Grace Campbell - Alastair Campbell

[BlueLegume]

If I have missed any threads already started about this then apologies.

I am literally lost for words on the post she added to her podcast along with Charlie Craggs.

My own daughter has been lost to this cause. I am hoping I get her back. How utterly vile can a young woman be - Grace Campbell - towards women who have worked so hard to give her such privilege. I might be ugly and a freak Grace with awful hair. But I am not a mean girl.

Yes, it was a prestigious all girls ex grammar school. No way would someone like that have gone to a normal 'bog standard' comp. If she had, she wouldn't have such an entitled, elitist mindset.

There are certain "comprehensives" in North London that are grammars in all but name, and lots of Labour MPs send their kids there.

Labour politicos all say they're against selective education, but they're not sending their own kids to Steve Biko Comprehensive in Tottenham.

I read Grace's Guardian article on her rape.

It's good. Clear. Upsetting, but not sentimental. Written with verve and wit, despite the subject matter. She's a good, strong writer, and clear sighted. And a woman who has been sold a pup by liberal feminism, and then been hurt by male violence.

What an odd blind spot for her to have revealed in this interview.

I hope at some point she is able to genuinely reflect on the dynamic between her and Charlie Cragg, and what led her to viciously attack other women to bond with this ridiculous nonentity of a man.

I also hope she has had good support after what sounds like a horrible and traumatising experience, as described in the article.

Content warning for rape:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/06/sex-positive-comedy-las-vegas-rape

Her writing on 18th century French history and literature was insightful and sophisticated.
I thought that was Nancy?

Absolutely. They claim their children go to state schools but it's gaslighting because based on the area they live in they can make sure their children get into the best schools.

Not that she appears remotely well educated.

I had not read Arabella’s post. Clearly I was wrong, I apologise.

I thought this was a better article which is another sensitive subject

www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/09/i-felt-entirely-alone-comedian-grace-campbell-on-the-aftermath-of-her-abortion

I think what leads people like Grace Campbell to viciously attack other women is that she's fully signed up to the big bag of progressive causes. Trans is an integral part of it. And being progressive gives you free reign to treat anyone outside of it with utter contempt. After all, those people are literal Nazis.

Mao's Red Guard would have understood this perfectly.

Yes, I'm sure that is part of it. But I also think it's a 'do it to Julia'. The woman-hate rolls so naturally off Charlie Craggs in that interview. It's him that starts chanting 'UGLY' and him that makes comment on the women's pubic hair. Grace is abasing women to appease the aggressive man. There's an awful lot of fawning.

I mean I haven't watched any of the other interviews on her channel. I don't know if she regularly slags women off, it would be interesting but I can't be arsed watching any more to see if the insults were wheeled out especially for Charlie, and wonder why that might be.

I've never got to grips with the late Nicholas Mosley's novels - they're maybe a bit too philosophical for my taste - but his two-volume biography of his father is excellent. They had a very difficult relationship, but at the end of his life the old monster seems to have come to the conclusion that Nicholas would be honest about him, more honest than Oswald could ever be about himself. So Nicholas was appointed biographer and got all the papers.

I don't really want to single the Campbells out and I certainly don't want to big up Mosley, but I can't really imagine any current year political figure saying "I'd like my estranged child to write a warts and all biography of me when I'm gone."

AC believes he's never done anything wrong, and will fly into a rage if you say otherwise, and Grace has a name that will get her into the right social circles and all the approved opinions, and that will do for both of them.

Yes, she's a good writer. Thoughtful and nuanced.

Given this context, I find the Charlie Craggs interview even more bizarre and disappointing.

Yes, agree, there is a lot of fawning. In GC's world someone like Craggs has high status and she's doing everything she can to suck up to him.

As the thread is about Grace, I went and read that Guardian article again - and have just seen that ArabellaScott read it too.

I made a name for myself with ‘sex-positive’ comedy. Then I was raped on a night out. Would my openness be used against me?
6 Aug 2022

IMHO the saddest, most disturbing thing about Grace's article, recounting events from when she was 27, is not that she was raped but that in the very first line she explains that, on the bounce from a series of failed relationships, she decides to be what used to be known as a "groupie":

"Last November, after a string of relationships with men had gone wrong, I decided to go to Los Angeles for a few months to try to fulfil my lifelong dream of having sex with an A-list celebrity."

