes, some of them probably are. Just as tax evasion was hardly Al Capone’s worst offence, the imperviousness to scandal of someone like Cuomo begets a prosecutorial, let’s-find-something-to-charge-him-with mentality, which in turn begets the weaponisation of sexual misconduct allegations against a man whose worst crimes are something else entirely.

And yes, this is a trend that threatens to weaken due process and cheapen the legitimate issue of workplace harassment.

But if the opportunistic tarring of Andrew Cuomo as a pervert is bad, so too is corruption, and conspiracy, and nepotism, and finger-wagging at the public over their Thanksgiving travel plans after your egotism and ineptitude just killed off fifteen thousand grandparents. And if the government and media would stop providing partisan cover for political werewolves, maybe desperate citizens wouldn’t feel the need to use MeToo as a silver bullet.

Americans love this quote. Not just for its lyrical qualities, but for the way it feels to say it, like planting your very own little flag on the topmost point of the moral high ground. We love it for the principles it enshrines: justice, fairness, protection of the vulnerable from authoritarian overreach.

That is, until one of those theoretical guilty persons actually escapes, in real life, and all those pesky rights they’re entitled to suddenly become really inconvenient.

Bill Cosby is the latest case to put Americans’ principles to the test, after his 2018 conviction for aggravated indecent assault — a landmark moment in the #MeToo movement — was overturned this week on a legal technicality. In 2005, Cosby was sued in civil court by a woman who alleged that he’d drugged and assaulted her. (This was long before the reckoning with Cosby’s history of serial sexual abuse that began in 2014 and ultimately resulted in 60 women coming forward with allegations of their own.) At the time, there wasn’t enough evidence to bring a criminal case against Cosby — and district attorney Bruce Castor made an agreement with the comedian: if Cosby waived his constitutional rights against self-incrimination, and testified truthfully in the civil case, he would not be prosecuted in criminal court.

Cosby did testify, did incriminate himself and ended up settling the lawsuit for $3.4 million. And while it’s easy to argue in hindsight that Castor never should’ve made such a deal, at the time, this was the next-best thing to seeing justice served. With no hope of moving forward on a criminal prosecution, here, at least, was a way that Cosby could be made to suffer consequences for what he’d done (and for his victim to receive recompense for the pain she’d experienced).  But in 2018, as the allegations against him piled up, a different prosecutor looked back at that case and decided to charge Cosby with criminal assault using his testimony from the civil case — and reneging on the promise made by Castor more than ten years before.

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Even at the time, both the prosecutor and the judge in Cosby’s criminal case knew that they were violating his due process right, and creating possible grounds for acquittal, by failing to uphold the agreement. So the verdict this week, handed down by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, is just a confirmation of what the law already implied: if one prosecutor makes a promise on behalf of the State, another prosecutor can’t come along and ignore it.

On the one hand, this is an enormous win for due process protections that puts important limits on how prosecutors can abuse their power. On the other, of course, it means that a rapist walks free (albeit after serving two years in prison).

And yet Cosby’s acquittal should still be welcomed — not just because it upholds an important principle, but because it sets a precedent for other cases, including those of sympathetic (or even innocent!) defendants who might otherwise have been railroaded by prosecutors.

For in reality, this is how it often works. As Andrew Fleischman, a defence attorney who works on behalf of wrongfully convicted clients in Georgia, told me: “Many of our most important rights come from people who suck.”

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The Miranda warning, for instance — the one that starts “you have the right to remain silent” — stems from the case of Ernesto Miranda, who kidnapped and raped a teenage girl in 1963. Miranda was totally guilty of a heinous crime (and he was convicted again at a second trial, despite the exclusion of his illegally obtained confession). But in overturning his first conviction, the court created a vital protection for all Americans, including people who are young, poor or otherwise vulnerable to being manipulated by the cops into incriminating themselves. Now, every person placed under arrest must be verbally instructed that they have the right to shut up and ask for a lawyer.

Meanwhile, the law that protected Cosby also protects people with far less wealth or resources, in a system where the state already enjoys immense power to wreck the lives of people who get caught up in the criminal justice system. Fleischman notes, for instance, that it’s not unusual for people charged with a crime — even something minor like marijuana possession — to have their children taken away by the state (a process that prosecutors often trigger intentionally, so that they can leverage the possibility of being reunited with the child to convince distraught parents to cooperate.)

It’s not hard to imagine a nightmare scenario in which the prosecutor promises a parent immunity from prosecution, and a better chance at getting their child back, in exchange for truthful testimony at the parental rights hearing in civil court — and then reneges on the agreement, using that testimony to bring a criminal case. But now, thanks to the precedent set by Cosby’s case, prosecutors won’t just get smacked down on appeal for abusing their power in this way; they’re also less likely to try it to begin with.

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If anyone should recognise the value of a due process victory, even for a terrible person like Bill Cosby, it’s American progressives (for whom criminal justice reform and decarceration is usually a central concern.) Instead, many are outraged over the acquittal. Partly this reflects a tendency on the Left to talk out of both sides of one’s mouth on the issue of crime, where decarceration and restorative justice is great, right up until it benefits someone we don’t like. (Take the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when the same people who’d downplayed crimes like looting and arson during the summer protests of 2020 suddenly developed a wild enthusiasm for throwing the book at lawbreakers.)

But it’s also a failure of imagination: even as many progressives would readily agree that our law enforcement officers have too much power and too little accountability, that too many people receive draconian punishments that don’t fit their crimes, or that innocent people get railroaded every day by overzealous prosecutors who just want to put someone in jail, they’re also sure, deep down, that the someone will always be someone else. Not them, or someone they love.

Probably, they’re right. But if they’re not, and if they’re unlucky enough to someday end up getting caught in the grinding machine of our criminal justice system, the due process and civil liberties that sometimes allow bad people to go unpunished might suddenly seem like a pretty good thing.

But behind this seemingly noble mission lies another more political, and at times sinister, agenda. Since its inception in 1994, CAIR has, according to the Global Muslim Brotherhood Research Center in 2007, “been intimately connected to a network of extremist Islamist groups centred on Hamas”. Its historical affinity with extremism has, however, remained poorly understood by the general public, as well as many American Muslims who take CAIR’s public statements at face value, or believe it just supports the general Palestinian cause.

Thanks to a whistleblower’s brave new testimony, revelations over the past month have revealed another side to CAIR: namely, its alleged tactics of shutting down debate around the gender-based violence that affects women within Muslim communities.

