Things will get back to normal on here soon. Honest. I’d much rather be talking about new books and fabulous slams, or even about how I got laid recently… but the real world keeps intervening. The woman-hating-shitface dectector keeps going off.
I’m not an American so I can’t vote in their Presidential elections. I’ve been thinking for a year or two that I no longer have very much of a desire to pay the US a visit at all, what with all the state-backed misogyny, but it’s ratcheted up to terrifying levels lately. Now they’ve got a potential Prez who is not only a tax-dodging, bill-non-paying, probably coke-addled racist, but who also boasts about his track record of sexual assault.
It might have been… I’m not entirely sure ‘interesting’ is the right word, but probably in keeping with the gibbering insanity of his campaign, if he’d tried to wriggle out of his latest clusterfuck by announcing that it was porn that made him behave like that. He might even throw that idea up as a way of winning back some of the religious-right backers who are now running away from him.
Given that many of them are shitting their pants not over the little matter of sexual assault but over the use of a naughty word, it might even work. But some of his fans are ready for that one. They are blaming 50 Shades of Grey. All these stupid women loved 50 Shades and fancied Christian Grey (maybe, perhaps, because not only was he an actual non-bankrupt billionaire, but also because he didn’t look like an orange scrotum with a hamster on top) therefore what the fuck are they whining about?
This deliberate confusion between naughty words and actual assault is nothing new, of course. It’s another twist on the old idea that a woman who is ‘loose’ or ‘unchaste’ has no right to refuse any kind of sexual activity. Because not much threatens the inadequate man more than the idea of women actually having a choice in who – or what – they find desirable and pleasing, and asserting their right to act on those choices.