For those too young to know, "groupies" were usually schoolgirls who, from the age of 13-14, dressed-up to look well beyond the age of consent in order to hang out with and shag musicians, football players, etc. then brag about it the next day at school. The ones who had notches on their bed posts for scoring house-hold name pop and rock stars sometimes featured in the gutter press but they were just the tip of the iceberg.

The wannabe-groupies I remember from my all-girls school were all very beautiful, elegant, aloof, middle-class and considered themselves to be "trés sophis". They looked down on the rest of us, who were shyly holding hands with boys who offered to carry our satchels home from school, because the night before they had been out getting spit-roasted by members of a 3rd tier rock band or 4th Division football club.

Some disappeared from school for a while. When they returned they were quiet and withdrawn, as well they might be after an abortion or giving birth out of town to a baby who was immediately given up for adoption. (Those were the days when it simply wasn't done for a nice, middle-class girl to have a baby out of wedlock.)

Some had mental breakdowns and/or got hooked on drugs supplied to them by the men they were hanging out with.

Some came out of it unscathed but the most beautiful of the bunch, who was a lovely girl and not part of the "snobby set", killed herself after someone sent an envelope full of incriminating Polaroid photos to her parents.

Pre-social media it was Polaroid photos that were the undoing of the unwary. Apparently, none of the men were recognisable as only their disembodied shagging parts were pictured but IIRC there was thereafter closer supervision of some of the football players and a couple of them accidentally walked into doors.

It would be miracle of none of those girls were not raped. I am sure some of them must have been.

None of us thought any the worse of those girls for their under-age sexual exploits. It was the snobbishness and superiority (of most of them) that pissed us off. If any of those girls had killed themselves I don't think we would have been bothered but everyone was upset and distressed when that beautiful, sweet girl killed herself.

The schoolboys who never stood a chance of dating her, and had never mentioned her before, were emboldened to repeat the one "joke" they had landed on to demean and degrade her memory, "More pricks than a dartboard!"

Grace Campbell, living in Cloud Cuckoo Guardian Reader Land, learned at 27 that men who were schoolboys in the 2000's were not so very different to men who were schoolboys in the 1960's and 70's.

Back to the article . . .

"The first time I visited LA, I went to Lady Gaga’s house. The second time, I danced with Drake’s dad in a club in west Hollywood."

Equally despised by those with whom they hung around, were "Liggers", including "wannabe groupies" on the look out for "prizes" to shag.

At 27, Grace seemed to be operating at the same level of maturity as schoolgirl groupies and liggers. She just happens to be well-connected and well-off, so is hobnobbing with the Stars in Hollywood and LA, rather than inviting D-Listers to gang-bang her on the pub pool table after hours.

What is different is that Grace thought that men were different now to when her parents were her age, whereas most of us know that that ain't so.

Or maybe she just thought that men of her elite leftie class were different? Not like those 'orrible oiks, chavs, gammons, etc. (who voted Blair into power and gave Daddy such an important job).

At least she recognises that her status might have counted for little if she had reported the rape:

"In the last decade, we’ve seen time and again that rape victims do not receive adequate protection from legal systems. My friends and I follow rape trials and the way they can end prematurely, because we want to know what might happen to us if we went to the police. We have memorised the facts. We know that in the year to September 2021, in England and Wales alone, 63,136 allegations of rape were taken to the police. Only 820 resulted in a charge or summons. That’s 1.3% of rape accusations.

The physical evidence that can ensure a conviction needs to be collected within a week, so if someone decides weeks, or months, or even years later that they want to go to the police, their case could be weakened. All too often, it’s your word against theirs, and their word is male, and it is louder than yours.

As one woman who went to police with an allegation of rape told the BBC: “It felt as though I was the one being investigated.” Her case didn’t make it to trial. When you go to the police, your phone can be taken away from you. Past messages, photos and correspondence on dating apps can be used as evidence, along with medical records, including alcohol use, mental health issues, STI history. Not every survivor of rape is equipped for the stress that all of this entails."

So she is grounded in reality enough to know that her public "sex positivity" might have affected how the Police, here and in the USA, would have dealt with her. Also that women generally are subjected to yet another ordeal if they decide to report that they have been raped.

Yet she seems to think that this is an institutional anomaly, something that does not reflect attitudes towards women and women as sexual beings generally:

"I had really thought that more was changing in terms of the collective male psyche. I’d hoped that since #MeToo, men now had a better understanding of consent, of why certain events or actions aren’t acceptable. But after Las Vegas, I’ve had a few uncomfortable experiences talking to men that have made me question that."

