Across Town

The next article is hard to translate, because so much of it is based on specifically New Zealand references, but the idea of comparing urban, liberal, middle-class people with conservative, rural, working class people isn’t limited to New Zealand.

Chris Trotter’s column on Friday made connections between 1980s police rape cases and the tour. ((I’m not sure I can explain what the tour means, although I’ve written about it on my blog – possibly comparing it to the anti-vietnam war movement is the best term of reference, if the anti-vietnam war movement happened in 1981 over a period of 6 weeks)). I’m not willing to concede that police rape belongs to a by-gone era, but I do think there’s probably a point there. These men’s obsession with using their batons to abuse women, clearly comes out of the same culture that created the red squad. ((New Zealand police brigade used during the tour))

The first part of Chris Trotter’s article, which covers the incident in some detail, is very interesting. But I disagree with most of the conclusions that he draws from it:

The thing about the 1981 Springbok Tour that made such vicious confrontations inevitable was that people who would normally never come within half a mile of each other were suddenly arriving at the same place. The New Zealand of The Listener and film festivals and feminist consciousness-raising was on a collision course with the New Zealand of the TV Guide and “adult” videos and steaming male bodies in the rugby club changing- room.

On the surface it might have been a case of “liberals” and “progressives” meeting “reactionaries” and “racists”. But, beneath the political veneer, a deeper, more visceral, dynamic of cultural attraction and disgust was at work. In some part of their respective psyches, “Pro-” and “Anti-” responded to the Springbok Tour like a carnival freak show at the edge of town with each group defining the other as the geek.

This simplistic analysis is a reasonably common explanation for what happened in 1981. There’s enough truth in it to sound plausible, but it ignores more than it explains. It was the connections that he drew between this and the police rape cases that I strongly disagreed with:

In its essence, the public outrage surrounding the acquittal of Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum represents the moral collision of two mutually incomprehensible sub-cultures. Like Banquo at the feast, the ghost of 1981 pro-Tour provincial New Zealand has returned to trouble the consciences of the morally, politically and socially victorious veterans of the anti-Tour protests.

It’s as if we’ve all been trapped in an episode of Life on Mars with a New Zealand twist. Here, we don’t have to travel back in time to discover a world governed by sexism, racism and homophobia – we have only to take a trip across town.

When I read that Brad Shipton’s brother had described Louise Nicholas as “that maggot-lying bitch”, all I could think of was the scene with the placard 26 years ago, and wonder how many Kiwi blokes still think of courageous, outspoken and assertive women as dogs to be kicked, punched, raped, intimidated and cross-examined into a proper appreciation of male power.

The first problem with this argument is that he’s wrong. I’ve talked to lots of people about the police rape cases over the last year, middle-class, working-class, urban, provincial, progressive, conservative, and the vast majority have believed those women. I think this issue has united people across usual boundaries, not polarised them.

There is a more fundamental way that Chris Trotter is wrong. He is arguing that objectifying, abusing and degrading women is intrinsic to working-class provincial masculinity, and alien to middle-class urban masculinity. I’ve addressed this argument before, in a slightly different form.

This idea is one that I’ve only ever put forward by middle-class men, and you can see why – because it is in their interests. Either they can use it to argue that women shouldn’t fight sexism, because to do so would alientate the working class (who are inevitably entirely male). Or they can use it to distance themselves from men who abuse women and so not examine their own behaviour, or that of their mates.

In reality Chris Trotter wouldn’t even need to cross town to find men who “think of courageous, outspoken and assertive women as dogs to be kicked, punched, raped, intimidated and cross-examined into a proper appreciation of male power.” I’m sure he knows some (as Span says “Of course I spotted one particular man who really shouldn’t have been on the march, given its focus, but then activist circles aren’t necessarily less sexist than general society, and sadly I suspect he wasn’t the only hypocrite pounding the tarmac for International Women’s Day.”). Most abusive liberal men are probably smooth enough not to call a rape survivor a ‘lying maggot bitch’, but they’ll discredit her just the same.

I’ve never heard a woman express this idea, whatever her class background. You don’t have to have much experience with middle-class men to know that some of them are abusive misogynist assholes. You also don’t have to have much experience with working-class men to know how much some of them respect and support women.