Why are some gender critical feminists praising Rod Liddle?

[Mouldemort]

Can anyone give any insight into why gender critical stalwarts such as Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel and Rosie Duffield are praising Rod Liddle? He was a wife-beating misogynist who argued that it shouldn't be a crime to look at images of child abuse.

It could be they are excusing his behaviour because he was personally nice to them, but honestly I am not sure.

https://x.com/Docstockk/status/2084268019270684830

I wasn't commenting on whether it was in general use. Just replying that rape is not sex, so cannot be porn. And completely agreeing that the term should never be used in reference to children.

It's always been known that viewing CSA creates demand.

I hate the term 'joyless' feminist. As if feminism's there to be fun. I take it to mean 'something violent men can't join in with'. Unlike transphobia.

Jenni Murray was a decent person I agreed with on several issues, and I grew up listening to her. I felt very let-down by her transphobia. She was no Rod Liddle, but all transphobic speech causes harm - and she had a position of authority. Shame she used it to kick down.

No, but TBH if it was someone writing as a friend of course they have that right to do so. But also, I do judge people in the sort of women's rights spaces who are friends with those people. Maybe that's wrong. I doubt they care about my judgement anyway. But for example someone who was a very vocal campaigner against child sexual exploitation being close friends with Thatchel or that "little girls can be sexy guy" would feel a bit jarring to me. In a way it wouldn't if an anti-racism campaigner was personal friends with a very right wing person or a socialist was friends in a personal capacity with a pro-billioniare Reagan economist.
Again, no reason why they would give a shit. But I think some views are more corrosive than others.

You don't do trans people any favours by suggesting that it's transphobic to believe that people can't change sex and women need sex based rights.

If you don’t want to see ‘things that violent men can join in with’, I suggest you avoid transactivism.

Are you referring to his article in the Spectator where he said he could never have been a teacher as "I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids"?

Of course. Many (most hopefully) paedophiles do not act on their perverted desires. However that does not mean they are not paedophiles.

Interesting to see that no one else on this thread has picked up on Rod Liddle's fondness for making racially provocative posts - either just within the line, as in his mainstream media work, or well beyond the line in his anonymous Millwall online persona.

There is a carefully balanced thread by the excellent Sunder Katwala here (it also mentions, which I didn't know, that Liddle was found in contempt of court for an article on the Stephen Lawrence trial):

bsky.app/profile/sundersays.bsky.social/post/3msakfjnvrk2c

Oh sure, but it's a waste of time even bothering to mention that on MN - overt racism and making jokes about the Holocaust is generally brushed off as "having a different opinion". Although it seems being a barely repressed nonce is too nowadays.

Is it interesting? I can't speak for anyone else, but I was certainly aware of all that about Liddle. What does it tell us?

That some people, including feminists, get on with people we probably wouldn't? Because, again, I already knew that.

That some people have different boundaries? Again, already knew that. In fact anyone who had paid any attention at all to FWR might note that many of the discussions centre on where people's boundaries are, and their right to establish them and have them respected.

What it doesn't tell us, however, is anything about whether any male people are women who deserve the right to access women-only spaces and services. Spoiler: they aren't and they don't.

I thought you were referring to his article in the Guardian where he talked about child sex abuse images.

"I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids"

Is that the entire quote? Unless he is specifically claiming to be attracted to girls below the age of consent, I think he is talking about potentially being being sexually attracted to older female students, which might be a bit ick, but it's a stretch to call it paedophilia. It seems much more likely that he was just trying to shock.

For comparison the Sun used the strapline "Sam, 16, Quits A-Levels for Ooh-Levels" when they first used her photo in 1983, Katie Price first appeared in the Sun when she was 17 and Charles proposed to Diana when she was 19. I don't approve of any of things (and can explain why at length), but it's going to be a long fight if you want to convict every man who is attracted to teenage girls.

But if you do want to do that and think that he was confessing to paedophilia in the pages of the Spectator, you should definitely contact them.

And there have been massive bust ups between Gender Critical feminists because they don't share political views. I think some of them would find it easier to be in a room with Jolyon Maugham than they would with each other.

