I’m back and I’m angry.

When I started this blog, I had all sorts of good intentions and tons of ideas for articles I would write. Sadly, I’ve been too busy burrowing here and there and working at becoming an archaeologist to actually do any of them.

What is even sadder is that what has pushed me to write again is not an inspiration or a great idea. It’s something awful that happened earlier today.

Today, at about lunchtime, I was taking my usual shortcut through Lewis’s department store in Liverpool, on my way to my normal Saturday lunch and window-shopping session in the city centre. I was passing by where they display the china when I became aware of a disturbance behind me. I kept walking, not really wanting to see. The disturbance followed. A man was shouting really loudly at someone, probably several people. I think there was a raised female voice as well, but I’m not sure. It was when I caught “It’s none of your fucking business” and “I was having a conversation with my WIFE” among the torrent of “fuck off” that I got a clue what was going on. My heart sank. I detest violence and disorder in public towards anybody, woman, man or child, but public displays of domestic violence sicken me in a particularly personal way.

I tried to keep walking. The man pushed past some people and was now level with me. He was now verbally abusing another woman who had obviously pulled him up on his shitty behaviour. I do not know who she was. He called her, among other things, a “soft cow” and repeatedly told her to fuck off.  Other insults were used, but I don’t remember them. At this point, a tall blonde woman in a checked jacket caught my eye. The look she gave me was not one of fear exactly, more the kind of look you do give a fellow person in this kind of situation, when you don’t know how to act and are looking around for support. I did not know who this woman was or what her part in the debacle was. I thought she may have been the bystander who had been the object of the last outburst.

I mouthed to her something about getting one of the assistants, not wanting to draw fire myself. Too late. As I was approaching the hosiery section, the man started shouting at me to fuck off, claiming it was nothing to FUCKING do with me and calling me a “soft cow” and other insults I cannot remember precisely enough to want to recount them. I am ashamed to say that I turned round and pretended I hadn’t noticed what was going on. By this time, a security guard had appeared. The man walked away, shoving a mobile phone into the hand of the blonde woman. It was only then that I noticed that they had a small child with them.

I was rather shaken. I am not used to this sort of thing happening. I went over to two of the female shop staff, who had seen what had happened. They said that shop security were now following the man. They were very kind and listened to my outraged and saddened waffling for a bit, both agreeing that the man’s behaviour was totally unacceptable. “Some people are just horrible”, is what one of them said to me.

All I did was show some concern and rudimentary solidarity with a fellow woman, heck, a fellow human being. If you are reading this, Mr Fuck-ugly overtanned psycho-aggressive control-freak misogynist who was passing through Lewis’s at about 1:10 pm on Saturday, 19th April, I have one thing to say to you. Take a leaf out of your own book. My concern for a fellow woman and disconcertion at your vile public behaviour is none of your fucking business. You act like a misogynist jerkoff in public, the few decent and brave people around will intervene and WILL pull you up on your unaceptable levels of aggression and rudeness. Just because a woman happens to be married to you, does not give you the right to insult, denigrate, threaten or humiliate her in public – whatever it was you did when you were thankfully out of my sight and direct earshot.

The person who intervened first, and I, were totally within our rights to expect you not to act like that in public or elsewhere. We were not in the wrong and you had NO fucking justification to insult and intimidate us and any other decent right-minded shop assistant or passer-by who was subjected to your violent outburst.

I will not mind my own business. For too long, this awful stupid feeling that we shouldn’t interfere has indirectly caused many serious crimes – I’m thinking most DV-related murders, most child abuse-related killings, a good number of horrific crimes against vulnerable adults, Dog knows how many other offences – or at least allowed them to go on undetected.

It’s time to get angry again. All that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing. Or mind their own bloody business.

Justice for Jane

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.)