Russell Brand: Beautiful Beast

“She’s a beast!”

This was high praise, friends, for Destinee Hooker.

With a name like that, Ms. Hooker sounds more like a stripper than a beast, but Ms. Hooker was named “Best Spiker” in the women’s volleyball competition in the London Olympics of 2012.

“She dominates her space.”  My morning gym acquaintances and I were reviewing the previous evening’s Olympic proceedings.  (Yes, men will talk about women’s sports in the men’s locker room and will praise these splendid Amazons who put out beastly performances.)  In other discussions (with women), I’d heard others suggest much the same about American striker Abby Wambach.  In women’s football competition, Wambach was a “beast” who would also “dominate her space.”

Strikers, Spikers and Beasts…  which brings to mind Russell Brand: He can tap into a reservoir of beastly energy and dominate the space.  The threat of being spiked on can induce others to make way, and he can deliver the spike when he has to.  I’d pose this (richly deserved) take-down of MSNBC host John Heilemann on Bill Maher’s Real Time as a recent example. 

Yet, one might guess that the current incarnation of Russell Brand is capable of forbearance: spike on others only resignedly.  But, one can imagine a younger man allowing himself to get swept up in his own beastly energy, being less reserved and less politic, and spiking on people when, perhaps, being a little more circumspect might make it easier for everyone to collectively navigate through a fraught matter.

I bring this up, because, as some readers will know, Russell Brand (who?) has been the focus of the last week’s news cycle.  Yes, Zelensky visited the Imperial City north of Richmond to lobby for tens of $billions for more war in Ukraine, Because Our Democracy™.  Zelensky then visited the Canadian parliament where parliamentarians proceeded to give a standing ovation to a Nazi stormtrooper, because he had “fought the Russians in WWII.”  These people are dumber and more ignorant that even I had understood, but that stupidity and ignorance all serves a good cause surely: Our Democracy™.

But, back to the big news of the week: With goose-stepping precision, the British media put out a highly-choreographed sequence of highly-produced reports about the rise of Brand during Britain’s Naughty Aughties.  Rising and sometimes raunchy entertainment personality Russell Brand had, we learn, some number of relationships with people in The Biz as well as with at least one besotted lass of 16.  British media, it turns out, has been digging into this stuff the last few years, running down former paramours and determining whom among them might be willing to say something that either is incriminating or could be made to sound incriminating.  Getting involved with a 16-year-old might seem incriminating enough, but the play-by-play of some relationships-not-always-working out did emerge.  Mix that content with terms like “misogyny” and even “rape” as in “I think I might have been raped!” and you get quite a stew of stuff that might prove toxic enough to snuff out an enterprising fellow’s burgeoning online media presence.

Commentaries seem to span at least four dimensions:

(1) “due process” in the spirit of “equal protection of the law” (as in “Let’s see the Epstein evidence”) or the burden of proof is on the prosecution, which is just another way of saying “innocent until proven guilty”;

(2) Me-too-ism in that men are beasts and we should do something about that;

(3) Beasts like Brand are a product of the Naughty Aughties (or “Noughties” for short);

(4) The Establishment is just trying to take him down, because he’s been an effective critic of the Establishment.

I want to illuminate something that relates mostly to the second point—not about the purported beastliness of men, but about the impulse to channel it, exorcise it, remedy it, punish it and about the belief that such things can be channeled, exorcised, remedied or punished.

The main proposition is: They can’t.  Or, at least, this stuff is hard to channel.  A second proposition would be: This business of punishing men for being men and trying to remedy their masculinity by trying to distill it into something that conforms to someone’s feminized ideal is not a good idea.  Rather, societies have tended to come up with coarse mechanisms for imposing some order on how people manage their personal relationships.  Why?  Because relationships make for messy affairs. But, where sex is concerned, societies have had interests.  Society has had interests in relationships being more functional and less dysfunctional, especially given the prospect of dysfunctional relationships generating dysfunctional children.  Dysfunction imposes costs on everyone.

