Showing posts with label Laura Kipnis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Laura Kipnis. Show all posts

Monday, May 14, 2018

GOOSING AND STEPPING


Laura Kipnis is an interesting writer and I think an interesting character, the author of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, about the moment when Liberalism becomes Stalinism, a contrarian perhaps, though most of what she writes makes pretty good sense to me, but that’s probably an argument for another time and place.

 


       Her appearance on a blog about walking, and I realize I’m a bit late on this, is because of a headline I saw on the Sun website that read, “LABOUR PERV - Minister ‘stuck his hand up young woman’s skirt 10 minutes after they met’.” Say what you like those tabloid guys, they know how to write a headline.

The young woman in question is, of course, Laura Kipnis, and the Sun refers to an article she wrote for the Guardian, part of which reads as follows:
“The culprit was a future MP and Europe minister, the friend of a friend. We were in a group of people heading into a restaurant, and this guy, later to become so politically illustrious, who was walking behind me, and whom I’d met maybe 10 minutes before, reached forward and goosed me.”

Goosing is a curious word, isn’t it?  It sounds kind of friendly and innocent, although I suspect that if you’ve ever been bitten in the bum by a goose you might think otherwise. 
Kipnis continues, “By goosed, I don’t mean he touched me on my butt, but in my butt, through the thin skirt I was wearing. I turned around and glared at him – I was young, jetlagged, and confused. Was this customary in Britain? What he’d done felt humiliating. I turned ahead and resolutely kept walking, whereupon he did it again.
“When I say things turned out well, what I mean is that he later went to prison. The ostensible reason was for cheating on his expenses, but I like to think it was cosmic justice for his crimes against my person.”


The best line here of course is the question “Was this customary in Britain?”  And I wonder how different things might have been if goosing had been an old British custom.  Would that have made it OK?  I don’t think so.