Russell Brand has today been found guilty of rape and three counts of sexual assault.
While I’m delighted to see him finally being held accountable and I hope they throw the Booky Wook at him, there’s something profoundly depressing about the fact that it’s taken this long. For decades, he was free to build his career, enjoy his fame and fortune, and carry on with his life while the women he assaulted were left to live with what he’d done.
And perhaps the most infuriating thing is that not one person alive is surprised. Brand’s attitude towards women was hardly a secret – he boasted about it in his own book ffs – and for years his outrageous behaviour was treated as part of his charm, much like his utterly insufferable predilection for unnecessarily elaborate and self-indulgent displays of linguistic grandiloquence.
But he was hardly alone. The 90s and 2000s were spent creating a culture in which men like Brand were celebrated, women were routinely humiliated, and sexual harassment was just another form of entertainment.
It’s got me thinking about what an absolutely fucking dreadful time the 90s and 2000s were to be a woman.
We look back at those decades with our rose-tinted glasses, remembering the music, the fashion, the terrible eyebrows and the days before social media ruined, well, absolutely everything.
But my god, some of the things we accepted as normal were horrific.
Sexual harassment was flirting, being catcalled was a compliment, and misogyny was comedy. Men who behaved like absolute pigs were celebrated as cheeky, lovable rogues, particularly if they were rich, famous or sufficiently charismatic. And if women dared to complain, we were humourless, frigid, hysterical bitches who couldn’t take a joke.
Remember lads’ mags? FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, with their endless pictures of practically naked women, rankings of the sexiest celebrities and articles that treated women as little more than a collection of body parts. Page 3 was still a perfectly normal feature of one of Britain’s bestselling newspapers. Objectifying women wasn’t some shameful little hobby, it was mainstream entertainment.
Meanwhile, women’s magazines were largely devoted to telling us how to lose weight, look better in our clothes, perform increasingly elaborate sexual gymnastics to keep our men happy and disguise the horrifying fact that we possessed pores. Men’s magazines told them they deserved beautiful women. Women’s magazines told us how to become beautiful enough to deserve men. What a marvellous system.
And the really depressing thing is that we bought them. With our own money. We paid actual cash for the privilege of being told we were fat, inadequate and doing sex wrong.
The media treated famous women terribly.
Britney Spears was interrogated about her virginity on national television, and when she struggled with her mental health, the world treated it like a spectator sport. Charlotte Church was just 15 when websites started counting down the days until she turned 16 and became ‘legal’. The Sun publicised the countdown, and Chris Moyles discussed it on BBC Radio 1, announcing that he’d like to take her virginity.
I struggled with it then, and I find it horrific today: A grown man, on national radio, talking about having sex with a child. And apparently this was entertainment and it didn’t affect his career for a second.
Heat magazine had a feature called the ‘Circle of Shame‘, where photographs of celebrities were scrutinised for cellulite, stretch marks, wrinkles and other disgusting physical abnormalities, eg having skin. Imagine being so beautiful that you’re internationally famous for it, only to have some bloke with a red marker pen declare your knees unacceptable.
And the rest of us were supposed to absorb this information and somehow develop a healthy relationship with our bodies. No wonder half my generation spent their twenties thinking a size 12 was practically a medical emergency. Thank fuck for perimenopause (not something I often say) and the not giving a fuck which comes with it. Very freeing.
And while I’m on one, remember American Pie?
One of the biggest comedy films of the era featured a teenage boy secretly filming a girl undressing and broadcasting it over the internet without her knowledge or consent. The girl gets sent home in disgrace, while the boy suffers little more than some embarrassment.
HAHAHA, WHAT A HOOT.
Nothing says light-hearted teenage comedy like a bit of non-consensual pornography.
Looking back, it’s remarkable how many of the things we were expected to find hilarious were actually just horrible things happening to women.
I think about the things we, as normal young women, experienced.
The comments about our bodies, the creepy bosses who thought it was hilarious to make sexual remarks to teenage employees, the much older men who wouldn’t take no for an answer and plied women young enough to be their daughters with alcohol. The wandering hands in nightclubs which was deemed entirely normal.
And if you complained, you’d be told to take it as a compliment, stop being so uptight, or consider yourself lucky anyone was interested in the first place, because you’re obviously ugly and/or a lesbian and they didn’t fancy you anyway. Apparently, being sexually harassed was something to be grateful for. How terribly ungracious of us not to appreciate the attention.
I remember all the times we laughed along, not because we thought it was funny, but because making a fuss was somehow considered worse than the behaviour itself.
How many of us have stories that we brushed off at the time because we were embarrassed, didn’t want to cause a scene or simply didn’t consider that we could? And now, when women come forward years later to report sexual assault or rape, people have the fucking audacity to ask why didn’t they say anything at the time?
Really? HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN WHAT IT WAS LIKE?
We lived in a culture where even the most famous and successful women in the world were publicly humiliated for the entertainment of millions. Where women who complained about men’s behaviour were mocked, disbelieved or blamed for whatever had happened to them. Where a man’s reputation, career and future were so often considered more important than the harm he might have caused.
Monica Lewinsky was just 22 when she became involved with Bill Clinton, a 49-year-old married man who happened to be the most powerful person in the world. She wasn’t famous, wealthy or particularly powerful. She was a young woman working in the White House, and yet somehow SHE became the international punchline. Her appearance, her sexuality and her entire existence were ridiculed for years, and she’s STILL the butt of misogynistic jokes nearly three decades later.
Meanwhile, Clinton gets to enjoy his legacy as a former president. Lewinsky has since become an extraordinary advocate against public shaming and bullying, and she’s a bloody ICON in my opinion, but the fact that she had to rebuild her life after being humiliated on a global scale tells you everything about how we treated women.
And people genuinely wonder why women kept quiet?
Now Russell Brand is facing sentencing.
In other happy news, Andrew Tate has been arrested and faces serious criminal charges, including rape and human trafficking. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the piss artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office over his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious (and thankfully long dead) paedophile.
Are we, maybe, finally seeing some of the entitlement, intimidation and abuse of power that went unchallenged for so long being properly confronted? Dare we hope for better for the future, for our daughters? And, perhaps even more importantly, that we’re raising sons who won’t grow up thinking they’re entitled to treat women like shit?
I’m not naive enough to think misogyny has disappeared. Quite the opposite, given that men like Andrew Tate have managed to build enormous followings by repackaging contempt for women and selling it to an entirely new generation of boys. Remember that Louis Theroux documentary, The Manosphere?
The attitudes haven’t disappeared. They’ve just found new platforms, new audiences and microphones, allowing an entirely new generation of boys to be fed the same misogynistic bullshit we grew up with. We’ve gone from lads’ mags telling men they’re entitled to women’s bodies to podcasts telling them they’re entitled to women’s obedience. Unfortunately for them, I don’t know a single woman who’s signing up for that particular arrangement. Enjoy your podcasts, lads.
But perhaps something is changing. Perhaps being rich, famous, influential or simply very loud isn’t quite the protection it used to be. Perhaps women are finally being listened to, and people who once seemed untouchable are discovering that they aren’t.
It’s taken an appallingly long time to get here, and we’ve still got a bloody long way to go.
But I’d quite like to think the world is moving forward, even if it occasionally feels like it’s being dragged there kicking and screaming.
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