Today everyone wants to defend Salman Rushdie. It wasn't always like that

For obvious reasons almost every political person believes that in the past his or her faction was correct on the major questions of the day. Obvious because this is at least part of the reason why they subscribe to that political affiliation in the first place – they believe their side will be right again in the future. So for conservatives while empire was unquestionably brutal, historically it was responsible for the establishment of democracy amongst the people it ruled over. On the Left a major source of pride was the struggle against Hitlerian fascism, which, were to you listen to today’s socialists and social democrats, united the Left around a common purpose and against a universal foe.

The problem in looking at history through this lens, however, is that it often glosses over divisions which plagued each side at the time. Not all conservatives were supporters of empire for example. Some opposed it vociferously. Nor in reality was the political Left united against Fascism. In his expansive essay The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell lambasted the silly-clever arguments trotted out by certain fellow leftists, who sneered at the prospect of lining up alongside their countrymen even if it meant losing the war to the Nazis:

“They will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism. There is not much freedom of speech in England; therefore there is no more than exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a horrible experience; therefore it is no worse to be in the torture-chambers of the Gestapo. In general, two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the same as no bread.”

Today Salman Rushdie is the cause célèbre. An argument repeated in recent weeks has been one which talks up the virtue of The Satanic Verses in comparison to the controversial film Innocence of Muslims. While the film is a “provocation” that “goes too far”, The Satanic Verses was different. Of course, in aesthetic terms anything by Salman Rushdie is invariably better than Innocence of Muslims -  a film which, were it not for the manufactured “outrage” that has brought it so much publicity, would fail even to make the low grade of a passable YouTube production. However liberals were not as united in 1989 as many retrospective accounts make out.

While many writers (and many Muslims) at the time publically defended Salman Rushdie’s right to free expression, some in the West were unwilling to offer Rushdie their solidarity out of a misguided attempt to “understand” the sorts of people who do not need to read books to burn them. One of those was feminist author Germaine Greer, who refused to sign a petition supporting The Satanic Verses because she said it was “about his [Rushdie’s] own troubles”. She added that Rushdie was “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with a dark skin” (no shame in that, you might think). In a March 1989 Op-Ed for The New York Times entitled “Rushdie's Book is an Insult,” former US President Jimmy Carter argued that, while Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms were “important”, “ we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Muslims whose sacred beliefs have been violated”. Others such as Iqbal Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain who was later knighted by the Blair government for services to community relations, went further, and said that death was “perhaps a bit too easy” for Rushdie.

There were countless other examples too, most not as extreme as Sacranie (although the Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper came close), but all implying that Rushdie himself was in some way to blame for his predicament.

Since the Fatwa, protecting the sensitivities of religious believers has become more appealing to progressives in Britain as we have become an increasingly multicultural society. And the sentiment is a laudable one. As the editor of Middle East Quarterly, Daniel Easterman, himself a former lecturer in Islamic Studies, puts it: “[A blasphemy law] is superficially attractive, carrying as it does heavy overtones of liberalisation, a promise of widening tolerance in a multicultural but divided society.”

Yet all too often those who reject the premise of an open society get a hearing as soon as they utter the words “I am offended”. As well as it being reasonable for the West to demand that its democratic traditions are respected by other nations, extending tolerance to the point where free expression is corroded does a disservice to the many immigrants who come here out of admiration for such ideas. One of the most depressing things about the struggle between absolutism and democracy, the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, is that “so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation”.

Today everyone wants to flatter Salman Rushdie. It was not always like that. In 1989 many who had enjoyed the fruits of free expression more than most could not bring themselves to assuredly defend it. Oh how much easier it is to be on the correct side of history when events are in the distant past. Much harder to recognise that the struggle for free expression is an ongoing one, and that to stand up for it is to stand firm even when it is buffoons like Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, rather than literary men and women, who are testing its limits.

Porn for women is here to stay

Fifty Shades author E.L. James last week released a companion album of classical music to go with her incredibly successful trilogy. Speculative plans are also in the pipeline for a film adaptation of the books, with arguments raging among excited fans over which Hollywood name is most suited to role of the dashing and, more importantly, sexually dominant lead, a young business magnate named Christian Grey.

Until last week I hadn’t actually taken much notice of the Fifty Shades trilogy. I was a man the last time I checked, and apart from the fact that my gender is conditioned (biologically or socially, you tell me) to sexually respond to images more than to the written word, my own “to read” list is sufficiently cramped already. Last week I was on holiday in Spain, however, and away from the gruelling myopia of the London nine to five I started to notice the sheer extent to which the Fifty Shades books were being read by women, vast swathes of women: on planes, aboard buses, and in one instance even on a moving bicycle.

Initially surprised at the sheer number of people actually reading - reading real, paper books that is, as opposed to staring endlessly into the void of wires and circuit boards commonly known as smartphones - I began to recall all the times I’d ever heard the Fifty Shades series contemptuously (and a little too enthusiastically) dismissed by men. “Silly airheads” was how a friend described to me the demographic that has so enthusiastically bought into the phenomenon of Mr Grey and the compliant recipient of his charms, Anastasia Steele. “Badly written”, was how another acquaintance cut the book down to size, apparently forgetting that a small proportion of his own income regularly goes on astonishingly un-erotic lad’s mags whose writers, I must say, are hardly banging down the door of the Orwell Prize.

