Imagine a scenario where a well known white person gives an interview to a specialist magazine,which is reported in the national press, where they opine that there isn't any discrimination against or harassment of black or Asian people.
Imagine if hundreds of black and Asian people think: "Blimey!" and write on Twitter "I've been on the receiving end of racial discrimination more often than you can possibly know."
Imagine then if several white people take to the internet and declare "I've discussed this with several of my white friends and we can categorically reassure you that that white celebrity was right, there is no racial discrimination. Now, you uppity Ethnics, please remove the characteristic chip from your shoulder and know your place"
This is in effect what has happened since Saturday night. Except that, instead of it being about race, it's about gender, and it's men - not all men, just some men - assuming to know about being a woman , and to mediate the supposed views of women without listening to women, unaware that women can express their own views and are doing so.
The celebrity in question is Stephen Fry and he has, at best, behaved foolishly and arrogantly. Not liking the uppity women contradicting him, he resorted to the standard Celebrity Pathetic Excuse 'I was quoted out of context' and went off in high dudgeon at being 'bullied'.
The parade of apologists for Fry is predictable. They discount one woman's personal testimonial because 'personal testimonial' is meaningless anecdote. In their world, the truth can only out when authoritative people make sweeping generalisations. The combined aggregate testimony of hundreds of women is bullying - the word 'hysterical' hangs there unsaid but implied. And yet the cumulative spontaneous testimony of hundreds of women was glorious!
I gave personal testimony because I cannot presume to speak for any other woman. I can guess what some other women think, at least partly. And I read other women giving similar personal testimony, not presuming to speak for me. Of course, there is always the one voice of a woman who says "Well, I've never had sex, therefore Stephen Fry is right", probably a woman with more psycho-sexual hang-ups than Fry himself - famously 'celibate' for, what, 15 years.
What does 'celibate' mean, anyway? An active choice, a vow to be broken when temptation becomes too great to resist, a public admissions of one's own inadequacies, or a prosaic acknowledgement of one's reality for the time being? Probably lots of people are, short-term or for most of their lives, but don't make a thing of it!
Fry does rather take on the persona of Renaissance Man, the person who knows about a great breadth of subjects. It's unclear what research is there, scholarly or otherwise, his own or that of unheralded lowly researchers, to support his jack-of-all-trades dominance of the media; he is but a dilettante. I really can't imagine the arrogance that can drive someone like him to believe that he has anything whatsoever to contribute about female sexuality.
He seems to have made his career out of being a rebel against his background. How often do we hear how he was expelled from two public schools? Presumably not to hang round drear shopping parades sniffing glue, vulnerable to predators and drug dealers, allowed three hours a week at Pupil Referral Centre.
Emerging from Cambridge University in a blaze of glory, he displayed his rebellion by behaving as if he's been to a state grammar school and 'Russell Group' university. In the advanced stages of middle-age, he probably still thinks he is anti-Establishment as he floats through gilded palaces, frequently congratulating himself on his iconoclasm, oblivious that the world has moved on past him, and the internet is stuffed with people from comprehensives and Polytechnics, women and black people, who don't have to negotiate the Old Boys network to be published, writers, many of whom write well, some of whom write brilliantly. And can bear witness to their own lives without needing Mr Establishment to mediate their opinions and translate them for an audience imagined to consist only of equally privileged men.
