Rape at the orgy

The trial-by-media of Russell Brand shows us that consent becomes an unreliable metric when you are living in a debauched, porn-soaked word.

If you have eyeballs you probably came across the exposé of British comedian-turned media critic Russell Brand this week. The hirsute former A-lister is the subject of serious sexual assault accusations in a story put out by the Sunday Times and Channel 4 documentary programme Dispatches.

We have two issues here: first, the media and government reaction; and second, the accusations themselves and what they tell us about our culture — in particular, sexual culture. 

I do not trust documentaries, and I especially do not trust this documentary. Whether or not you like Russell Brand, it is remarkable how he shifted from the low-brow mainstream — with a  persona was that reminiscent of an out-of-control toddler, prancing around in his underpants — to alt-media guru, delivering highly effective takedowns of mainstream media hypocrisies and lies. The media’s fake crusades are what gave Brand the power and popularity he has now, so it’s not accidental that they have begun their own crusade against him. For the last several years, he’s been over the target: charmingly and amusingly articulating the media-government-corporate corruption we are all now living in. 

The Sunday Times graphic made Brand look suitably demonic.

When I read the story in the Sunday Times last weekend, the sidebar to the main article was a narcissistic and unnecessary video in which the female journalists use the term “misinformation” — that means ‘information I don’t agree with’ —  and are filmed shuffling papers around with serious looks on their faces. One of my pet peeves is when journalists actively bring attention to themselves as brave warriors for truth. And the video fails to answer the most important question in this story: why is it important? Why, other than the prurient interest about a famous person’s sex life, should we care? Was he taking money from the Chinese Communist Party, or a gas company in Ukraine? Was he holding political office and profiting from it?

Also, no one should be engaging with the Brand story without keeping at the forefront of their mind that “abuse” is now a convenient excuse for government to take away your basic and fundamentally necessary freedoms. We see this time and time again, as I wrote about in my last Substack about hate speech law in Ireland. And exactly on cue, YouTube demonetised Brand’s very popular channel; and the British government asked a rival video platform, Rumble, if it “intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand's ability to earn money on the platform.”

This is a huge, glaring, red flag. We all should be able to see how dangerous this is — whether Brand is guilty or not. 

I have no idea if the accusations about Brand are crimes that deserve law enforcement and/or societal punishment. But they do make clear to me, yet again, how incapable the mainstream conversation is of processing big stories like this without resorting to muddled thinking, hypocrisy and cliches.

Sexual assaults are so common. I’ve had my physical boundaries transgressed by men AND women. I know men who have been raped by men who were strangers, and been put in deeply inappropriate sexual situations by predatory women. But we are never presented with a wide variety of experiences when it comes to unwanted sexual attention.  It’s always a doe-eyed innocent female being aggressed by a hairy, scary beast. This storyline has become so overused that it’s starting to look like a fetish. I find it deeply disturbing, in part because the sharing of the details is prurient and voyeuristic, like it’s feeding the public’s lust for terrible sex stories. Understanding and wisdom are never, ever, achieved. 

And so it was with the Russell Brand documentary, which I forced myself to watch. There is a lot of damning stuff in there. I had never seen any of his stand-up, and never paid much attention to him when he was at the height of fame. What the documentary makers chose to show of his past work was gross and, yes, offensive. The lengthy catalogue they compiled of his awful remarks about women, like fantasising live on air about a female news reader on one of his radio shows, was absolutely appalling. It should have resulted in him getting a swift kick in the balls — if not physically, then at least administratively. 

For context, I found the #MeToo movement to be a repellent exercise in elite score-settling, not a brave fight against the patriarchy. It was so full of hypocrisies and blind spots that I think it actively harmed real victims of sexual violence. So I admit I had #MeToo inspired skepticism about Brand’s accusers, but I could not entirely dismiss the case they build against him.

An accuser given the fake name of Phoebe had the most damning story. Another woman, who was still a teenager when she had a relationship with Brand, claims he spit in her mouth and held her mouth closed as she struggled to stop him, before being forced to to swallow his drool. That’s the stuff of nightmares. 

But here’s my biggest problem with this practice of exposing the disgusting sexual behaviour of famous men: how is it possible that in 2023 we are still collectively pretending to be shocked that rich and famous men take advantage of their status, in ugly ways, and how come we never hear from the women who play that game right alongside them? This has been happening for literally all of human history. Yet it’s reported as big news, with a tone of ‘oh my goodness, who could believe it? Who knew that the clearly unwell man who talks non-stop in really gross ways about sex is a gross sex partner?’

I am bored, totally bored, by this continual return to the victimised ingenue story line. It always serves someone’s interest other than the alleged victims’, and in this case, that’s the interests of the journalists who want to be viewed as heroes for taking him down. 

Conservatives and feminists, each in their own ways, showed their blind spots in response to the Brand story. Feminists immediately lionised the accusers — whose identities are not known — and many conservatives were all too quick to defend him. Disconcertingly, at least one went so far as to brand the accusers harlots. This shows once again that conservatives have a bad habit of forgetting that there has never been a time of society-wide sexual innocence, not really. Just as feminists pretend women are never victimisers, never manipulate, never rewrite history, or seduce to advance themselves, conservatives pretend that before feminism came along women were pure.

If these terrible behaviours existed even when the penalties were harsh for stepping outside the bounds of oppressive sexual norms, how much worse is it today, when interactions have become shaped by porn, and most of mainstream media celebrates extreme promiscuity?

What I euphemistically refer to as advanced sexual practices — anal, group sex, BDSM — are now considered appropriate material for high schoolers. How come the same liberals who think that teens can change gender, or declare themselves pansexual, or have access to porn in schools, are suddenly helpless babies when in a relationship with an older celebrity? Which one is it? How is it possible that young women have grown up in the most sexually explicit society in the history of mankind, and yet they can still be degraded by sex? The clear implication is that a sexually permissive society is harmful to women — yet liberals cannot admit this because it further implies that we should return to restrictions on sexuality. What a quandary. 

In a natural state, most people’s tastes do not gravitate toward the extreme or advanced sexual behaviours. My opinion is that they develop with input from external conditions or experiences. 

However, we now live in a culture that insists that all sex acts are acceptable and great. Sex is simply a physical act the purpose of which is to achieve a pleasant physical sensation. This erroneous idea is reinforced by the media. The same media that insists those acts are problematic when being done by a person they want to destroy. Any other time, they are celebrated as empowerment, even if deep down inside we all have a moral compass that tells us we should avoid such behaviours. 

Call me a boring square, but I consider spitting into someone’s mouth to be entirely disgusting and should never be done. But apparently, “spit play” has become normalised. And this is a problem: how are two people, hooking up without knowing the other particularly well, and without the rigid guardrails of sexual norms that used to keep us all more or less in the same lane, supposed to navigate this world of infinite sexual variety? The allegations against Brand were from women who had consensual relations with him, but also had normal, standard, sexual expectations and then encountered a hugely deviant, insensitive and rather maniacal freak. Like 150 pound white collar boxers, who stepped in to the ring with Mike Tyson and then were surprised they got their ass beat. Consent becomes an unreliable metric when you are living in an utterly debauched, porn-soaked word. And do not let anyone, even the most sympathetic victim, convince you that this a problem the government can solve with more laws. 

Neither our sexual hypocrisies, nor sexual danger went away when we abandoned traditional morality. This is a very disappointing fact that all sexual liberals must contend with, if they are going to claim any intellectual honesty at all.

In the meantime, the powers-that-be in society will continue to use sex scandals (true or not, it doesn’t matter) to bring down their adversaries.