It’s presumptuous of me to begin by quibbling with Shakespeare, but he’s dead and I’m feeling a bit kicky this morning. “What’s in a name?” his Juliet asks, “A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” To this I say, “Juliet. Woman to woman, don’t kid yourself, a Rose by any other name is not a Rose at all.”
Names matter. They really do.
It’s far easier to erase people if you erase their names, and it’s far easier to identify something if you can name it.
In one familiar Grimm’s fairytale we learn of a young woman who has been served up to please men with the promise that she can manipulate nature to bring about great material riches. This enlightenment spell which requires that she sacrifice herself, a woman, and her purpose, being a mother, can only be broken by naming the creature “Rumpelstiltskin”.
Every now and then the shattered pieces of the feminine gather together enough to speak a name in the hope that it will break the spell of the distorted masculine which enslaves it. Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter, Jeffery Epstein and now Russell Brand. But the spell never breaks because, for all the shouting, cancelling, outrage and fury, the real name has yet to be acknowledged.
Relativism, not Russell Brand is the real Rumpelstiltskin.
The new relation to truth is mirrored in the new relation to women. Only a return to objective truth will restore the respect due to women.
Instead of contemplating such a return, our mind-moulding media, educational establishment and political elite, now outraged by Russell Brand, will slip gloves on so as to obscure the blood on their own hands as they deliver him up to the baying mob.
Then they will go about business as usual, eradicating the name “woman”, removing the word “mother” from maternity documents, celebrating women only when they emulate men or present themselves as objects of use to spin straw into gold.
They will double down on teaching kids everything except how to keep their clothes on. They will sexualise children without the consent of their parents while crying in horror when a man fails to seek consent from a woman. They will shout about the importance of human rights while riding roughshod over the right to life of the most vulnerable. They will advertise, promote and celebrate sexual promiscuity, hail pride as the source and summit of all happiness, cancel and cut down anyone who refuses to adopt “my truth” and instead speaks of “the truth”. They will accelerate the production of television programmes which reduce a person’s value to their naked body and then serve it up for consumption, all the time pretending to be ignorant of the fact that we are what we eat.
The post enlightenment menu has been serving nothing but Bacon for far too long. One of Francis Bacon’s earliest works “The Masculine Birth of Time” contains a subtitle that characterises the resultant western experience, “The Great Instauration of the dominion of man over the universe”. Bacon’s ultimate objective was to recover dominion over creation in order to benefit humanity in material terms. This dominion would be achieved by the constraint of nature through technology, a process that exacted heavy costs from nature herself. The result of this mechanistic revolution was to break nature up into parts that could be manipulated by external forces. Nature herself was presented as a machine that could be repaired or reconstructed from outside by a human mechanic. Truth, as Peter Kreeft says, became “a prostitute bought and sold for the money of power over nature”. The feminine Truth and Wisdom have been raped and reconstructed from the outside by man for over 300 years.
Nature is, and has always been understood to be, feminine. The bringer and reproducer of life, personified with breasts and a womb. The old contemplative attitude of objectivity, wonder and respect for nature has been replaced by a new activist attitude of conquest, use and subjective satisfaction in relation to women, just as in relation to truth.
The answer is not to smash the rightly ordered patriarchy, any more than it was to smash the beauty of femininity as the enlightenment project has done. Our fathers and brothers and sons are not the enemy. Men are not toxic. They, like women, are the victims. We are all victims of a culture that has rejected truth, the truth of the givenness of things. A culture that tells us to take, rape, use and exploit in order to achieve freedom and happiness, but the freedom is false and the happiness hollow.
The sexual revolution could only have happened in a society that has turned its back on truth. It is a revolution which requires us to be relativists, to deny truth, to deny that we can know the nature of things, to assent to the manipulation and reconstruction of nature, to ignore the natural complementarity of the sexes and acquiesce to the artificial masculine domination of the feminine.
Only in such a world could contraception be countenanced, could a man become a woman, could babies be artificially created, bought and sold, could humans be sacrificed on the altar of sexual gratification and could the value of women be so reduced as to make consent (in such conditions) sufficient grounds for them to be used.
Any woman condemning Brand and not seeking to smash the petri dish from which he was unleashed cannot expect a different outcome any time soon. Russell Brand is the end result of a diet of garbage. Getting rid of him and not improving the menu won’t change a thing. The way to break the spell is to speak the name: Relativism.
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