But then there’s always been something slightly subversive about the idea of women enjoying sex, hasn’t there? In Stephen Fry’s book The Hippopotamus, the central character boldly claims that women “ put up with sex as the price they pay for having a man, for being part of what they like to call a relationship.” The main character in one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s greatest novels is at it too (and no, I don’t mean that). Bemoaning the fact that his wife does not want to have sex with him, the protagonist in Love in the Time of Cholera, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, concludes bitterly that women can at time have their periods “as often as three times a week”.

The popularity of the Fifty Shades series is, as Laurie Penny has deftly pointed out, based on the fact that the books are cleverly crafted porn for women. Populist porn with shiny edges and a fluffy centre, but porn all the same. Of greater interest is the wave of publicity on the back of which the trilogy has ridden. Women consuming porn is still news; and that is, I suspect, because it is still deeply ingrained in our cultural psyche that men like sex and women, well, lie back and think of the Magna Carta.

The only evidence that has ever been produced to support this assertion is anecdotal of course, and mainly revolves around the fact that women are a good degree coyer than men about their appetite for sexual activity. Well quelle bloody surprise. Did anybody expect the separation of women from an early age into good and bad human beings based on how many people they have gone to bed with not to have had an impact? As the American feminist author Jessica Valenti puts it in her aptly entitled book, He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut:

“I was called a slut when my boobs grew faster than others. I was called a slut when I had a boyfriend (even though we weren’t having sex.) I was called a slut when I didn’t have a boyfriend and kissed a random boy at a party. I was called a slut when I had the nerve to talk about sex. I was called a slut when I wore a bikini on a weekend trip with high school friends. It seems the word slut can be applied to any activity that doesn’t include knitting, praying, or sitting perfectly still lest any sudden movements be deemed whorish.”

A study last year by researchers at the Kinsey Institute of Indiana University in the US found evidence that painted a different picture. As part of a study into relationship satisfaction, researchers at the university spoke to 1,000 couples from Brazil, the US, Spain, Germany and Japan who’d been in relationships for a variety of years from one to 51. The white coats asked participants how many times in the past month they had kissed, cuddled, caressed and had sex. And the result? Men's overall happiness in a relationship was based on how much hugging and kissing there was, whereas women were more likely to say that their sex life determined the quality of the relationship.

Women will almost certainly stop reading Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels eventually. It’s starting to seem a bit like old hat already. However expect many more authors, film makers and artists to tread where E.L. James has beaten a path, because thanks to the author the proverbial stereotype of the uncorrupted female gender is increasingly flanked on either side by debauched biological reality. For many men the idea that women secretly yearn for sex as much as they do is an alarming thought. But then revolutionary ideas usually begin life in that way, only later to be defended by all and sundry as common sense.

Originally published @the Independent.

Socialism and blasphemy: all authority should be ridiculed

Violent protests have spread across the Middle East and North Africa in response to an anti-Islamic film, The Innocence of Muslims, that was posted on YouTube.

To call the film a piece of third-rate dross would be too lenient. Aesthetically the film is patently awful, and features a cast who can’t act and a set that jumps and bumps around the screen when it most definitely shouldn’t. The film also mocks and insults Islam. It portrays the prophet Muhammad as a philanderer and a child molester who gets a kick out of massacring non-believers. The fact that it’s badly acted seems to make it even viler, for some reason.

The content of the film is beside the point, however. If you believe in free expression you must defend the rights of filmmakers to make such films. Unfortunately a small minority of extremists in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have used the film as a pretext for assaulting American and Israeli embassies and a number of people have been killed, proving that the apparent sanctity of divine revelation trumps any concern for human life for a small number of the pious.

Instead of unreservedly condemning the violence and defending free expression, however, a number of Western commentators have sunk into a swamp of half-baked liberalism that appears to believe only in the necessity of committing cultural suicide as hastily as possible. One example was Robert Fisk who, writing in the Independent, claimed the people who “set the Middle East on fire” were those who produced the film, rather than those who lit the matches. As well as disenfranchising the vast majority of Muslims who, when they learned that Islam had been ridiculed in this way, didn’t go out and violently assault the first American they came across, this line of argument sidesteps the fact that monotheism has historically responded violently when it has encountered criticism. All the more reason to criticise, comrades!

It also gives ammunition to the forces of the far-right, who will gleefully welcome the proposition that Muslims are too thin-skinned to live alongside free expression, when in reality this applies only to a small number of fanatics.

In a society where ideas are exchanged freely, anyone who is not a sociopath will at times take offense. The idea that people can ever be sheltered from hurt feelings is, I hope to everyone reading this, an absurdity that only makes sense if one wants to live in a society resembling that of Nineteen Eighty Four. Bullies who use violence to silence critics of religion should never be appeased by socialists. The idea that free speech is being “abused” whenever someone actually tests it should also be seen for the idiotic fallacy that it is. The freedom of religious and political groups to proselytise is intrinsically connected to the right of the apolitical and non-religious to blaspheme.

In much of the region affected by the protests religion has historically propped up some of the most misogynistic, homophobic and reactionary forces. Take away the right to ridicule and mock authority, textual authority in this instance, and everything else is detail, including the right of the Muslim working class to satirise and ridicule its rulers.