One of those men was someone she was dating and another was a male friend. She is shocked, shocked I tell you, that some of the men she dates and is friends with are sexist pigs. Shocked that #MeToo did not change how men think about and sometimes behave towards women.

The plane of unreality that these people attempt to inhabit must drive them mad with cognitive dissonance.

The only big difference from the schoolgirl groupies of the 1970's is that it seems very unlikely that Grace would have killed herself if someone had sent her parents photos of her being consensually gang-banged. Which is nothing to do with "sex-positivity" because I also doubt that they would have greeted her with, "Hey Grace, looks like you had a great time last night gobbling those cocks!"

The article ends:

"The world loves to praise a sex-positive woman until she is challenging the very things about the world that have made her want to be sex-positive."

"The world" . . . that would be:
a) men and
b) "feminist" Guardian columnists?

"I can be a cocky, self-proclaimed slut, who wears revealing tops, and writes shows about being obsessed with men, and I can also be raped. Those two things can exist at the same time. I know this, because it’s what happened to me."

Yes, but it is hardly the discovery of the age that #MeToo did not change this.

Is she equating "sex-positivity" with being a "slut"?

I don't know anything about her apart from this article and the video of the cringe-worthy conversation with her mate Charlie Craggs.

Is she "reclaiming" slut and seeking to purify the term of its derogatory connotations?

Or is she revelling in what she perceives as clique-approved transgressive behaviour, which she celebrates as being the actions of an aren't-I-just-wonderful "slut"?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/06/sex-positive-comedy-las-vegas-rape

She seems very childish and I kept thinking, "Who is she doing this for? Is it really for her "sex-positive" self? If not, who is she trying to impress?"

She's no Victoria Wood is she? Not even a Rosie Jones tbh. I'd rather watch repeats of Top Gear.

I think this thread needs to be closed. None of the recent posts have any relevance to my OP which was relating to the appalling video ridiculing women at the Supreme Court ruling.

It appears many posters are desperate to ;spin’ Grace Campbell as a ‘great writer’ etc

I do not buy into the spin.

Can I please ask anyone commenting on anything other than the utterly appalling clip of Grace Campbell and Charlie Craggs ridiculing women celebrating the Supreme Court ruling - please start your own thread.

As the OP I have no desire to try and appease the situation by commenting on how good a writer Grace Campbell is. That might be so. It’s a pity she did not add how awful life must have been and continues to be for the vulnerable girls exposed to the grooming gangs. Not one mention.

Thanks to all contributors. The clip remains appalling.

OP, it's a discussion board. So long as it stays roughly on topic, thats what its for. Different views and angles.

Campbell made some foolish comments. She insulted women. Made revealing, unpleasant, and daft ad homs.

There are larger issues involved here.

Feminism is also about looking at how women are shaped and harmed by VAWG.

Analysis and discussion of that is exactly what this board is for.

@ArabellaScott thank you for schooling me. As a woman I am well aware how we are shaped by VAWGs which is why I welcomed the law being on my side and ensuring single sex spaces.

Seeing a man pretending to be a woman mocking and insulting other women is VAWG in action.

Watching an incredibly privileged woman joining in compounded the insult.

The fact Grace Campbell has experienced traumatic experiences seems lost on her. Zero humility.

The spin around trans has become ridiculous. you are male or female. How you present within those categories is up to you - just do not vilify those women who want single sex spaces by spinning a yarn that they are ugly bigots.

Imagine not realising that it’s not actually up to you, to control how other people you don’t know respond to a thread on the internet?

I’ve not read the articles (The Graun can keep it’s grubby paws off my data) so cannot and will not comment on Grace’s writing abilities.

However, my take on the extension of the thread discussion is that a) Grace’s fawning to Charlie cannot be explained by being poorly educated or unintelligent.

So b) that makes it worse in my eyes that a young, intelligent and supposedly feminist who has direct experience of the harm done to women opts to seek approval of Charlie by denigrating the looks of the FWS women.

More than simply being juvenile and petty, it exposes the wide ranging misogynistic and shallow nature of gender ideology.

They both think that the best way to denigrate intelligent and committed women fighting for female rights is to talk about their looks because of internalised misogyny (on Grace’s part) and because there are no meaningful arguments they can make. But yes, it is an appalling video on so many levels.

On balance the misogyny, both external and internal, that Grace is affected by and displays is what is most striking about the whole subject.

Much of liberal feminism is just misogyny in a new disguise, though.