I should declare here that I have a history with CAIR. Only a few months ago, the organisation attempted to pressure San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club into cancelling a discussion between me and journalist Bari Weiss about my new book, Prey, which discusses the recent rise in sexual assault and harassment in Europe in the context of mass migration from Muslim-majority countries.

CAIR-California mobilised their nationwide network, both privately and publicly, demanding that the club does “not lend their platform to hateful voices.” Ultimately, the CAIR campaign failed and the event was a success — though I doubt that it’s the last I’ll hear from them. Indeed, I am quite used to a pattern of attempted cancellations by CAIR and its sister organisations, notably the Muslim Student Association. Some attempts, as with the honorary degree I was supposed to receive from Brandeis University, have been successful. Not every institution stands its ground the way the Commonwealth Club did.

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Yet my run-ins with CAIR seem relatively minor when compared to the entrenched internal culture of misogyny, homophobia and abuse alleged in recent federal court filings.

Enter Lori Saroya.

Saroya, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Pakistan, was raised in a small town in southern Iowa. From a young age, she showed an interest in civil rights and social justice; she became the President of the Muslim Student Association at her university, and later co-founded CAIR-Minnesota. Eventually she joined the National Board and worked her way up to become a Chapter Director in 2017.

Like many Americans, Saroya was convinced that CAIR was everything it claimed to be. That, in itself, is unsurprising. CAIR’s cleverness is that, despite having a fairly marginal following among American Muslims, it has managed to position itself as the defender of civil rights of all American Muslims, and as the main intermediary between US intelligence and law enforcement agencies and grassroots communities.

That isn’t to say that allegations about a toxic culture inside CAIR are anything new. Since moving to the United States in 2006, I’ve heard whispers of allegations against men in the upper ranks of CAIR — stories of women claiming sexual harassment or assault, but too frightened to come forward.

The women who approached me fearfully described an organisation that is “Mafia-like”; they walked on eggshells, terrified of the control, the aggression and the manipulation. All were willing to tell their stories behind closed doors, but none dared to go public. Not even at the time of #MeToo.

That is what makes what Saroya sets forth in a recent filing in federal court so remarkable.

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On January 12^th, Hassan Shibly resigned as the executive director of CAIR’s prominent Florida chapter, after his wife publicly accused him of domestic violence, allegations which he denied. “For years I have been in an abusive relationship and the situation at home has become unbearable,” she said in a video on GoFundMe. Shibly has denied these accusations, dismissing them as an “attempt to smear me and fraudulently raise money from the community while capitalising on my name recognition.”

Then, in April, following a series of public posts by Saroya critical of CAIR, National Public Radio interviewed “half a dozen” other women who had come forward “with their own accusations of emotional abuse and sexual misconduct by him”. Shibly’s departure, NPR reported, “emboldened a slew of women to come forward with their own accusations of emotional abuse and sexual misconduct by him and of workplace discrimination at CAIR’s national office and several prominent chapters”.

Clearly it rattled CAIR. After the report was published, CAIR filed a federal defamation lawsuit against Saroya. “Since her departure from CAIR in 2018,” it claims, “Saroya has been actively engaging in a systemic and continuous internet smear campaign to damage CAIR’s reputation and to cause CAIR severe economic harm.”

Earlier this month, Saroya filed her response — published online here — and it makes for grim reading.

It details how Sayora attempted to resign in 2016 over CAIR’s “refusal to take any action at all regarding the evidence of Shibly’s mistreatment of women and others”. Nihad Awad, the National Executive Director of CAIR and one of its founders, convinced her to stay, but was unhappy that she continued to press for an investigation of Shibly.

Eventually, in 2018, Saroya did resign from CAIR. She withstood pressure from Awad, who allegedly attempted to bully her into signing a non-disclosure agreement threatening that “CAIR is a very powerful organisation.”

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Saroya’s legal response explicitly mentions Awad, a married father of three, and his allies. She states that over her ten years working for CAIR, “she was forced to endure and witness unethical, and at times illegal, conduct”. This included sexual harassment, assault and discrimination. By May, she’d had enough. She alleges:

“It was at the CAIR retreat that Mr. Awad’s unwelcome, inappropriate and offensive behavior toward Ms. Saroya reached a point where she decided that she would in fact resign. Prior to that point, Mr. Awad, Ms. Saroya’s supervisor, had on various occasions asked her out to a personal lunch with him, asked her to put away her notebook and stop talking about work, and insisted on driving her back to her hotel during conferences and retreats. In May 2018, while out of town on a work trip, Mr. Awad asked Ms. Saroya to meet him in the hotel lobby at midnight. When she complied, he said to her with a smile “Do you know that [other CAIR employees] think there is something going on between us?“ This latest escalation of Mr. Awad’s shocking and repulsive behavior led Ms. Saroya to realise she needed to leave CAIR for her own safety and well-being.”

After resigning, it continues, Saroya was “shocked at the sheer number of women, past and present, who revealed their appalling experiences at CAIR National and affiliate chapters in a number of CAIR victim support groups and other channels she joined after her departure from CAIR”.

Her testimony is undoubtedly unsettling. But it also raises an uncomfortable question: why were concerns about the alleged abuse at CAIR not aired during the height of the #MeToo movement?

The answer, I believe, is rooted in a fundamental tension between America’s Muslim community and their country — one that is illustrated by the way that CAIR’s leadership retains control of three spheres of influence.

The first is internal: within the Muslim community, there is an honour and shame dynamic that is both compelling and insidious. When the victims in the #MeToo movement came forward, the prevailing culture called for the male predators to be held to account. The women were not blamed or shamed.

The Arab-Islamic attitude towards sex and sexuality, however, is rigid in its honour code. Women who have been victimised are often approached with an air of open suspicion. What were you wearing? Why were you in the car alone with a man? Why are you working outside of the home? The woman is assigned the blame and faces the prospect of causing her family real shame and dishonour, even if the woman is a victim.

In addition to the honour and shame dynamic, there is a related “in-group” and “out-group” attitude. The very act of a person from the Muslim community seeking legal counsel, police involvement or media attention outside of the Muslim community — or even outside of her own ethnic or extended family community — can be viewed as a betrayal of all Muslims, rather than an individual plea for help. In a community where you have to seek to resolve your grievances internally or shut up, women will frequently gravitate to the latter option by default.

