But, likewise, I find it very hard to imagine newspapers skating that sex-offender tightrope in the 90s, still less the 80s. It is unlikely that the titles would get away with that now. In 2002, anonymous people on the internet started a countdown to the 16th birthday of Charlotte Church, which was reported in the Sun and the Mirror, with that cloak of plausible deniability that the online world had so recently gifted the mainstream media: “We didn’t make this – we’re merely telling you it happened.” In 2008, photographers lay on the pavement outside the venue where Emma Watson was celebrating her 18th birthday, to take pictures up her skirt that it would have been illegal to print 24 hours before. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardianīut there are things that newspapers did 15 or 20 years ago that they would no longer do today. ‘‘Everybody is talking about how these moments from the 00s would be unacceptable in the media now’… Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism project. It’s like those people have forgotten that, in the last two years, we’ve seen one of our biggest-selling newspapers wonder whether a senior British politician is uncrossing and crossing her legs to distract Boris Johnson, and has just recently printed a column wishing that Meghan could be paraded down the streets and pelted with excrement.” Laura Bates, the author of Men Who Hate Women and the founder in 2012 of Everyday Sexism, cautions: “Everybody is talking about this culture of the past, how these moments from the 2000s would be outrageous and unacceptable in the media now. In fact, the atmospherics and the underlying philosophies of the 90s lad were very different from the 00s version perhaps the conflation of the two has blinded us to how much changed between the 20th and 21st centuries.Ī word, first, on how much has remained the same. This is frequently traced back to the birth of lad culture in the mid-90s, which itself tends now to be characterised as a reaction against “feminism gone too far”. It was considered pearl-clutching, joy-killing, to object to a rape joke, just as it was thought – correctly – to be career-ending to allege sexual assault against someone more powerful, who would be openly joking about it by the next day anyway. This was a time when tabloids were completely unrestrained in their misogyny, and sexual violence was not just the topic of jokes nor the jumping-off point, but the entire joke. The writer James Butler remembers the “ironic, nihilist, hypersadist mass culture of the mid-late 00s”, when Brand was doing his first nationwide standup tour, taking part in the Royal Variety Performance and recording a special for Comedy Central. It was only “funny” because we were watching: the humour was created by our collusion, in much the same way as his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, dressed up audacity – “I just described spitting on a woman and dared you to react” – as inventiveness, and only got away with it because, no, we didn’t dare. Brand’s 2006 tour Shame, for example, featured a routine about choking someone during oral sex that had no components of humour. When we talk about “hiding in plain sight”, we often understand that to mean a celebrity was protected and enabled by others in the industry, because that is easier to swallow than the material we all watched, all enabled.
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