Those coarse mechanisms have included variations on statutory rape.  A given relationship may be very genuine and productive, but the authorities are yet going to draw a bright line—a line that is easy to police—when it comes to sexual relationships with very young people.  It’s not going to burden itself with costly fact-finding and a careful weighing of purported facts in cases involving under-age encounters.  Don’t do it.  No excuses.  Hence a technical note: In Britain, the authorities have drawn that bright line at 16, so those same authorities can’t go after Russell Brand for having gotten involved 18 years ago with a 16-year-old.

Other coarse mechanisms include variations on the marriage contract.  At some stage during the Roman era, marriage amounted to legalistic schemes to which only affluent families afforded themselves.  In general, one family would pay the bride’s family a dowry, and the bride would join the groom’s family.  But, the contract might assign to the bride’s family the right to swoop in and take it’s daughter back were evidence (of what quality? substantiated how?) to come out that the groom’s family had treated the daughter poorly.  That’s kind of like the right to foreclose on a loan that a bank will reserve for itself: So long as a borrower performs under the terms of a loan, the borrower gets to exercise most of the rights of ownership over an asset.  But, once the lender (the bank) becomes aware of objectively verifiable non-performance on a loan, it might be able to swoop in and assume ownership of the asset itself.

So, there’s a question amenable, in principle, to empirical analysis: Were families less willing to pay high dowries for contracts that afforded “foreclosure rights” to brides’ families?  In contrast, were they willing to pay higher dowries for contracts that denied brides’ families the right to march in and take back their daughters?  Hmm.

Bigger questions: What would explain the inclusion or exclusion of such foreclosure rights across marriage contracts?  Also, did poor conduct extend to sexual matters?  Meanwhile, did people of more modest means use some form of marriage contract to impose some structure on their own family relationships?  Or not?  Indeed, were informal mechanisms substitutes for formal marriage contracts?  Such people may have tended to be dependent on life in specific communities, in which case the threat of de facto ostracization or actual banishment may have gone far toward inducing otherwise beastly men to behave themselves.

Flash forward two millennia and two weekends, and we get a torrent of commentaries about how beastly the Noughties were.  Tim Black catalogues this stuff in a piece at Spiked! titled “The myth of the ‘Nasty Noughties’.”  He first makes contact with a piece by one of our friends over at UnHerd that was motivated by the pitch that the Noughties constituted “a period where cruelty was the norm and misogyny was celebrated. And Russell Brand was at its centre.”

Really?  And will “the Nasty Noughties” go the way of “the conformity of the 1950’s”?  The latter is one of those articles of faith one can stumble across any number of times in print in a given year.  Although I note that 1950’s innovators like Jackson Pollack, Miles Davis and Martin Luther King, Jr. are no longer available for comment.

Meanwhile, the 2020’s have started out abominably.  We got a steady stream of misandry dressed up in the language of misogyny.  We get hyper-conformism (as in conformism to The Science™), cruelty (as in the chemical and physical sterilization of children), and the daily undermining of the rule of law and democratic norms (a few examples would include the mass debanking and incarceration of protestors and political opponents; the criminalization of speech and the right to peaceful assembly; the celebration and elevation of yet other destructive protest and conduct).  Then there is the obscene business of making young Ukrainian men and young Russian men risk death-by-incineration-in-a-tank, Because Reasons that have something to do with Our Democracy™.

So, Russell Brand had been a randy fellow getting on with people in a business (entertainment) that has featured a lot of randiness over the course of the last few millennia.  But, in the here and now, the education industrial complex is busy teaching kindergarteners about sex and self-pleasuring, and it’s working to normalize pedophilia.

Russell Brand and his people have been spiking on the purveyors of all this beastliness week after week, and they are very effective.  He and his people regrouped last week, and they’ve gotten back to business. It’s not obvious that the Establishment will succeed either in shutting him down or shutting down the media platforms that have rebuffed demands by the State to cease distributing his commentaries.  Go check them out on Rumble.com.