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Secondly, there is CAIR’s influence over the American-Muslim identity. CAIR shapes the image of what America is for Muslims, projecting a message that Islamophobia is around every corner and just one wrong word could result in a rise of attacks against Muslims nationwide. In the face of this perceived Islamophobic threat, CAIR presents itself as the only barrier standing between Muslims and persecution. And what practising Muslim — especially those who have already fled from persecution in other countries — would dare to question that? Even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything CAIR says, you wouldn’t want to undermine the fight against Islamophobia, would you?

This also relates to CAIR’s third sphere of influence: the one that concerns the wider society. The #MeToo movement rose against the backdrop of identity politics and the backlash against the Trump administration. And no organisation has profited more from this than CAIR. In the years since #MeToo reached its peak, CAIR has cynically leveraged identity politics by explicitly styling itself as the defender of minorities. It is, so the thinking goes, the last place that people would expect to find any form of mistreatment of women. And, even if someone did, it would be easy to cry Islamophobia, bigotry, and xenophobia. Any critics would be defamed, dismissed and ignored.

But now, thanks to Saroya’s courageous refusal to be silenced, those spheres of influence have never looked so fragile.

I have never been a vocal supporter of the #MeToo movement. There were too many unsubstantiated allegations, too many reputations destroyed for lapses of taste rather than crimes, too much attention paid to Hollywood when much worse offences were being committed against less privileged women in more obscure places. Women, it should be noted, like those at CAIR.

Of course, CAIR’s lawsuit against Saroya is yet to be concluded; and Saroya’s testimony yet to be countered; so far, the allegations against the organisation and individuals concerned remain exactly that: allegations. But the public fury of women such as Saroya surely marks a turning point for Muslim women in the US. Make no mistake: America’s Muslim #MeToo moment is here.

The progressive world has a long and ignoble history of downplaying sexual misconduct for the sake of “the cause”. One such incident nearly tore the Socialist Workers’ Party apart in 2013, long before #MeToo, when a senior party member was accused of rape.

The female accuser didn’t go to the police, because she believed that the party’s hostility to the thin blue line meant involving them would result in her expulsion from the party. Instead, the SWP handled the matter internally — and she was told the accused was suspended from the party and told him to read up on feminism.

A glance at the track record of prominent male feminists, though, suggests that this may not have helped. Being an outspoken male supporter of gender equality is no shield against accusations of improper behaviour.

Take, for example, former GQ political editor Rupert Myers, who berated men’s rights activists as “cave-dwelling idiots” for denying the existence of “rape culture”. Being a self-styled feminist was no defence against a social media mobbing, though. When allegations circulated online at the height of #MeToo about Myers’s sexual behaviour, prompting a Twitter pile-on, Myers ended up being fired by the magazine.

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Nor is he the only one: other male feminist journalists who faced #MeToo allegations included Sam Kriss and Vice’s Michael Hafford. Even the Ground Zero of #MeToo himself, Harvey Weinstein, complained in 2019 about how the accusations against him have “eviscerated” his pioneering work in gender equality.

This isn’t a purely #MeToo phenomenon either. During the GamerGate controversy of 2014, a number of male journalists spoke out in defence of women — more than 15 of whom have since been accused of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment and rape to consuming child pornography.

My aim here isn’t to re-litigate the rights and wrongs of every alleged misplaced hand, or ill-judged joke, so much as to wonder at this startling volume of “male feminists” at least alleged to be on the pervy side. Surely a commitment to feminism would have the opposite effect. Why, then, so many self-identified male feminists dogged by rumours of sexual misconduct?

Men’s rights activists might argue that in a climate where calls to “believe women” come thick and fast, even the most ambiguous situation can easily be weaponised to destroy a man’s career. Men accused of impropriety have claimed that the real motivation was politics — or simply a bad breakup.

To this the feminists might retort, following Mandy Rice-Davies, that they would say that, wouldn’t they. Everyone wants to believe the best about themselves, something that leads to what social psychology calls “moral licensing”. This concept argues that people justify ethically dodgy behaviour by referring to a past track record of virtue.

For example, one Stanford study showed that people who loudly proclaim anti-racist views are often, in practice, more racist than average. Are men who identify as feminist more prone to sexual misbehaviour because they imagine their political beliefs put them beyond reproach?

A radical feminist might reply, though, that imagining it’s merely self-deception is to misunderstand what feminism is. In this view, since patriarchy arranges men hierarchically over women, it’s impossible by definition for a male to be a feminist. Regardless of a man’s intentions, as long as patriarchy exists he’ll always be an oppressor; he will inevitably end up imposing his own patriarchal presumptions — and sometimes sexual attentions — when they’re not wanted.

But part of the difficulty is precisely in determining where sexual attentions might be wanted. There are, of course, clear-cut and inexcusable cases of rape and sexual assault. But some of the cases above provoked intense controversy precisely because the circumstances of the accusation were highly subject to (inevitably partisan) interpretation.

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And one under-discussed fact that complicates these controversies is that women do not, under every single circumstance, categorically hate men being sexually forward. In ‘BDSM’ circles, for example, numerous studies have shown that women are significantly more likely than men to fantasise about being dominated.

And enjoying male assertiveness isn’t just a kink among the whips-and-chains brigade. One study showed that 93% of women prefer to be asked out, rather than asking. Once in a relationship, too, a lack of male sexual initiative often makes women unhappy. Clinical psychologist Marianne Brandon, for example, describes how frequently female patients express frustration with male sexual partners who have learned that “to show respect to their female partners” they must “avoid at all costs any behaviour in the bedroom that may be regarded as aggressive or dominant”. In other words, male sexual initiative is often quite popular with women.

But not always. The same action might come across as deliciously confident in one context, but repulsively creepy in another. And the sheer volume of #MeToo accusations suggests something has gone very wrong how men and women assess which is which.

The institutional takeaway from #MeToo seems to have been that the solution to such unhappy encounters is more feminism, more consent and more bureaucracy for punishing people who get the context wrong. But if in fact women quite like at least a measure of male sexual initiative, provided it’s in the right context, then we may need not less aggression but better guidelines on context.

And here we face the troubling possibility that all these handsy male feminists weren’t overly forward because they were doing liberal feminism wrong, but because they took its lessons too literally.

For core among these lessons is the idea that men and women are basically the same apart from our dangly bits. As the quintessential liberal pop-feminist (and UN feminist advocate) actress Emma Watson put it: feminism is “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” It is, Watson tells us, “about giving women choice […] It’s about freedom. It’s about liberation. It’s about equality.”

