@SoupDragon
'I don't believe that any level of abuse of women is ever justified under any circumstances' Connery speaks for the first time after cancelling his high-profile appearance at Holyrood's Festival of Politics
Empty words when you consider what he’d said previously. That video - from 1987 - makes it very clear where he’s coming from, and he reiterated the sentiments to Vanity Fair in 1993.
It was only in 2006, when he realised that kind of overt male supremacism wouldn’t fly any more, that he backtracked at all. Still no acknowledgment of the odious things he’d said in the past, no acknowledgement of the harm he could have done with his remarks, no attempt to put anything right.
Because his comments will have done harm, undoubtedly. He was an iconic, hugely successful man and that gave him a platform. He used that platform to legitimise domestic abuse, male violence against women.
Men watching him who were already abusers could have felt vindicated by his remarks, and enabled to carry on abusing. Women watching him who were being abused, and already believing it was their own fault, could have further internalised the blame and been even less inclined to seek support or get away. Imagine the impact on children who watched that, both boys and girls, especially those already living with their fathers’ violence against their mothers.
No, he wasn’t at the extreme end of the spectrum of domestic violence but he was on that spectrum and he celebrated that, he revelled in it, he glorified it. Two women a week on average are killed by their partners or ex partners in England and Wales alone; the stats from Scotland and elsewhere in the world are no less grim. Many other women’s and children’s lives are devastated by DA. And Connery, with his foul, misogynistic, violence-advocating remarks, was fuelling and contributing to the climate where men can and do get away with unconscionable violence towards women.
As his ex wife Diane Cilento said, he was twice her weight. A slap could still do a lot of harm (and according to her, it wasn’t always “just” slaps anyway).
We will never know how many men may have slapped or beaten their partners once or twice more because of what he said. How many women will have stayed in an abusive situation that bit longer because of what he said. How many children will have grown up thinking that this was normal for that bit longer because of what he said.
And also thinking that it was normal for a man to seek to control his partner, generally; that a man is, in fact, the boss in a (heterosexual) relationship and has the right by virtue of his superior physical strength to set the parameters of that relationship and decide what it and isn’t acceptable. Because that’s the mindset that underpins his remarks.
If he’d really changed his views, he would have recognised that his earlier comments were profoundly morally wrong and indefensible, and he would have welcomed the opportunity to use his platform to speak out against all forms of domestic violence including the ones he himself had perpetrated.
Instead, when he learned that he was going to be questioned on that topic in an interview at the Festival of Politics, he just did a big, angry flounce and pulled out of the interview altogether, resulting in the male interviewer apologising to him, the wife beater. And Alex Salmond took his side and joined in the minimising too, for good measure. I guess that video wasn’t on YouTube back then.
In that context I can’t believe he’d had any real change of heart, and he certainly had no intention to repair any of the real harm he will have caused with his remarks.
But, c’est la vie. Here we are in 2020 and celebrities are still spewing misogynistic shite from their vast platforms, even if most of it these days is covert misogyny rather than Connery’s overt brand of it.
www.heraldscotland.com/news/12430892.i-dont-believe-that-any-level-of-abuse-of-women-is-ever-justified-under-any-circumstances-connery-speaks-for-the-first-time-after-cancelling-his-high-profile-appearance-at-holyroods-festival-of-politics-by-paul-hutcheon/
www.scotsman.com/news/people/jealous-connery-beat-me-says-ex-wife-2509499