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

FFs stop trying to justify this. Any right thinking person would think it was reprehensible to view child sex abuse images, whether it was illegal or not. I can’t believe some of the posts on this thread.

I’m not justifying anything. Learn to read.

I see, thank you. It seems he wrote for the Guardian into the 2000s, I hadn't realised that. That makes sense and may help explain- not excuse- his column on CSA images.

I knew him as a columnist for The Sun & The Times , and associate editor for the Spectator, so I wasn't aware he was left wing until relatively recently.

'As someone else says, this wasn’t just something that only Liddle was talking about at that time. I’m not even sure that ‘just’ viewing images was illegal everywhere then'

• I don't think that's an excuse. After all, TRA beliefs have been supported by many, for one thing, that doesn't excuse media figure who support them.

It’s not an excuse. It’s context. The fact the article was published in a mainstream left of centre paper is an indication that this wasn’t a view that was completely beyond the pale at that time.

Why and how do you think images like that get made?!

They get made by abusing children for profit and the titillation of "people" like Liddle.

People are rightly jailed for such activity and this sort of imagery was made illegal in the Protection of Children Act 1978, which predates his ghastly screed by decades.

Stop excusing horrible people doing horrible things.

As for those supposed "protect the children" folk currently dishing out praise...

Wtf are you actually yapping about? You can’t possibly think that poster was condoning the idea of viewing CSA images.
Why on earth are you trying to make out like she was excusing the idea of doing something so despicable when we can all read her post for ourselves and see that’s not the case?

I’ve already said I don’t agree with Liddle. For the record Townshend wasn’t jailed. He was cautioned, because he had viewed rather than downloaded images. Again, this is the context that Liddle was writing in. Liddle’s argument being that viewing alone shouldn’t be an offence. (Again for the hard of thinking, I think he is wrong)

www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/may/08/arts.ukcrime

I had the pleasure of briefly knowing him. He was kind and funny with a lot of common sense. He was absolutely pro women’s rights and worshipped the mother of his daughter.

He had no time for fools or ignorant types and rightly took the piss out of people for espousing fashionable views with no roots in reality.

He didn’t believe a bird could have a willy.

His writing was erudite and stinging and I rarely read a piece he published without both laughing and expanding my vocabulary.

It was way beyond my pale at the time. Did you think it was reasonable?

If people are asking, I clearly remember passionately arguing with men on the internet back in 2003-2005 who were claiming that viewing child abuse images was a victimless crime. It wasn't an uncommon view to espouse back then, and I remember being shouted down for my view that sharing images of rape was further abuse. I also remember a similar article being published in a student rag of the time by a young man who thought he was vair clever.

Incidentally, that's why a female-dominated website like mumsnet has been so powerful. On mumsnet, the default perspective was to remember that the child in the images is a real person whose suffering has been caught on film and to empathise with that child, instead of empathising with the viewer. For me, joining MN was like drinking from a clear fresh well after becoming used to brackish water.

This was a major subject at that time, and a lot of people were thinking in terms of overreach.

There was a Simpsons episode where a bunch of ladies end up trying to ban David-the statue, from coming to their town. A heck of a lot of people agreed with that concern. Especially on the left .the public discourse was about where to draw the line.

No clue who this fellow is (was) but I'm not sure of the point you're trying to make, OP.

Obviously everyone is going to have some opinions we find distasteful or downright abhorrent, which is why we probably shouldn't put people on pedestals, but rather value ideas and principles on their own merits, no matter whose lips they come from.

So a few gender critical women may have kind words to say about a man who's crass and misogynist (again, I know nothing about him, so I don't know) - what's that got to do with the fact that men can't become women, or that men shouldn't be in female spaces?

Does this mean we should never speak ill of Hitler? Or Stalin? Or Ted Bundy? Charles Manson? Why shouldn’t we speak ill of the dead? What is the thought process?

Indeed, it's just yet another in the very longline of attempted gotchas which goes

"X is a person who I don't approve of, he/she has now said Y which is stupid/rude/abusive about <insert topic here> therefore this means men are women and should have all women's things"

id be embarrassed at 4 year olds making that argument

“Can anyone give any insight“

Nope

And men can still not ever be women.

And Mouldemort is still a cringeworthy username.

PP are correct to say Liddell was once on the Left, when and where when his views on pornography and women would not have been at all unusual (and really haven’t changed much among many left leaning men nowadays). He drifted rightwards over time, though his stance on Brexit was shared by many on the Left. He was a gifted writer and probably a good friend to those he counted as friends, but overall a man with unpleasant character elements that probably didn’t change much over time and despite political leanings. He was perfectly correct in his views on gender, which is not a political left/right issue.