And yet however loudly we bang the drum for equality, there remain some clear and well-documented differences between the sexes. Perhaps, as this UN Women training booklet does, this is a consequence of sexist male socialisation. But a simpler explanation is that humans are, while capable of rationality, also evolved animals — and that this translates to some normative differences in attitude and behaviour. For example, males commit 90% of all sexual assaults, and almost all violent crime.

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Of course, suggesting male aggression (including sexual aggression) may have some basis in evolution isn’t to argue it’s always good. But it is to argue that education is unlikely to get rid of it entirely. And if this is true, the core reason there are so many male feminist sex pests may simply be because they’re male. No amount of feminist “education” will alter this basic fact — even if women wanted to, which (at least according to Dr Marianne Brandon) is by no means universally the case.

If anything, sending a lechy male feminist off to read liberal feminism, like the SWP did, may make matters worse — for doing so will entrench the belief that differences between the sexes are pure social constructs. And a man who’s signed up to this worldview has no reason to imagine his sexual desires differ in any way from those of a woman he finds attractive. We are, he might point out, totally over the sexist stereotypes of women as pure vestal virgins — aren’t we?

This belief that men and women are essentially the same leaves both sexes chronically at risk of misunderstanding human sexuality. A measure of male sexual aggression is neither entirely a social construct nor wholly curable via education. It has a biological substrate. And it’s not even undesirable to women, provided it’s in the right context. But managing it takes a measure of realism, compromise and — sometimes — a willingness to adopt social norms that treat the sexes differently.

This is anathema to the liberal feminist doctrine of sameness, a worldview so committed to ignoring any biological element to sex differences it’s bound to leave men ill-equipped to recognise and restrain their own sexual aggression. And on the other side, this doctrine of sameness leaves women shorn of social strategies for evading that aggression, leading to the (anecdotally common) phenomenon of women consenting to unwanted sex largely out of politeness. And it’s somewhere in this murky territory, I suspect, that many of the most controversial accusations of impropriety occur.

Then both sexes, wounded and perplexed as to what has gone wrong on the battlefield of intimacy, turn to supposedly neutral but in fact highly politicised procedures and pseudo-legal means of redress, in the hope that someone can adjudicate on who was right and who wrong. No one ever stops to wonder if part of the problem is that everyone is working off faulty assumptions.

What is to be done? At least if internet gossip is to be believed, teaching men to be feminists isn’t doing the trick. But contra received opinion, we may not help matters either by trying to demolish sexist stereotypes about male and female sexuality. Instead, if we’re to navigate our differences honestly in the interests of intimacy, we may need a feminist project to resurrect them.

“What is your favourite smell?” Pizza, he says. “What is your guiltiest pleasure?” Peanut butter crunch Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, he says. It’s fluff.

Then, last week, the paper published an extensive and detailed report of sexual harassment allegations against Clarke, based on the testimony of 20 women. Within 24 hours, ITV had pulled the finale of Clarke-starring primetime drama Viewpoint from its schedules. Sky had halted work on all projects with him. Bafta suspended both his membership and the award. Another six women came forward.

Clarke’s career is over, for the foreseeable future at least. A statement in which he expresses himself “deeply sorry” for the way his “actions have affected people” and promises to “[seek] professional help to educate myself and change for the better” suggests that he knows as much.

If Clarke were aware of the investigation when he did the Q&A, that might explain the strangely suspicious, embattled tone of some of his answers. Asked about the trait he most deplores in himself, he says: “I can’t help being a loyal person and I expect that back. When it doesn’t happen, it can upset or anger me.” Asked about the trait he most deplores in others, he says: “The inability to say what they mean.” The last question is: “What is the most important lesson life has taught you?” Clarke replies: “Don’t trust anyone.”

Does he feel let down that women were speaking out against him? If he does, he has no right to. The picture of his behaviour in the Guardian investigation is one of rampant entitlement to and casual degradation of women. But it’s the kind of rampant entitlement and casual degradation that can only happen in an industry which enables it.

Bafta was aware of the allegations when it decided to give him the award, and Clarke may well have considered it a vindication. “As far as we’re concerned,” his business partner told one woman, “the thing has now gone away as much as Noel can do in his power.” Women owed him no silence, but seeing your industry turn away from you after initially appearing to back you must feel like a cruel betrayal.

Because Clarke couldn’t have done all that he’s alleged to have done without, at the very least, a reckless lack of oversight from his collaborators. Some of the allegations against Clarke involve the kind of misconduct that happens between one man and one woman, and can only be made visible when multiple victims tell their story. A lot of them, however, do not: there are claims that Clarke not only sexually harassed women on-set, but that as a producer and director, he ran sets in ways that facilitated the harassment.

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If, as alleged, he hired strippers in preference to professional actors who would have been aware of usual working practices; if he failed to run appropriate “closed sets” when filming nude scenes; if he demanded off-script nudity from female performers and spent time filming pornographic footage that could never be used on-screen; if he did these things (and Clarke denies that he mistreated women on-set), it’s very hard to see how any of this passed under the radar. Some of it must have appeared on budgets.

As is the way of these things, Clarke’s cancellation was savagely efficient when it came. The suspicion is that the savage efficiency marks not just the industry’s authentic horror at the allegations, but also a desire to restrict any reputational damage to one man alone. With Clarke cast out, quarantined with his reported misdeeds, the film and TV business can evade any difficult questions about the abuses it might tolerate.

There’s another betrayal, too — less severe than a filmmaker’s betrayal of the duty of care to women he employs, more sympathetically compelling than the betrayal experienced by a man who can no longer luxuriate in the complacency of his industry. When someone is famous in the way Clarke is, it’s because people like him. Why would anybody give over two seconds’ reading time to his favourite smell or guiltiest pleasure if they didn’t have some personal attachment? Clarke’s alleged behaviour is a betrayal of that attachment.

It’s why the wiping of Clarke’s work from the schedules feels so much less egregious than last week’s other big cancellation — that of author Blake Bailey, whose biography of Philip Roth was pulled from print by publisher WW Norton. That also followed allegations of sexual misconduct, with two women accusing him of rape and several more claiming that he had “groomed” them when they were teenagers and he was their teacher. (Bailey has denied criminality, while conceding: “My behaviour was deplorable.”)

The Bailey allegations are queasy stuff, but they don’t impinge on the book in the same way that the allegations against Clarke impinge on his work. Whether the biography is a faithful, insightful account of Roth’s life or not can be assessed on its own terms: liking Bailey is besides the point, and Norton’s decision smacks of panic and pointlessness.

