Mr Justice Bennathan’s sentencing remarks in the trial of Russell Brand hit me like a train, and I know I’m not the only one. This week my Instagram feed has been full of female friends, colleagues and acquaintances sharing his words: “Whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no and to demand justice from the criminal courts when sexual predators like you, Russell Brand, act without their consent.” Those same women are now sharing the Guardian and ITV’s investigation into David Walliams, who is accused of preying on young women for sex, with the same fury and fervour (Walliams has denied the allegations against him).
Both of these stories concerning predatory male behaviour took place in an era when I was a young woman: the “lad culture” era. It dated from about the mid-to-late 90s until the beginning of the #MeToo movement in 2016, and those of us who came of age during it sometimes joke bleakly that it’s a miracle we made it out in one piece. Some of us didn’t, and those victim-survivors live with the daily impact of male coercion, abuse and violence, still.
We were all, essentially, frogs in boiling water. Misogyny and female objectification were so common, so normalised, that all you could do was try to keep swimming before you were boiled alive. With Bennathan’s words I was catapulted back to being 17 years old and sitting in my boyfriend’s parents’ kitchen, where I read a tabloid newspaper column arguing that girls who wore short skirts essentially deserved to be raped. So many of us girls, as we were then, must have had a moment like that, where we realised, essentially, that we were prey, when we realised that we “deserved” it.
How to explain to young women today how it felt back then? Today’s girls face their own dark threats, not least from online grooming and harassment, deepfakes and being blackmailed over images, as well as the rape and sexual assault that remains prevalent. At the same time, their knowhow when it comes to consent and boundaries is far superior to what ours was then, when the word “safeguarding” was barely used. We were all learning on the job, essentially, while being surrounded by perverts.
I know girls who met rock stars more than twice their age at festivals who targeted them when they were still in their teens. Girls whose older male bosses shoved their tongues down their throats. Girls who were groomed and abused by their teachers, or preyed upon by older men with a preference for girls still doing their GCSEs. Girls whose boyfriends locked them in their flats. Girls who were assaulted, or anally raped, like Brand’s victim was.
You’d feel sick, strange, or shocked by a man’s behaviour towards you. You would know on some level that what had happened was wrong, and yet the overwhelming message from the culture around you was that this was normal because you were young and beautiful, and that was always going to be tempting to men, wasn’t it? When I was attacked by a stranger while walking home after a night out, a common rape myth at the time had it that I was a car who had left her doors unlocked. What did I, or any of us, expect?
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And so this weird sort of splitting of the self would occur: one half comprised of the pain of it all, a trauma that lives in the body, a body that knows on a cellular level that it has been violated, and the other, well, the other a shell walking around this world set with traps, surviving. Making light of it, even, or not consciously realising that what happened to you was wrong, that it mattered. Living while embodying that disconnect does odd things to you, ultimately. Especially when you’re surrounded by fully grown adults who seem to think that it’s all fine.
You forget how different the media culture was then. It wasn’t as online, as disparate and diffuse as it is now, where there are megastars on TikTok of whom whole demographics are entirely ignorant. The landscape was much more of a monoculture, its tenets, its myths and its doctrines, its language and its cadences decided by far fewer individuals, most of them older, and often, but not always, men. It was a world of lads’ mags and tabloids and telly – and if a celebrity was king of all three then their power was immense indeed. Being able to make the nation laugh was treated as a superpower. Banter and rape jokes were par for the course. That clip that is doing the rounds of Jonathan Ross, Noel Fielding and Brand joking about rape? It seems sickening now, but in the audience’s laugh you hear the truth: it was all normal then.
In 2014, I co-wrote a book with Holly Baxter about the media landscape called The Vagenda. I picked it up this morning because I wanted to remember what the world was like then. Just a sample for you: Jimmy Carr – these days rebranded as a worldly, empathic sage of social media – joking about gang-rape. The Evening Standard having a strip club correspondent. The Telegraph glowingly reporting the fact that Gymbox ran a Playboy “bunny bootcamp”. An academic study that found members of the public struggled to differentiate between statements taken from lads’ mags and those who had committed serious sexual offences. Teenage magazines having a section for readers’ photos entitled “How Sexy Am I?”.
This book, which contained a section on rape culture and rape myths and was aimed at teenage girls, was given to older men to review, as though they knew anything about what it was like to spend your adolescence in a sexist hellscape. It was trashed both by them and by the women who took money from the women’s magazines we criticised, who were complicit. There were some adults who were on our side – our mums, our editors – but by and large any woman who tried to challenge that prevailing media culture was doing so very much alone.
That is why it does not surprise me that these stories have taken so long to come to public attention, or for any justice to be delivered. That sordid, shabby era may be over, but those who endured it as the backdrop to their girlhood are still trying to reconcile those two parts of themselves: the half that knows it has been violated, and the half walking around in a world that refused to listen.
