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By God, James, this caller is amazing
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This caller is talking a lot of sense. Current caller is exactly why I love your show, James, writes Phil
0:07
It's so eye-opening. This woman says Miriam has just wrapped up your entire hour with 15 minutes to spare
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Well, let's not, let's hope not, Miriam. I've got an invoice for the whole thing. Laurie brought a discerning historical concept to an age-old problem, James
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Men, writes John in Edinburgh. And the psychology of in-group and out-group dynamics, writes Yvonne
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as explained by the psychologist Angers-Henri Tajfel. Firstly, I want to say, like, with the greatest possible respect
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it's 10.42, and we've had 42 minutes of listening to men talk to each other
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Only two men. It's my fault, that. It's not a selection. It's just I interrupt too much, and I talk too much
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So I'll shut up for a while and let you fill as much time as you want. Hashtag not all men. Hashtag not all men
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Well, OK. Yes. But look, what you say is completely right about the
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look, condemning an entire category of people on the basis that one of them might one day commit a crime
1:05
is the essence of prejudice, is literally the definition of prejudice, prejudging an entire group of people
1:11
But secondly, this is a trend that we've seen in this country
1:16
and across certainly the English-speaking world for a long, long time. I mean, hundreds of years, certainly decades
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of using fear of violence against women and girls and children to excuse demonization of outsider groups And you know the great civil rights activist and writer Angela Davis calls this the myth of the outsider rapist
1:36
She was talking then about the excuse of how many black men in the American South
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were being murdered by mobs of white racists who convinced themselves that they were simply protecting their women
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This was used as the excuse for lynchings. And in the British occupation of India
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We justified massacres by saying we were just retribution for rape, real or imagined attacks on white women
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And the argument that black and brown men pose a unique threat to white women and children is not new at all
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It's a very, very old form of prejudice. And another group we see being targeted by exactly this kind of lie is transgender people, and particularly transgender women right now
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I mean, we had this discussion, you had this discussion on the show, you know, quite recently saying like, well, is this, you know, is this a unique threat to women and girls
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Are transgender women some kind of unique threat to women? Of course they're not. But somehow we can only speak about this kind of violence when we project it onto outsiders
2:40
Is it, I mean, I don't, I don't know if generous is quite the right word, but is it because it somehow feels, so trying to deal with all male sex abusers feels like an unclimbable mountain
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but if you break it down so I not coming from a place of sympathy but a place of seeking to understand people that I find hard to understand I present it to you as fixable We can deal with these M or these skittles There no way we
3:07
can deal with all the sweets in all the world but hey look there's some skittles here that we can
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excise from our diet. Let's just do that and it becomes a bit easier to understand perhaps
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Absolutely and look there are quite a few women in some of these racist and homophobic
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transphobic movements who have found you know one way in which they're finally allowed to speak
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about real violence that they've seen and suffered in their lives about the you know
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because you know violence against women and children is a real thing and yet somehow
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you know finally by some miracle finally everybody who dismissed it for years and years and years
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suddenly seems to care about it when we're blaming it on outsiders and yeah i think you're right it's
3:50
It doesn't seem like it's so baked in you can't. It will always be there
3:55
And I mean, people will produce statistics, sometimes questionable, that prove their right to be more worried about these people than other people
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And they will talk about culture and they will talk about how women are viewed in other parts of the world
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And there will be some truth in some of these points. But will it ever be enough? Why will it never be enough to justify treating everybody from that, quotes, culture, end quotes, with suspicion
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Because we believe in innocence until proven guilty, I suppose. I'm not sure it's that
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Go on. Unfortunately I think that a quite generous and optimistic No no but one of the things I mean if you look at history the crime of rape was first understood not as a crime against a person
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but as a crime of property. You know, the crime was done by the other man against the man
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who technically owned that woman. It's about, I mean, the word is chauvinism. It's an out-of-fashion word
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But you see people talking about our women. You know, those people aren't allowed to attack women, our women
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Only we are. It's about territory, about property. Who is allowed to..
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Honestly, this is the attitude I've seen. I've been doing activism in this kind of area for a very long time
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And that would explain why... I mean, I don't know if anyone ever dug into how disproportionate it was
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but there were certainly many cases of people in the EDL being found guilty of precisely the sort of crimes
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that they claimed to exist to resist when they were committed by people of different backgrounds
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I mean, that's horrible. I wish I could push back, but I don't have the knowledge or experience to push back
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And you do, as you say. The idea that, no, no, no, these crimes are fine when they're committed by one of us
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Hey, look, if it's a powerful, rich white man boasting about grabbing women by the vagina
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then that's just locker room talk, even though, you know, we've got no reason to believe he was lying
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But if it's somebody who's just come over here on a small boat doing it
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then let's just set fire to his home and stuff all the people in it
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It certainly fits the facts as they are available, but it's very, very bleak
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Fascinating call, Laurie. I hope you ring me again. Thank you