In fact, wrote Judith Shulevitz (who was initially critical of Bailey’s book), Bailey’s work might be more interesting in light of the allegations: “Reading my suspicions about Bailey into the book now does make it easier to imagine how biographer and subject could have tapped into the worst parts of each other to construct a collective monument to un-self-awareness. And that, in turn, gives me a glimpse of how men collude to deny women reality and reduce them to inviting targets.”

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There’s no such perverse redemption available for Clarke’s work. I thought Clarke’s girly heist film 4. 3. 2. 1. was sexist trash when I saw it on release in 2010 (inside the first three minutes, Clarke contrives a crotch shot of one of the female leads), and am not convinced that revisiting it as a “monument to un-self-awareness” would profit me much. Unlike Bailey, Clarke could use his work to further his abuse — and vice versa — which makes being a viewer a complicity too far.

Clarke was a star, and his kind of stardom is a contract of love. It does not make much material difference to most people if their favourite actor or singer turns out to be a bad person; except it does make a difference, because choosing a favourite is a statement of faith that they are a good person, and more than that, that you are a good person by implication of your taste. It feels like being cheated on to be contradicted.

Clarke was likeable because he was Mickey in Doctor Who — the resolutely ordinary boyfriend of the Doctor’s companion Rose, who eventually redeemed himself. He was likeable because he was a young black British man who established himself as an auteur (it would have been churlish to point out that his vision involved a lot of upskirting). He was likeable because his guiltiest pleasure was ice cream.

What has been suggested now is very much not likeable. Very much not a feelgood story. Some cancelled TV projects and a withdrawn award shouldn’t be the end of this. Perhaps instead of women sadly saying “Me too!” to each other, this time there will be men thinking frantically to themselves: “Me next?”

But as a result of this collective reticence, discussion surrounding this issue has often been isolated to two extremes. On the one hand, it has been dominated by the populist Right. In response to the Cologne sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve 2015-16, for example, German supporters of Alternative für Deutschland rioted and called for mass deportations. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the response of many European liberals and progressives has been that of the three wise monkeys: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

But why should this debate be restricted to these two extremes? Surely good social science requires that rigorous empirical research can be carried out on complex phenomena, particularly when it is controversial and politically sensitive. After all, only then can they be better understood, and public policy measures be appropriately formulated and targeted.

When carrying out research for my new book Prey, I was constantly frustrated by the lack of reliable data on almost every aspect of the problematic relationship between mass migration and sexual violence. Statistics were either a tangle of changing definitions of “sexual assault” or — in the case of a number of countries, including Sweden — they weren’t available at all.

That has now changed thanks to the work of the social scientists Ardavan Khoshnood, Henrik Ohlsson, Jan Sundquist and Kristina Sundquist. In a recent issue of the journal Forensic Sciences Research, they published a paper on “Swedish rape offenders”, in which they analyse the characteristics of individuals between 15-60 years old who were convicted of “rape+” against women in Sweden between 2000 and 2015. The term “rape+” here refers to both acts of rape and attempted rape, including aggravated cases.

The researchers found that, within that time-frame, a total of 3,039 offenders were convicted of rape+ against a woman in Sweden — nearly all of whom (99.7%) were men. According to the researchers, Swedish-born offenders with Swedish-born parents accounted for 40.8% of the offenders. But, strikingly, almost half of the offenders were born outside of Sweden (47.7%). Of those foreign-born offenders, 34.5% were from the Middle East/North Africa, with 19.1% hailing from the rest of Africa. As a percentage of all convicted perpetrators, therefore, 16.4% were foreign-born individuals from the Middle East/North Africa, and 9.1% were foreign-born individuals from Africa (excluding North Africa).

How far does this signify over-representation? On the basis of population records kept by the official agency Statistics Sweden (SCB), approximately 20% (19.7%) of the Swedish population are foreign-born individuals. Among those convicted of rape and perpetrated rape, the foreign-born account for 47.7% of those convicted — so they are over-represented by a factor of 2.4.

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By Ayaan Hirsi-Ali

Moreover, if we piece various statistics together, we find there are 565,902 foreign-born people living in Sweden who were born in North Africa and the Middle East, representing 4.9% of Sweden’s population. Yet 16.4% of those convicted of rape and attempted rape are foreign-born individuals from North Africa and the Middle East: over-representation by a factor of 3.3. And that figure rises to 4.7 when you consider all foreign-born citizens from Africa (excluding North Africa.)

Such statistics must, of course, be handled with care. There are, after all, several risks that need to be weighed up when it comes to such a sensitive and politically fraught subject. The first, and perhaps most obvious, lies in condemning entire groups, with whole categories of persons deemed “guilty” based on the criminal behaviour of a few. I think that is a mistake, ethically and analytically, not least because the overwhelming majority of foreign-born men living in Sweden are not guilty of crimes. It goes without saying that the group as a whole cannot be condemned for the actions of a very small percentage.

The second risk, however, is to take the complete opposite approach; to dismiss the link from migration to sexual violence through excessive relativisation. In Germany, for example, an official report warned that since not all criminal suspects are identified, comparisons between population groups are not possible. The report then noted that non-Germans living in Germany are more likely to be male, poorer, less educated, and more likely to live in urban areas. All of these characteristics, the report’s authors cautioned, are associated or correlated with criminal behaviour in general, making it impossible — these criminologists say — to draw meaningful comparisons about the higher prevalence of non-Germans in criminal cases.

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But such an approach is not only naïve; it also ignores the existence of a wider trend. The Swedish authors themselves state that their conclusions “are in line with previous Swedish studies… [and] are also in line with international studies from, among others, Switzerland, as well as Sweden’s neighbouring countries Norway, Finland and Denmark.”

The documented over-representation across countries, and over an extended period of time, therefore, offers real grounds for concern. To discuss this issue is not to pit “foreign” against “native,” nor to ascribe collective guilt. It is to explore, as carefully as possible, the nature of sexual violence taking place today in order to defend the basic rights of all women in Europe. At the very least, we have to take seriously the possibility that certain divergent norms based on flawed assumptions about women’s sexuality, be they cultural or religious in origin, play a role in these crimes. An over-representation of this magnitude cannot simply be attributed to socio-economic disadvantage, alienation or youthful aggression.

But a third risk of analysing sexual assault must also be mentioned: the difficulty of examining it from a criminological point of view. Some will caution that the figures in the Swedish study pertain only to individuals who were convicted — and therefore ignore the many cases of rape that are not reported to police to begin with, or those where there is insufficient evidence to establish, in a court of law, whether a suspect is guilty.

