Watching boring, misogynistic comedy whilst surrounded by a tent full of families and Radio 4 fans is a dispiriting experience. Watching boring, misogynistic comedy just hours after a seventeen year old girl has been raped a few hundred metres away is much, much worse.
For those who aren’t aware of the rape stories that emerged at this year’s Latitude festival, you can read about them HERE. A 17-year-old girl from Suffolk came forward to report she had been raped in a tent on the campsite on Friday night, while a 19-year-old woman told police that on Thursday night she was grabbed, held down and raped by a group of three or four men.
Now, Latitude is probably my favourite festival. I like its mix of book readings, comedy, film screenings, lectures, cabaret and music. But the news that two women may have been raped at this year’s festival has left me feeling depressed, disappointed and strangely guilty.
Guilty, partially, for feeling smug, safe and amused when something so monstrous was happening so close. Depressed and disappointed because these accusations seem to support the argument, made by stand up comedians like Rufus Hound and Richard Herring, that men are aggressive, sex-hungry neanderthals. ‘Men just want to spray around as much semen as possible,’ said Hound at his Sunday afternoon gig. At the time I found his set boring, unfunny and horribly outmoded. With hindsight, the joke seems painfully inappropriate.
Of course, I would not argue that misogynistic comedy causes sexual assault. That is stupidly reductive and patently not the case. Instead, I would point out that any comic who paints men as sexual aggressors and women as joyless, embittered prick-teases who should serve their purpose as sexual objects and stop resisting, is treading dangerously close to pretty sordid territory. There is a link between a sexually aggressive woman-hating mentality and the ability to enact sexual violence against women. If you appeal to the former, you cannot ignore the latter.
Rufus Hound’s crime was not inciting sexual violence; it was being boring, old fashioned, unfunny and crass.
Hound, I imagine, was merely going through his usual Stag Do ‘aren’t men and women different?’ routine when he shouted out ‘Ladies, just suck some cock’. Also, I’m sure that when he shouted ‘If your parents weren’t married, then your mum probably sucked a lot of cock’ he thought this a funny, observational comment on relationships.
Although, let me point out here that Rufus Hound told his 20 minutes of blow job jokes at 5pm on a Sunday at a family festival wearing teddy bear makeup. Let me also mention that Hound is the star of a children’s television programme. Finally, I’d like to point out that telling blow job jokes is about as contemporary, funny and inventive as burning witches.
Perhaps Hound admires the club comedians of the 1970s. Perhaps he is a fan of the pre-alternative comedy routines about fucking women and avoiding relationships. But when a husband and father makes jokes about how men ‘really will do anything to get a blow job’ and tells the ‘ladies’ in the audience that their partners aren’t the sensitive, complicated, rounded individuals they believe them to be, but simply ‘garden sprinklers’ of semen in constant need of oral sex, it is unutterably depressing. When you find out that a number of men have committed acts of brutal sexual violence against women nearly young enough to be Hound’s daughter, it is depressingly easy to believe in the comic’s portrayal of men as cum-spraying emotion-vacuums who will do anything in order to achieve sexual gratification.
Rape is rape. It is a frightening and terrible act of brutality against another person. To find out that it has happened in the context of a family-orientated festival is shocking and terribly sad. To find out that it happened hours before a comedian told a tent of 500 men, women and children ’suck a cock today, world peace tomorrow’ is somehow worse.
Nell Frizzell
One Comment
I was squirming at it, and found myself feeling disappointed in both the comics for not being better aware of their surroundings. It was painful to watch the pair of them trying to get a read on the audience, but with material better suited to a late night club. I’ve heard comics complain time and time again that these daytime festival shows are a nightmare but the Irish chaps on before them showed that it was an audience ready to laugh. perhaps both Herring and Hound would have done well to stop, think about where they would be playing and to take the piss out of that? It would have been wise to be sensitive of the goings on on site. Look at how ridiculous the crowd is; a bunch of middle class, pompous twonks. LOADS to talk about, just don’t mention the hummus.
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