Thank God for Bianca Jagger: I'd have a good word for plutonium in my bathwater if she was against it, writes Kevin Myers.
She's the great weather-vane of showbiz sanctimony, the Clare Short of popular culture, inheriting the mantle once donned by posturing horror stories such as Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. This gruesome foursome is the most compelling argument not merely in favour of legalising male homosexual marriage, but making it compulsory.
Bianca Jagger was in Dublin last weekend for the Amnesty International "It's In Our Hands" campaign against violence towards women. Needless to say, we got the same tired old feminist mumbo-jumbo, presumably because those who spout it either feel no shame at presenting vapid falsehoods as muscular facts or wouldn't know truth even if it walked up them and put its tongue in their mouths.
So naturally, we got some new "findings" to make us rub our eyes, and say Golly, that's bad. This time we hear that "at least one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime". God knows where they get these figures from, though actually even He probably doesn't.
No matter. In other words, two thirds of women in the world have been spared any abuse whatsoever throughout their entire life? That's pretty impressive. I'd have trouble finding a single man I know who had never been "abused in his lifetime", if abuse includes parental, school or peer violence, bullying or coercion. Well, I think we chaps should have a conference about all the violence we've suffered down the years, though of course at best we'd be ignored by the media, at worst mocked; but it would at least - sob - give us the chance to share one another's pain.
The last time I wrote on this subject, I was astonished by the response I got from the male victims of real, not imagined, abuse; and what offended them most of all was the endless government-financed conferences which focused entirely on female victimhood, and never referred to female violence and abuse.
What is truly flabbergasting about victim-feminists is their inexhaustible ability to scan a landscape of facts and merely see the topographical features in which only women suffer. How often does Erin Pizzey have to repeat that her surveys into domestic abuse showed female-triggered violence constituted nearly 50 per cent of the total? How often? Not even 10 zillions times would make any difference, since the sisters simply don't want to hear it.
The majority of victims of all violence in all societies are men. How many men were murdered in Ireland last year? About 50. And how many women? Maybe five. Violence against men is an almost an international societal norm. Of the 3,700 or so fatal victims of the Northern Troubles, only 330 were women: fewer than 10 per cent, and these were overwhelmingly accidental killings. Perhaps fewer than 30 women were deliberately targeted and killed.
How many women were taken away and murdered at Srebenice? How many women were necklaced in Soweto? How many women were murdered in South African police custody? How many women were. . .oh, you get my drift.
But this doesn't silence the babble from the one-eyed sisters who can survey burning cities and slaughtered armies of male conscripts and see only female suffering. Some of the Amnesty findings which probably bedazzled the audience in Dublin might even have been amusing if they weren't symptoms of a chronic and pathological failure to see the truth. Thus Amnesty declared that the prioritisation of international security over human rights, especially since September 11th, 2001, has "disproportionately affected women".
WHAT? Are they completely, barking mad? Have they gone stark, raving bonkers? How many women are being held in Guantanamo Bay? How many women were killed by allied forces in Afghanistan? How many Palestinian women have the Israelis assassinated in targeted killings? How many women are being held without trial across the world? How many women are awaiting trial on terrorist charges?
Alleging that women have suffered disproportionately since 9/11 is like howling about Eskimo casualties in the Northern Troubles, or screaming over the Solomon Islanders killed at Chernobyl. Yet no matter how absurd or fallacious the claims, the sisters convene at their numerous state-subsidised conferences, and reiterate their state-subsidised gibberish, in the wholly justified belief that they will be dutifully and unquestioningly reported in the media. Their myths accumulate into mountain ranges, and these ranges fill the landscape, obscuring the truth of nuance, of subtlety, of social complexity.
So, needless to say, Amnesty is calling for all governments to adopt laws that ensure domestic violence against women is treated as seriously as any assault. And of course, it stays silent on domestic violence against men. Why? Maybe because it wouldn't get support from the showbiz types who know there are no headlines and no media sympathy for men who are bullied and beaten in their homes.
Last Monday night the BBC showed a television documentary about men at war, which suggested that even in the extremes of mortal combat, 98 per cent of men are actually incapable of lethal violence. During the programme, we were shown uncut footage of men being executed, and of a Japanese soldier writhing to death in liquid fire from a flamethrower. These were real men dying real and terrible deaths. However, when a modern soldier casually used the word "cunt", it was beeped.
Men dying terribly, OK. A single feminist-disapproved word, a mere sound, not OK, and thus censored. What a sick and vile set of values this feminist cant has created.