Stephen Fry - Stonewall "nonsensical"

[fromorbit]

Another Reverse Ferret dashes out of cover.

Stonewall ‘has got stuck in a terrible quagmire,' Stephen Fry tells Triggernometry. ‘I have no interest or support of this current wave of nonsensical… It’s shameful and sad.’

The Rise of the Right is the Left's Fault - Stephen Fry

Good to see on one level, but irritating at the same time Fry didn't support the truth when it was hard. He also slags off Dave Chappelle for truth telling in the same interview. Someone tried to kill him though. Thousands of women faced death threats for saying biology is real, lost jobs and opportunities. Kids had their lives ruined.

More to the point now Fry feels it is safe to come out it shows we are winning, but a LOT more to do and the genderists will resist every step of the way.

All the current Labour front bench will know all about PIE and Hewitt (and I don't think she was the only one, was she?). It's part of Labour's history. Which makes their utterances over the last few years all the more remarkable. Fool me once...

Margaret Hodge and Harriet Harman were on the fringes of the PIE affair and Islington CSA, iirc? There were others.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/28/harriet-harman-backs-patricia-hewitt-nccl-apology-decision

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/nov/21/childrensservices.schools

Harriet Harman was very vocal in her support.

Miss Hewitt, who was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974 to 1983 said: "I take responsibility for the mistakes we made. I got it wrong on PIE and I apologise for having done so.

She wanted to lower the age of consent to ten. That's pre puberty.

I struggle to describe people getting behind sex for children as naive or foolish. In a politician, it's terrifying.

And it wasn't a secret, unchallenged thing. The debate was open, people knew what was going on and were alarmed and vocal. It was horrible being a young teenager then, and knowing we were on the menu.

She put out a press release in her sole name advocating that it be legal for ten year old children, eleven if you want to quibble, to consent to sex. That's a hell of a thing to backpeddle from. She 'should have urged the council to take strong measures to protect NCCL’s integrity from the activities of PIE members'. Yes, she should have. Instead she enthusiastically advocated for the goals of those same PIE members.

'Naive' doesn't really cover it.

They were literally called the paedophile information exchange, lobbying to have sex with children. You can't get on board with that and expect to be cast as simply "naive" when people are disgusted. Good grief.

I was a teenager back in the 70s understood the implications very well and was horrified by this. As did most ordinary people with a modicum of common sense.

And it all played out in the letters page of the Guardian at the time.

And on Radio 4.

I think sometimes it's easy to imagine paedophiles as men lurking in the background, with those in charge, or in authority, as being hoodwinked by them.

When in reality, those in charge or in authority could just as easily be the ones doing the hoodwinking.

We've seen it, a lot more transparently of course, with transactivation.

Infiltrate to take over.

They were literally called the paedophile information exchange

Quite. They were doing exactly what they said on the tin.

And they'd come so far, that hoodwinking didn't appear to be in the least bit necessary, either.

In plain sight. Still some of the same individuals in the public eye, given status and credibility, on the television and everything.

Yes. Credibility there and beyond.

Quite a number of these figures have substantial roles, chairing ICBs and other sizeable bodies that require excellent governance.

I don't really think it's surprising at all I guess.

I just look at all the crazy and sometimes unnatural seeming things societies have believed over time. There are societies where people think it is not only ok, but good, to exose imperfect infants at birth, and weird sexual norms are hardly that unusual.

People have a huge capacity to believe all kinds of things and a lot of what we think is obvious morally, isn't. It seems obvious to us because we take the thinking behind it for granted.

People who believed organizations like PIE were in good faith are a lot like people who think today any political policies championed by an oppressed group today must be in good faith. The people they think are the good guys are what counts as society for them and their ethical takes are derived from those people, even (especially, maybe) when others oppose those ideas.

I'm always reminded of that article about the parents in Germany in the 60s who fell under the spell of these ideas about adult child sexual relationships, including in educational contexts - where some parents felt that it was wrong, but then felt guilty for feeling it was wrong and tried to suppress it.

I was tricked into clicking on a Kink News link. Poor Stephen's fallen between two stools

https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/12/20/stephen-fry-stonewall-trans-backlash/

There's no need to repeat my mistake. The headline sums it up. Only two comments, although this gave me a dark chuckle

I've been gravely disappointed by Mr Fry in recent times. Not only is he emerging as one more passenger on the accelerating anti-trans bandwagon, he is also a firm supporter of Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people - some of whom, doubtless, are LGBTQ+ people.

I hope any LGBTQ+ Palestinians are keeping very quiet about it or are living in Israel.

No-one, it seems, likes a fence sitter. Unless you enjoy having splinters up your butt, it's better to pick a side. Afaic though, the genderists can have him.

I'm always reminded of that article about the parents in Germany in the 60s who fell under the spell of these ideas about adult child sexual relationships, including in educational contexts - where some parents felt that it was wrong, but then felt guilty for feeling it was wrong and tried to suppress it.

This one:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-children-how-the-left-took-things-too-far-a-702679.html

Yes, that's it.

What always strikes me is that perfectly normal people were made to feel guilty for their hesitance - they thought it meant that they were repressed prudes.

It suggests a real fragility of moral thought in many people that I find almost more disturbing than an impulse towards evil.

Increasingly I think, there's 'a real fragility' in what we might call civilised behaviour. We saw that in the riots. It doesn't take much to make people go along with any old load of bollocks.

I'm not sure that fragility in the veneer of civilised behaviour changes much over time.

The fear of being thought to be non-progressive represented a greater loss of social capital to the parents than their instinctive need to safeguard their children?

I still can't get quite grasp this unless it's the perceived horror of not being in the desirable "in-group" with more than a pinch of Lifton's criteria for thought reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism

I don't think that's quite it, if I am taking the right sense of what you are saying. Not for all of them, anyway.

It's not about being "in" as such, because they are convinced that these people are correct - they are on the path to righteousness, or are the arbiters of what is right and good, however you want to frame it, so have a really elevated moral authority.

And then it also seems like the people who go along despite misgivings significantly lack trust in their own instincts and reasoning powers.

One of the things that strikes me with all the sexual revolution thinking is how well it amplified people's mistrust in their instincts. They created an argument which said, I this stuff makes you uncomfortable, it's not a warning, it's a sign that you have been damage by sexual repression yourself. Don't want a threesome? Feel like one night stands might make you depressed? Worries that your fantasy life is weird and disturbing? All the result of repression, and the solution is overcoming those feelings and carrying on living according to progressive thinking.

Yeah, essentially w straight men who are misogynists the attitude is often 'Women are only good for sex, babies etc'. Whereas misogynist gay men will see women as totally useless unless for babies (ie. Surrogacy) . A lot of gay men ARE good supporters of women. But sadly Fry's attitude is not uncommon. I suspect if it had been lesbians who faced something like the AIDS crisis, gay men would have helped them less

I wouldn't say that gay male sexism us ignored though. I've read a fair bit of mainstream liberal criticism of gay men in the fashion industry pushing anorexia, misogyny in drag, gay men who supported fascism, and various other issues.