Our culture has a habit of ‘badgirling’ and Russell Brand was part of it
Dividing women into ‘lovely’ – as Brand described one alleged victim – and ‘bad girls’ just reinforces a hugely damaging stereotype that is widespread on and off our screens, says Laura Barton
There were many details in the Dispatches special on Russell Brand that stuck in the mind – blow jobs, bottles of urine, bad taste prank calls. For me, the lingering image has been the text messages the comedian-turned-guru sent to a woman the programme-makers named “Nadia”, shortly after she alleges he had raped her, without a condom, in the hallway of his Los Angeles home. Nadia says she had fled by the time Brand apologised for actions he called “crazy and selfish”. “I hope that you can forgive me,” wrote Brand (who denies any non-consensual sex or other wrongdoing in connection with any of the allegations against him). “I know that you are a lovely person.”
“Loveliness” is a deeply loaded concept for women. The idea that we must be lovely, and remain so, is culturally reinforced throughout our lives – in our literature and our movies, our pop stars and our television screens. It is a defining quality of fairy-tale princesses and Hollywood sweethearts, of the girl-next-door and the good little wife.
“Lovely” means being accommodating, allowing bad male behaviour and not raising our voices. It means being demure, not swearing, or getting legless, or doing drugs or growing too ambitious. It is run through with ideas of sexual purity, with the implication that a woman can be ruined by desire. Across this week I have wondered repeatedly: would Brand have apologised if Nadia had been less “lovely”?
Loveliness is firmly entangled in the notions we hold of who exactly makes a sympathetic victim. Those women who went backstage to meet Brand, those who went to his home or his hotel room, who sent him naked pictures, who slept with him willingly, dilute their loveliness. They knew what they were doing. They were asking for it. They got what was coming to them.
The difficulty in building a case against sexual predators often lives in this grey area. Again, thanks to both the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we watch on our screens, we still think of rapists as strangers when, statistically, they are more likely to be partners; we are still more afraid of the dark than anything we see in plain sight. Similarly, we think of victims as those who could not defend themselves, who did not know any better, who had their innocence tainted.
Even Dispatches played into this. Interviewing the woman Brand had allegedly groomed and manipulated when he was 31 and she was 16 years old, they did not show the woman herself (they were, after all, protecting her identity) but a peculiar montage of delicate roses blooming.
It was Sigmund Freud who first identified the Madonna-whore complex – an unconscious psychological structure in which men regard women as either saintly or debased. But we can trace the idea back further, and see its evidence across the arts. It’s there in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Bizet’s Carmen, and it continues right through James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in the pop career of Madonna herself.
We see, too, what it means to move from one to the other, the moment, in effect, when Eve bites the apple. In Grease, for instance, Sandy is described as “Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity” but ditches the pastel colours and poodle skirts in favour of figure-hugging black spandex, leather jacket, red lipstick, heels and a cigarette to gain Danny’s approval. Following a similar trajectory, in 1989, Kylie Minogue left behind the Charlene from Neighbours reputation and the chirpy Stock Aitken and Waterman hits and began dating “bad boy” INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence – a relationship many viewed as some kind of defilement. However, it meant that by 1993, when New Sexy Kylie released “Confide in Me”, the world was at least braced for impact.
Such “badgirling” can become culturally weaponised. When Donald Trump labelled Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during their third presidential debate, and claimed E Jean Carroll, the columnist whom he was found liable of both sexually assaulting and defaming, had said it was “very sexy to be raped”, he was doing his best to curdle both women’s reputations, leaving them unworthy of either votes or sympathy.
Similarly, back in 2008, when Brand and Jonathan Ross used a BBC Radio 2 show to make prank calls to beloved actor Andrew Sachs, claiming Brand had “f***ed” Sachs’s granddaughter, the singer Georgina Baillie, there was little thought for Baillie herself. She was, after all, part of a burlesque dance troupe named The Satanic Sluts, and, by logical conclusion, therefore not “lovely”.
But “bad girls” can still feel used and disregarded. Several of Brand’s alleged victims have spoken of the comedian’s demeaning anger when he felt himself rejected. Baillie, too, noted that although Brand sent a letter of apology to her family, no such remorse was expressed to her.
At the heart of all of this is a societal obsession with female virginity, with paternity and male ownership, with a peculiar inheritance that encompasses the Virgin Mary, Queen Elizabeth I (the Virgin Queen), Britney Spears, and now Brand’s 16-year-old alleged victim, who told of how the comedian was aroused by her untainted virginity.
It’s reasonable to wonder whether, for Brand, what seems like this fetish for corrupting whatever he perceives to be wholesome and good, extended further. Whether perhaps he regarded the BBC itself as a pervertable victim. More recently, we might wonder, what is the “wellness” industry if not the pursuit of a kind of physical purity?
It is hard for any of us to buck these ingrained notions of the pure and corrupt, the good and the bad, but if we are to truly address the matters that still blight gender equality, from rape to reproductive rights, we have to question our part in these cultural narratives. We have to say it is OK to not be lovely.