The Chris Langham trial has brought pornography and its darkest side into the public spotlight once more. I am intending to blog about that at a later date, but for now I would like to focus on another trial that was concluded earlier in the summer: the trial of Graham Coutts, who was found guilty of the murder of Jane Longhurst for a second time.
For the uninitiated, Coutts murdered Jane, a special needs teacher and musician, in 2004. He strangled her and then hid her body in a rented storage container, before losing his nerve some time later, dumping the body in a wood and setting fire to it. The pathologists involved were unable to tell with certainty whether she was strangled with a pair of tights, or whether she was asphyxiated by manipulating pressure points on her throat.
Coutts was known to be a BDSM practitioner with an obsessive interest in “strangling” his female partners and was a user of “necrophiliac” pornography sites. He was initially found guilty by a jury, but appealed, claiming that Jane’s death was the result of a BDSM sex “game” gone wrong.The original judge did not give an alternative consideration of manslaughter to the jury, so the retrial, which Coutts lost, was ordered.
Feminists, particularly those of a radical nature, followed this case closely, especially as Jane’s mother, Liz, launched a campain against violent and necrophile porn, which resulted in some new legislation being drawn up.
What the radfems were shocked by was the outcry against Coutts’s conviction and the resulting campaign.
I have read through the transcript of the original trial and the testimony that Coutts gave is garbled, inconsistent and unreliable; he gives no real explanation of how Jane came to collapse, stop breathing, vomit blood and die. He gives no indication that he tried to seek help. In other statements he admits there was no previous sexual relationship between them but still expects the jury to believe that she consented not only to sex but to this peculiar and violent sexual act – hardly the stuff of first-date dreams. His excuse for concealing her body for so long was to protect his pregnant girlfriend – whom he had supposedly cheated on! Yet a small army of his supporters defended him to the hilt. They seized on one tiny piece of evidence released during the original trial: Jane had made a brief and cryptic comment to a work colleague a couple of years previously that something she had done with a boyfriend “took her breath away”. This, to a sane observer, would mean that she had enjoyed something she and her lover did very much, perhaps more than she anticipated or perhaps just “a lot”. It is a cliched phrase common in films and Mills&Boon novels.
Unless, of course, you are one of the violent porn users and BDSM fanatics who campaigned for Coutts’s release. Then, this phrase was an admission that Jane too was a BDSM practitioner who enjoyed breath restriction as part of sex. All this despite the fact that several of Jane’s former lovers testified that this was untrue and that she had shown no such inclination with them.
This grasping at straws by porn and violent sex apologists was doubly hypocritical considering their wailing and gnashing of teeth at the use of forensics from Coutts’s computer showing that he accessed violent and necrophile porn, some on the day of Jane’s murder. To go through files on a man’s computer, a BDSM dom’s computer, to analyse his porn usage was unfair, prejudicial and misleading. To seize on one comment a woman made in a corridor and to question her former boyfriends about their sexual habits was acceptable and necessary. It is just another version of the old sexual double standard, brought in to the 21st century.
The jury thought differently and wasted no time in convicting him once again for murder, aided by the judge.
Before the case, I had no particular opinion on BDSM. Now, I am shocked at how a section of the BDSM community did not distance itself from a violent murderer like Coutts, who himself admitted that he had confided to a psychiatric worker that he was worried that his obsession would lead to him killing a woman.
Most people get through life without the need to throttle their partners in bed or stare at images of simulated murder victims.
The backlash against Liz Longhurst’s campaign, which aims to help protect women (and men) from suffering as her daughter did, is depressing. The legislation as it stands, is not perfectly clear and needs tightening up, but the reasoning behind it is there. While we have a sexual culture that celebrates domination, real and implied violence and “pushing the limits”, there will be too many who push things too far, with the blessing of the “free speech” and “sexual freedom” advocates. One man’s sexual freedom is another woman’s sexual hell. (Or even, sometimes, another man’s hell too.)
Posted by theradicalrodent 