If his critics are right, and if
gradation and shades of grey either do not or should not exist, then I have the
same right as a victim of a brutal gang rape to be outraged by comments made by
Stephen Fry in an interview with US chat show host David Rubin. The same right?
No, the same obligation. If his critics are right, I should by now be writhing,
crippled by anger. I should have been hurt; I should have been triggered.
For, if his critics are right,
rape is rape and abuse is abuse and not only are there no questions left to be
asked or answered but anyone stupid, anyone insensitive
enough to doubt that inherent truth is a monster; a relic of a less progressive
age; a hideous ogre.
So I should be triggered. I should be. We are all supposed to read from
the same Newspeak dictionary, that wonderful thing that frees us from the pain
of difficult thoughts by depriving us of the language used to express them.
I have been abused; the victim, I
bellyfeel, of sexcrime; and damn the blackwhiters
and crimethinkers who duckspeak otherwise.
It – this abuse - has happened on
no less than four occasions. Sex whilst one party is inebriated, intoxicated
and incapable of giving proper consent, is rape, is it not? That, the exploitation
of my own past-penchant for illegal and mind-altering substances, accounts for
three of the four; three ‘days-after’ spent regretting to my core that I was
too fucked to say no.
The fourth occurred long before.
It would be more accurate to call it the first. I was twelve or thirteen,
perhaps fourteen, and visiting my uncle in his care home. It was his birthday;
we took him a cake and balloons (of which he was once terrified; the chance of
bangs and loud noises triggers those
occupying his place on the spectrum but he grew up and away from that fear). We
were to spend time celebrating with him and his carers and his fellow
residents.
Whilst most went into the
kitchen, to cut the cake with deliberately blunted knives, I stayed in another
room with two of those fellow residents. One was a woman rocking quietly and
with earnest intent in the corner. I don’t mind saying that I found her
disconcerting; I did. And the other was a man, huge and black. Not fat, just
huge. And I found him endearing by comparison. He looked kind and friendly,
smiling absent-mindedly as he turned some toy over in his hands.
I was about to leave the room and
find the others when that man stood up. I assumed he’d had the same idea and I
waited for him to leave first.
Except that he wasn’t leaving,
was he. No, he was walking over to me and, pressed up against the wall by his
bulk, I felt one large hand, warm and calloused, find its way inside the
waistband of my trousers.
It didn’t last long; the hand was
hurriedly withdrawn when the rocking woman screeched from the corner. “No! What have we told you about touching!”
And I left the room, nonplussed
and a little breathless but otherwise unaffected. I’ve never forgotten the
experience and I’d never want to. Looking back, and thankful to that rocking
woman who had so alarmed me, I think it is probably the first time the old
adage about appearances was made real to me. They can be deceiving. The value
of that experience vastly overmatches the occasional chill I get from the
memory of it.
I have a vivid imagination. I
could ponder here, in writing, what might have happened had the rocking woman
not been there. I could speculate as to what might have occurred had I
encountered that man not in a care home with my family but in an empty house or
a secluded alleyway. It would have been unpleasant. Dare I say worse?
No, I dare not say worse, because that would imply that
there are different forms of abuse or severities of rape. And that would be inconceivable,
unconscionable in this enlightened day and this progressive age where we are
all survivors; where there is no acknowledgeable
qualitative difference between an unwanted hand on your cock and a rape at the
hands of Jimmy Savile or an entire Somali militia.
It is as if we now live in a
culture dedicated to the propagation of trauma. Whereas once we would have
looked for ways to overcome what has happened to us, we are now encouraged to
feel it as keenly as we can and for as long as we can; to let it define us; to
adopt it as an integral part of our identity. We are encouraged to free
associate with feeling and to expand our own to encompass the pain and sadness
of others.
I say that what happened to me was
bad but that it does not begin to compare with what has happened to others. But
this new movement would have me say that it does
compare, moreover that is the same
and so I should feel worse about it.
When there is no gradation, when we do not consider relativity in these matters
or discriminate between cases, we are forced to elevate the banal and the
moderate in order that we not exclude the extreme from this single, unified
standard we now operate by. It is all a case, as Fry decries, of black and
white, Good and Evil, with all moral nuance dispensed with.
I don’t doubt that this movement,
and related cases like #Rhodesmustfall which encourages black students to
inherit offences against their ancestors, is sincere in its belief that such
conflations are in our best interests and that they serve the common good. It
takes a sincere belief in good to breed the most sinister and harmful thoughts
and ideologies. As Voltaire is thought to have said “l
meglio รจ l'inimico del bene;” They make the best the
enemy of the good.
But to understand that is to
understand the need to fight against it, to know that the sacrifice of nuance
and of good sense and intellectual rigour contributes only to the conflagration
of the crimes these movements rail against. Seldom is it a commitment to harm
and to evil that drives authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent; they do it
because they know that they are right and the dissenters just don’t get it!
But which of the two most
resembles the Ogre? It is not Stephen Fry, who argues against the
trivialisation of rape that his opponents accuse him of and is undoubtedly
better equipped than they of the moral arsenal needed to condemn it. No, the
Ogres are the reactionary forces that believe that they are right regardless of
their ability to justify it, and who prefer to fall for the easy temptation of
censorship than take the difficult path to enlightenment.
As Auden said:
“The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.
About a subjugated plane,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While
drivel gushes from his lips.”
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