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Could it be that foreign-born individuals in Sweden are singled out for prosecutions of rape and attempted rape by authorities? Or could it be that victims of rape and attempted rape in Sweden disproportionately report crimes in which the perpetrators are foreign-born? Thus far, the jury is out — though I have found no persuasive evidence to substantiate either of these hypotheses.

Whatever truth, one thing we do know is that European statistics on the characteristics of sexual offenders currently form a complex, disparate set of data; they are often difficult to locate, sometimes shrouded in secrecy. Data on perpetrators are especially few and far between. And that can be dangerous. For where information is inaccessible or obscure, the most outlandish theories can flourish in the darker corners of the internet, where the constraints of responsible editing, much less peer review, are non-existent.

The authors of this Swedish study have therefore performed a valuable service in shining a light on an excruciatingly painful topic. We can only hope that it serves as a model to researchers in other European countries, so that more effective measures can be developed to safeguard the rights of all women, foreign-born and native alike. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” is not a legitimate policy response to a wave of criminality that has ruined or marred the lives of tens of thousands of people.

I have walked the streets of London and Liverpool on my own for the past 20 years, at all times of night, rarely giving it a second thought. So reading women’s accounts of their everyday experiences, and talking to the women in my life about theirs, is a glimpse into an alien world. I am left with the terrible, bleak feeling that it will be impossible to ever make women feel adequately safe.

There is a kind of stereotyped masculine response to these female fears. That is: they are irrational. Murder, especially the murder of women, and especially the random murder of women by strangers in the street, is vanishingly rare. You are far more likely to be hit by a car on your walk home. So if you worry about it, goes this response, you are wrong.

This response is not exactly wrong, but it misses the point by a distance. It’s absolutely true that murder is rare in the UK; you are less likely, as a citizen of the UK in 2021, to be murdered than almost any other human in history. The Crime Survey for England and Wales puts the UK’s homicide rate at about 1.1 per 100,000. For comparison, according to the UN, the USA has something like 5 per 100,000; Brazil, about 27.

In the UK, and many other countries, the number of murders per year has been dropping since at least 1990. Going further back, there was a surge in the later years of the 20th century, but on a longer timescale the trend is clear: you were many, many times more likely to be murdered for most of human history than you are now in the UK, or in most other countries.

To carry on in the same stereotyped vein, if you are a woman, you are even less likely to be murdered. Of the 695 people murdered in England and Wales in the year to March 2020, 506 of them were men. And for the specific issue of murders on the street, by strangers — the fear we’re dealing with — the disparity is greater still: 154 men were murdered by strangers, and just 23 women. 

All this is true. But that doesn’t mean that the streets feel safe for women.

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By Tom Chivers

For one thing, it’s not just getting murdered that women fear. They fear getting abducted. They fear being raped. They are made by men to feel uncomfortable. Men yell things out of cars at women as they drive past, or follow them as they walk home, shouting out to them. One woman I know finished a half marathon as a bunch of men at the finish line loudly rated the attractiveness of the runners (“would, wouldn’t.”) 

I’m a bit sceptical of surveys like the recent one which found that 97% of young women have been sexually harassed, because the definition of “sexually harassed” varies, and I’d say some of the things they include in their data are borderline. But I bet that most women have some stories like the ones above. 

It’s mercifully true that almost none of those cases will escalate into murder, and few into actual violence. But, equally, I don’t think it’s irrational to be unnerved, in a world where these things happen reasonably regularly, and so to avoid being out alone after dark. 

If men being threatening is the main driver of women feeling unsafe, you might think that we have a clear way to move forward. Simply get men to stop being threatening, and women will feel safe. But I worry that will fail, on two grounds. One, I don’t think it’s possible, and two, even if it were, I don’t think it would work.

The first trouble is that we bump up against the law of large numbers. Imagine that the average woman walks past 200 men in a day. I expect working women in large cities see much more than that, in non-pandemic times, but others who are at home or who live in small communities see far fewer, so perhaps that number’s about right. In a year, that’s 73,000 encounters; in a decade, 730,000. Even if only a tiny fraction of men are dangerous or threatening, women will occasionally encounter them. 

Forget “not all men”: even if it’s “almost zero men”, there are enough to make women feel threatened. And it’s probably not almost zero men; it’s probably some relatively small but non-trivial fraction of them. (Or, even worse, a larger fraction of men, but only some of the time, for instance when drunk.) How many incidents per decade would it take to make you anxious? One? Two? 

There’s more than just this going on though. We’re also battling against human psychology.

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In the US and UK, crime has been falling consistently for 30 years. In America, there are something like half as many violent crimes per person per year, and about half as many property crimes, as there were in the early 1990s. In the UK, the crime rate has fallen to something like a quarter of its 1996 peak.

But in both the USA and UK, most people believe that crime is increasing. The percentage who think so has dropped in the UK over the last 10 years, but still, nearly two-thirds of adults think that crime is more common now than it was a few years ago. Almost 80% of US adults think there is more crime now than a year ago. People’s perception of the risk of crime is only very loosely tied to the actual risk of crime in their country. Bringing it down — making people safer — will probably only have a relatively small effect on how safe people feel.

What’s more, while it is true that things like traffic accidents are much more common, humans are much more likely to be scared of dramatic, rare risks than common ones: “They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former,” wrote the security expert Bruce Schneier back in 2006. 

Schneier also points out that personified danger, dangers with identifiable victims, is far scarier than anonymous, statistical risks. 10,000 faceless people dying of diabetes will never get to us in the way that a single named child ill with bone cancer will. If there’s a human agent behind the risk, that’s even worse. And risks that we don’t choose, risks that are beyond our control, are scarier than those we choose. High-profile murders by strangers meet all of these criteria. They are almost designed to scare us. 

And we will always keep hearing about them, once again because of the law of large numbers. There are about 70 million people in the UK. If we get the risk of murder down to an unrealistically low one-in-70-million per year, we will still hear about them once a year, because they will make the news. The news will never dedicate 100 times as much coverage to diabetes deaths as they do to street murders, because that’s just not how the media works or, really, ever could work. A newspaper headline of “100,000 aircraft landed safely yesterday” would not sell many copies.

More than that, women tend to be more risk-averse than men. I want to be really clear about something: this is not “irrational”. There’s no optimal level of risk aversion, no correct amount to be worried. But it is an empirical fact that although men are more likely to be victims of crime and violence, they are less likely to be worried about it. 