And women still require sex based rights and it's still impossible to change sex.

Unless he is specifically claiming to be attracted to girls below the age of consent, I think he is talking about potentially being being sexually attracted to older female students, which might be a bit ick, but it's a stretch to call it paedophilia. It seems much more likely that he was just trying to shock

Year 10. So that's 14 -15 year olds.

https://spectator.com/article/a-teenage-girl-a-maths-teacher-and-a-righteous-tabloid-fury/?edition=us

"I don't think I'd have dabbled much below year ten as it is now called."

So 14-15 year olds.

This article was written in 2012, by the way. The Sun stopped publishing topless photographs of under 18s by the early 90s so I'm not sure of the relevance.

Well yes, the Sun and Sunday Sport etc was also disgusting in it's open sexualisation of children and was part of a much wider general tabloid and media culture that viewed girls**, particularly working class girls, as sexually fair game, provocative and responsible for tempting men. And sexual relationships between said young girls and much older men as OK. Several men in that millieu were later sent to prison as a result of crimes committed that their jobs made easier. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-27259318
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8pk06wrx0o . Of course that doesn't mean everyone involved in the sexualisation of sixteen year olds (and younger) was a predator but they had a role in facilitating a culture in which predators thrived.

Nowadays that very open attitude towards young teenage girls as being "up for it" has been memory holed but it also had a role in the way the grooming of young girls was ignored for so long. As much as those same tabloids like to pretend that it was only a result only of foreign attitudes completely alien to our own. They were part of pushing the "slags" narrative about working class children

The fact the Liddle's views were common among his peers does not make his views any less bad.

**I use the word girls to mean girl children as in under 18 as opposed to young women.

I'd happily sit in the same room as Jolyon Maugham or Owen Jones or (RIP) Anne Widdocombe even if I found them annoying. Id prefer not to share that same space with Alok Vaid-Menon ("little girls can be kinky too") because he turns my stomach.
There's having very different political opinions to someone. And there's advocating for the child sexual exploitation material. They aren't the same.

As a point of accuracy, the tabloid press were still printing topless pictures of 16 and 17 year olds in 2003, until the Sexual Offences Act of late that year prohibited it. The Sport, and possibly the Sun, also printed 'titillating' pictures of 15 year olds as they 'counted down' to their 16th birthday. The 'countdown to 16' was also utilised in respect of a number of young celebrities in these and other media, most notably Charlotte Church and Emma Watson, as grown men marked the date they became 'legal'. All very unpleasant. All again largely opposed by feminists who were often called 'puritans' (where have we read that recently? hmm) and 'po faced'.

If you want to go further back, the fight against what was then frequently unpleasantly termed 'kiddie porn' was largely led by Mary Whitehouse. A woman who has undergone a bit of a reappraisal, but who was at the time, and continued to be, largely mocked by 'progressives'.

And still people can't change sex and men don't get to use use women's single-sex spaces and services.

Animal cruelty doesn't bother you then?

Thank you for the link. It's interesting to step back in time to when the tabloids still controlled the zeitgeist.

We’re talking secondary school level here, by the way — and even then I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called.

I think he is trying to shock the reader and highlight hypocrisy, because that is his writing style. The rest of the article makes it clear that this is not a statement of intent.

The Sun stopped publishing topless photographs of under 18s by the early 90s so I'm not sure of the relevance.

I don't think the Sun stopped publishing photos of under 18s until they were forced to do so by a law change in 2003, but I doubt that many men are able to tell the difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old. Page 3 didn't end until 2015, and presumably continued to publish topless photos of girls who were young enough to be at school. (This might be why Liddle is not impressed by 'tabloid fury'.)

He concludes:

"But for sure, what Mr Forrest did was wrong. I suspect — and it is only a guess — that thousands of teachers up and down the land conduct sexual relationships with their older charges and that in most cases no harm comes of it. But it is still wrong, and no matter how imbecilic the teacher involved might be, it is still exploitative, even if it is not consciously so. I just hope Mr Forrest is not so thrown by the hyperbolic furore that he neglects to return to Britain with Megan at all."

