https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/sexual-harassment-and-cultural-masochism/
From the country which did nothing to stop and much to ignore Rotherham’s grooming gangs of Subcontinental predators comes a slanderous TV ad intended to combat sexual harassment on public transport. The villain with the roving hands and thrusting crotch? A middle-class white male of course.
One of the biggest media narratives of 2019 will be the liberal morality play of selective-outrage at the sexual peccadilloes of Donald Trump and his alleged attempts to hide them. It will no doubt run and run. And this may well be just as it should be, although it is worth mentally stepping back and reminding oneself that many much-revered statesmen of former times will have been guilty of very similar behaviour but which was kept well out of the public eye.
We are endlessly told in our Anglosphere media that we now live in a globalised world; and in many ways we do. It is ironic then that when it comes to some global issues – such as the oppression of women by men – that same media is the very essence of parochialism. The casting-couch sexual pressure faced by some Western women on their way up the ladder of fame and fortune is a bigger story than an Indian woman sentenced by village elders to be gang-raped as punishment for the supposed transgressions of her brother and now living in terror of her neighbours.
Then there is the tricky issue of ‘racism’: defined, in media terms, as something of which only white people can be guilty. Liberal preciousness about ‘racism’ means that even within the confines of our wealthy developed world, media coverage of sexual harassment depends on who is doing the harassing. This is why, in the UK, the rape and terrorising of hundreds of non-Muslim girls by gangs of Pakistani men went unreported for years.
It also gives rise to endless media fictions in television drama and advertisements. Like this one: it’s standing room only on a London Underground train…man in a grey suit is staring at the rear of a woman in a white suit. The carriage is roaring and rolling along the tunnel. Man’s stare is steady and menacing. She is oblivious…. until he leans in to her and surreptitiously fingers her bottom. He is white, middle class and around forty. His face has something of the stuck-up, repressed Brit of Hollywood caricature; the curl of his thin upper lip, the damp pallor of his skin and the cold, glazed eyes all suggestive of some kind of droit du seigneur fantasist. She is black, thirty-something and also middle class. Professional in appearance and attractive, she looks like she might one day get cast as one of those alluring TV female special agents, complete with side-arm weapon and karate black belt. She is circumspectly but determinedly ignoring the situation but he persists and eventually, on the pretext of making room for other passengers, he thrusts his groin into her behind just as the train pulls into the next station, where she escapes.