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That makes sense. Even if I do get jumped in Finsbury Park as I walk home some night, there’s some deluded bit of me that thinks I could fight, or at least run. I would feel like I have some control, and risks we think (rightly or wrongly) that we can control are less scary. Most women do not have that feeling. It is hardly surprising that the world is scarier for women.

Plus, we’re diurnal animals. The night is frightening for us, and has been since before we evolved from our common ancestor with chimps. You don’t have to go all evolutionary psychology to think that being alone on a dark street is going to be scary for humans, whatever the real risks are.

Women also differ widely in their responses to things. There is a great essay by Scott Alexander, called “Different Worlds”, talking about how the same situation will be perceived entirely differently by different people. We all have different levels of threat-perception, and almost all signals we receive from the world are ambiguous. Some people will read some behaviour as dangerous, some as benign.

I read this story, about a woman’s reaction to unwanted attention on a train, and it felt threatening and unpleasant. But perhaps some other women might think it was harmless flirting. And the survey into sexual harassment I mentioned above included “being stared at” as sexual harassment, but I remember some female friends, when they were single, telling each other about that guy at the bar “checking you out”. The line between flirty “checking out” and harassment-level “being stared at” will be different for different women. Which is entirely normal and unavoidable. But it does mean that some women will be much more likely to feel threatened than others. Which will in turn mean that it will be harder to reach a point where all, or enough, women feel safe.

What can be done? Certainly men could be more aware of behaviour that might seem threatening. And doing whatever we can to reduce the level of crime, improving rape conviction rates, reducing workplace harassment and stigmatising the sort of creepy behaviour I talked about above — those things are good in their own right, and probably will have some effect on how safe women feel. I’ve seen women suggesting curfews for men — I’m not sure how seriously — and no doubt that would lower the incidence of attacks, although it’s not really proportional or realistic; it would involve punishing an awful lot of innocent men for the actions of a terrible minority. As would restricting alcohol sales, given that at least half of attackers in violent crime are under the influence.

Fundamentally, we are fighting too many things — especially the law of large numbers, a sensationalist media, and human psychology — for it to be realistic that women will ever feel safe enough. Men will never understand how women feel; but even worse, we may never be able to entirely change it.

Is this about a senior male politician’s power over the women beneath him in party and government? Did his heir as FM and SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, act with honest feminist intentions throughout her involvement in the case? Or is this a situation whereby a former protegee saw her chance to neutralise her predecessor and gracelessly jumped on it, making a hash of justice in the process?

A key part of Salmond’s defence was the invocation of a plot intended to bring him down. His QC was overheard on a train saying that he intended to “put a smell” on the accusers, and whether or not that was the strategy that secured Salmond’s acquittal, it was a strategy that worked: “he is not guilty” does not equate to “she lied”, but Salmond’s fans on social media have no compunction about drawing that conclusion and stating it in the most misogynistic terms.

On the other hand, if Salmond’s defenders are just a clique falling in line behind old privilege, what to make of the involvement of someone such as Joanna Cherry, who has been an outspoken defender of feminism on the gender identity issue? Here, though, she takes the part of the accused man over the women who accused him.

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Confessions of a female journalist

By Sarah Ditum

Those accusations may have failed to meet the burden of proof for criminal conviction, but they added up to a coherent and consistent picture of at the very least inappropriate behaviour. As Dani Garavelli, who covered the whole trial, wrote: “much of the evidence was He said, She said. Or rather He said, She said, She said, She said.” And if Salmond thinks he was failed by the system, his accusers have been too, and badly. One of the worst allegations to come out of the Holyrood inquiry is that one accuser was identified to Salmond’s allies.

There’s something deeply unsatisfying about a set of circumstances that refuses to be reduced to easily identifiable heroes and villains. How you read this tangle depends to a large degree on where you’re aligned on the SNP’s internal split between Salmond and Sturgeon. So if you don’t have an alignment, the whole matter appears hopelessly opaque — and since most people aren’t SNP members at all, the temptation to dismiss this as an impenetrable party dispute of no wider significance is great.

Great, and wrong. This was not Scotland’s #MeToo moment, but maybe it was a lesson in the limits of justice. The Salmond case left a scratchy, inconclusive feeling. He was not guilty, but nor was his reputation wholly vindicated. For his alleged victims, there was no restitution, despite the uncontested fact that Salmond had crossed several lines, albeit not lawbreaking ones.

The repercussions reach far wider than the courtroom. For women who recognised their own experience in the testimony — the boss who keeps you for a drink, who strokes your face, who slithers his hands beneath your clothes — the trial served as a warning against ever seeking redress. Garavelli noted that Salmond’s QC’s closing submission “appeared to play to male fears about past behaviour. How did things that people thought nothing of later find themselves on a charge sheet, he wondered. ‘It’s scary, scary stuff.’ A couple of jurors nodded along.”

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But even without this, most victims of sexual assault already know that the courtroom will be a hostile environment. In the service of getting to the truth, their reputations will be attacked, their motivations impugned, their accounts of their own lives recast as fiction by the defence. Their private messages picked over, humiliatingly, for any one thing that could be used to undermine them with a jury.

The law is an especially cruel instrument for assessing sexual crime, because a rape conviction requires the jury to agree not only that a man penetrated (or attempted to penetrate her) against her will, but that he could not have “reasonably believed” that she consented.

Internal institutional processes — HR departments, political parties’ own investigations — don’t have to meet the high bar of criminal proceedings, but they still have to be robust and independent to be effective. Instead, formal responses to #MeToo have been piecemeal and erratic. That’s most obviously been bad for those men who’ve had the misfortune to take the brunt of wild justice in the pushback against sexual harassment.

But while it’s impossible not to feel pangs for men such as Mark Tunison, whose career was torpedoed by his inclusion on the “Shitty Media Men” list, due process isn’t something that’s only owed to alleged perpetrators. Women like Salmond’s accusers who seek justice for past wrongs and security against future ones can achieve neither without a system that can deliver solid judgements and stand up to scrutiny.

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By Henry Hill

Long before the Salmond case could come to court, the kinds of grey-area-blurring things that he accepted he had done should have been dealt with by the SNP and Holyrood. A concerning admission from Sturgeon’s evidence to the Salmond inquiry is that as long ago as 2017, she had a “lingering fear” that allegations about his conduct would be made public.