It really is genuinely shocking to come onto feminist forum and see some so-called feminists referring to images of children being raped and abused, as porn.
A man wanking over something doesn't make it porn, FFS.

Like many people who post here he was at one point a member of both the SWP and of the Labour party. He then rejected the conformist, strait-jacketed politics of the tribe and considered and approached issues with more freedom of thought.

Most people are pretty socially conservative, and that does not make them 'right wingers'. Being conservative simply implies an appreciation for the reasons that some practices and habits have become established ( such as why we have single sex categories). Radical over-throw for the sake of it is a pre-occupation only for the young, or for those who have never really made peace with reality.

I didn't know personally any of those characters you talk of and any comments I might make about them are therefore confned to their footnote in history: to the obvious fact they were disturbed and driven people who were responsible for some awful things. That's it!

The issue, for me, is these days people are villified for their political or imagined political perspectives, especially when they don't align with the supposedly 'righteous' tribe. We see this all of the time; and many of us here are sensitive to and aware of that because we have experienced it ourselves - for standing up for the dignity and integrity of female people and their established protections.

Character assasination has become something of a lesiure pursuit - and in fact, Ann Widdicombe had been speaking about this in the last interview she gave, 20 minutes before she was brutally assasinated with a hammer, by someone who had apparently singled her out for some of the views she espoused.

The nature of much on line media is nasty and spiteful and in no way redeeeming of the people who on one hand preach goodness and virtue, but then go on to defile and destroy the public perception of others who have done nothing worse than write or talk in ways that some others don't like or approve of.

Do we know for certain that Rod Liddle wannked over images of children being abused? Or is it perhaps that he became involved in the wider discussion of this growing menace and how best to deal with it or approach it?

I suspect many women here would be shocked at what some of the men in their lives are viewing on-line, including many righteous, left wing men. I suspect there would not be enough space in all of the prisons in Europe to contain them should there be mass surveillance of their computers.

The talk of shagging teenagers is
a, a joke
b, an insight into what men think about and underlines why safeguarding and female safe spaces are necessary.

Liddle was admitting that you can't trust men.

Yes it's like how a stand-up comedian generally isn't expressing their sincere beliefs in every joke. Liddle used the same sort of techniques in his writing.

There's something that feels very dishonest to me about using the very worst examples of humanity as the yardstick by which we decided if it's OK to denigrate a person who has just passed. It seems to be purpose designed to justify behaving awfully, indecently, towards other people.
Liddle had his flaws, it's undeniable, but his flaws didn't rank up there with Hitler, Stalin, mass murderers, etc... so why are they being used as a yardstick to measure him?
It seems a very black and white way of looking at the world. Every one is fair game for slagging off after they die, because of horrible humans in the past?
Does this rule hold in all directions? If a left winger dies are right wingers justified in slagging them off? It just seems a really nasty way to behave to me.
The dead person doesn't get to hear the abuse, but their friends and family may well get to see the abuse at a time while they are already upset by the death. What moral crime did they do to deserve the additional upset? Or is guilt by association going to rear its ugly head?
That guy who posted online about how he hoped Widdecombe's death was as painful as possible. Made himself look like a right idiot, facing police charges, being investigated by his employer. Is he a good role model, because Hitler? That just doesn't make any sense to me. However the police and employer investigations go, that stain on his character of the inhumanity of his words is going to stay with him for the rest of his life. Wherever he goes he's going to face - "You're the bloke who wanted Widdecombe to die horribly aren't you?".
I don't think what he did was a crime, but I think it will affect how other people treat him for the rest of his life, and it will be because of how he chose to behave.

Judging him solely on his writing, Liddle was a bit of a prick. Shagging teen jokes? No I wouldn't be rushing to say lovely things but I didn't know the guy.

Purity spirals and condemnation by association are nothing more than hypocritical bullshit from chronically immature people who possibly have never met other flawed, difficult, at times unpleasant, human beings and have certainly never had to make the headspace to deal with them in a professional capacity.

TRAs claiming a moral high ground when they have spokespeople like Sarah Jane Baker is laughable. Use your desire to scold to get your own house in order first.

We all draw our own boundaries, we don't have to agree and we can actually feel pretty appalled by the company others chose to keep, but then we make our individual choices accordingly. It's one of the many facets of having a personality, instead of a check list of things to fulfill, to claim an identity.

As you were.