But again, if you are genuinely concerned that he was promoting paedophilia you should definitely raise this with the Spectator.

Honestly it does in the abstract... But I actually know people who were pro fox hunting and had actually gone hunting back when it was legal. Proper old school Tory types. Their politics were the opposite to mine in most ways, and I also think fox hunting is super cruel (as is bashing a foxes head in with a baseball bat in your wife's Kimono or whatever it was). But I could be friends with them. And I also am friends with vegans who apparently are happy to hang out with me despite the fact I do something they might consider morally wrong for themselves.

So maybe it's a failing on my part. But I can think murdering foxes in cold blood should be illegal and still able to associate with people who do that. I can make a difference between my political beliefs and the fact that people I know are a complicated mix of different things. Whereas child abuse, sexualising children or people who make creepy theoretical arguments about sexualising children is different. I can rationalise it and create a very strong logical reason for this. But the original point was about how comfortable you would feel in someone's company and my reaction is therefore also emotional. I just feel differently about theoretical CSE then any other theoretical political position you could create.

In the Guardian article you refer to, he explicitly said that people shouldn't be criminalised for "looking at things".

By which he meant CSA. He wrote that in 2003.

The Hunt For Britain's Paedophiles was broadcast in 2002, and the immense harm done by CSA was very much discussed in the year afterwards. It changed a lot of attitudes and led to demands for change. That's the context for Liddle's article.

Yeah, I will believe a man who advocated for decriminalisation of viewing CSA images - and punched his pregnant girlfriend - when he says he wants to rape under-16s. Talk about hiding in plain sight.

So many men attack others when they have guilty secrets themselves (see, for example, how many men claiming to protect girls from trans people, gay people or Muslims, turn out to be paedophiles themselves). I wouldn't be remotely surprised if some very dark things emerge about him.

Projection is real. I was heavily pregnant when THFBP was broadcast and have never forgotten the convicted paedophile who campaigned for an end to FGM. I think of that creep every time a transphobic man sends me his repulsive rape fantasies about 'little girls showering naked with men'. Ugh. (When you're parent to a trans kid, those dangers show up a lot.)

There's so much else with Liddle. His repulsive, homophobic comments about gay sex, the article attacking Rosie Duffield for discussing her experience of domestic violence, his dismissal of the Rohingya genocide (the mass rapes and burning alive of women & little girls, after their families had been shot) as 'a bit heavy-handed'....

@nicepotoftea

"But again, if you are genuinely concerned that he was promoting paedophilia you should definitely raise this with the Spectator."

This is such an odd take. It's not my job to "raise" a 14 year old article. Should I also be complaining to Youtube about old footage of Rolf Harris or Jimmy Savile? Or rapists like Mike Tyson?

The excuse-making and whataboutery for this vile individual, simply because some his views aligned with yours (and indeed mine) is extraordinary. I wholeheartedly agree with his views on men in women's sports. That doesn't mean he wasn't a nonce, a wifebeater, and a racist.

Honestly, this whole conversation reminds me of Whoopi Goldberg defending Roman Polanski by saying "It wasn't rape-rape" simply because he was quite good at making films.

But then again, I shouldn't be surprised anymore by the extraordinary lengths to which some women will go to defend men.

I suppose I find it interesting because clearly lots of posters are (rightly IMO) exercised about RL's views on child sex abuse/fancying younger teenagers etc, but much less so about his blatant racism. It's like most people just don't care, which is a bit depressing.

Zoe Williams has written quite well about him here - I don't usually rate her, let alone agree with her on women's rights, but if you set that aside I think this is a thoughtful and balanced piece: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/06/i-knew-rod-liddle-and-hated-what-he-became

I imagine the focus was on CSA because those posting felt it was a better stick to beat feminists with.

The thread is about the immediate response to his death from Gender Critical women who knew him personally.

I didn't so am not in a place to judge either Zoe Williams or Rosie Duffield's comments.

Why not? The articles are still on line so if you are sincerely concerned they promote child sex abuse you should ask for them to be removed.

simply because some his views aligned with yours

I was more likely to disagree than agree with his newspaper articles. All I have done is try to explain why people who knew him personally were sad that he died and said so.