And so, while I can see the irony in (as Sonia Sodha put it in the Observer) “a woman being held to account for a man’s transgressions”, this is about power not sex. If the processes of the party Sturgeon ran and the government she led weren’t fit for purpose, the buck would have to stop with her.

Salmond’s QC’s closing argument landed with the jurors because he had a half-point: #MeToo has forced a reassessment of actions once accepted. That does not mean that women are retconning cheerful-at-the-time sexual experiences as acts of violence. It means that they are, in many cases, refusing to go on telling the lie that something was OK when it was always wrong. It means that the encounter which hurt and degraded you is no longer something you bury in shame and self-reproach. Instead, you can look at it and say: I never wanted this, and this was never fair.

That’s a cultural shift, and a significant one for individual women. But it’s only half a reformation. The other half is the hard bit: ensuring the legal, judicial and tribunal processes can truly handle allegations of sexual misconduct. And there are a lot of these to get through: almost all young women, and 80% of all women, say they’ve experienced sexual harassment. The Salmond inquiry will tend, inevitably, to become about the question of whether or not he was a victim of machinations. But whatever that conclusion, the women who accused him are already victims of a broken system.

All of this is to say, a Joe Biden administration will be a marked improvement on the politics of the past four years precisely because it’ll be a return to business as usual — and because the 78-year-old Biden’s extra-long tenure in public life makes him an especially predictable president, even before he’s signed a single bill into law. Whatever he might do in office, he will certainly not surprise us! Indeed, he hasn’t yet: from his campaign promises to the scandal that briefly threatened to sink his candidacy back in the spring of 2020, the twists and turns of Biden’s path to the White House could be seen coming a mile off.

We know, too, all the ways in which a Biden presidency will be a negative — and they’re worth taking note of, before we’re put to sleep by the blissfully boring politics. For there is at least one policy issue on which Biden might well be worse, not better, than Trump —it’s precisely because Biden has long styled himself as a champion for women that we know how lacking his feminist credentials truly are.

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Back in the 1990s, Biden was a tough-on-crime Democrat and a leading proponent of the legislation that would eventually become the Violence Against Women Act. His statements and positions then followed what would become a familiar pattern: what women needed was not liberation, but protection. Not rights or respect, but rules and regulations — for their own good, of course. And if one of these damsels in distress rejected the state’s attempts to save her? Well, then she was part of the problem.

Biden was an early advocate of no-drop prosecutions and mandatory arrests in domestic violence cases — policies that punish female victims who don’t go along with the state’s preferences vis-a-vis how to resolve such conflicts. That a woman might have good reasons for not wanting her partner arrested, or not wanting to be mired in the criminal justice system herself, was immaterial: those who refused to testify in domestic violence cases against their partners were subject to arrest or imprisonment. Sometimes, their children were, too.

Long after data had emerged to suggest that mandatory arrest policies made America’s domestic violence problem worse, not better — and that they diminished battered women’s trust in the system supposedly designed to help them — Biden continued to push them as a solution. When the Violence Against Women Act was signed into law in 1994, it cemented the role of the state as saviour — and the notion of women as too hapless and helpless to act in their own best interests.

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Biden is proud of this legislation; he’s touted it repeatedly as an indicator of how good his presidency would be for women, how long he’s been fighting on their behalf. Of course, under the circumstances, it made for a persuasive contrast: who wouldn’t prefer a president who protects women over Mr. Grab-em-by-the-pussy? You could almost overlook the fact that Biden’s care for women seemed to always take the form of chivalrous head-patting, that it was insulting in its own way. As Barack Obama’s Vice President, Biden toured colleges around the country to promote the administration’s commitment to combatting campus assault. His vision of female empowerment always had a funny way of sounding a lot like benevolent sexism: “The greatest sin is the abuse of power,” he would tell the assembled crowds of students. “And the cardinal sin of them all is for a man to raise his hand to a woman.”

In practice, the result of all this state-sanctioned white-knighting is not the woman-saving panacea it claims to be. Since the passage of VAWA, countless victims have ended up unwittingly ensnared in the criminal justice system when they didn’t agree with the state’s desire to prosecute. And on campus, third-party reporting mandates mean that women are labelled victims whether they agree or not, forced to have their sex lives dissected by Title IX tribunals who are highly motivated to expel alleged offenders lest they lose federal funding. (One exasperated accuser told authorities, “I’m fine and wasn’t raped”; administrators disagreed, and expelled her boyfriend anyway.)

This morally panicked approach to campus sexual assault has made a mockery of both due process and women’s agency; the Obama-era strategy, with its focus on continual consent-seeking at every stage of intimacy, seem founded in the rather Victorian conviction that no woman ever really wants to have sex at all. And with Biden vowing to reinstate these policies — the rolling-back of which might have been the one good thing to come out of a Trump administration — women can expect more unwanted, “for your own good” intrusions into their private lives over the next four years.

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All of this is complicated by Biden’s own woman problem, which once presented the greatest threat to his chances to occupy the White House. In March 2019, a report surfaced of the former Vice President’s extensive history of cheek-smooching, hair-sniffing, and other instances of inappropriate touching, calling into question whether he was really the right man to represent a Democratic Party trying to position itself as the anti-Trump. A year later, this same history worked against him when Tara Reade alleged that he had assaulted her while she was working in his office as a Senate aide.

On both occasions, it was Biden’s huggy paternalism that opened him up to controversy; but it was also this — that special brand of intimacy with a whiff of protective condescension — that ultimately saved him. In a world primed to conflate “inappropriate touching” with “sexual misconduct”, Biden’s behaviour was odd, but also oddly sexless, in a way that made it difficult to pinpoint as a violation. And while his accusers were all woman, he himself did not discriminate on the basis of sex; Biden would bestow a grandfatherly hug and forehead-kiss on anyone, of any persuasion, who he perceived as vulnerable and in need of comfort. Inappropriate? Come on, man! It’s a public service!

Between the raunchy anti-feminism of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement that positioned sexual misconduct as the only misconduct that matters, it is hard to make the argument that our next president will be bad for women — and indeed, this is not that argument. But Joe Biden’s brand of feminism ultimately does not do enough to grapple with the radical notion that women are people, with all the agency and complexity that this implies. Instead, his administration seems poised to continue protecting women, rather than respecting them, and failing to recognise that these two things are not always one and the same. Is he bad? No. Worse than Trump? Not by a long shot. But when it comes to women, his presidency should serve mostly as a reminder that we could, someday, do better.