All of you STOP! Read the goddamn article that Stephen Fry was originally quoted in. Be somewhat familiar with Stephen Fry. It is completely out of context and verging on vicious lies when all these newspapers and blogs run with a headline like, "Women can't enjoy sex," and use phrases like, "In a bizarre outburst."
What absolute bloody arsehanky. What a slimy, sniveling, under-rock-crawling, straw grasping, pathetic approach to journalism these people are taking.
How on earth can you call an organized interview an outburst? And again, read the bloody article and you'll see there's not a skerrick of misogyny. What a horrid, ludicrous and opportunistic word to throw at someone as consistently compassionate and concerned for human rights as Stephen Fry. Commenters are pointing at that he's old and gay, using that as a reason for his comments, as if he's mentally slipped from syphilis due to his years of buggery. What a horrid way to treat someone. Fry has said numerous times his being gay was a fiery trial that almost ended with him at the end of a rope or choking on his own vomit. He emerged firm on the need to accept people and his liberal mind and pursuits demonstrate a commitment to equality and human rights.
What we're seeing here is a completely overblown and misguided sense of feminism, a vicious mutation of feminism that isn't true to the cause, that seeks to crush men instead of equalize women. It's the sort of feminism you find in a university campus among a group of young women recently scorned by lovers who have thrown their hands in the air angrily and said they've given up on men, but who, ten years later, lose their anger, find the right man (or woman) and buy a labradoodle together, hopefully feeling faintly embarrassed about their overwrought man-hating when they look back at campus life during a nostalgic moment. Worse, it's women who never let go of that anger and look for any possible target to unleash on, never once thinking to have a proper look at the target first.
The comments and articles spewing out in relation to Fry's interview smack of ignorance and off-topic agenda-pushing rants. I remember when a book was released that talked about sex, IVF and homosexuality, aimed at young kids. People decried the book while proudly stating that of course they hadn't actually read it, it's filth and evil. This week's trashy articles read exactly like those squealing fools.
It's not feminism that is happening here. Feminists aren't attacking Stephen Fry for his harmless comments about gay men having much higher and sometimes more kinky sex drives than women. It's people who think they are feminists. People who think that tearing down an old queer who states quite truthfully that there are very few places to find heterosexual cruising lanes or cottages makes them a feminist.
Feminism is about increasing the power of women so they can take their rightful place next to men, not under them. Feminism is about creating a culture that sees humans, not man and woman. It's about breaking barriers: wage barriers, job barriers, rights barriers. It's about changing the minds of men who dismiss women just because they are women. It has nothing to do with a gay men commenting that he thinks gay men like sex more than straight women, in the context of whether or not women use public places for lewd and lascivious acts. Re-read that last sentence and see how ludicrous it sounds to judge a man's entire worldview based on such a light and frivolous topic.
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What we're seeing here is a completely overblown and misguided sense of feminism, a vicious mutation of feminism that isn't true to the cause, that seeks to crush men instead of equalize women
Bullshit.
Had Fry restricted himself to observing that he believed women generally were less inclined to seek out casual sex than men, there would have been no furore.
Instead, lulled by the comforting atmosphere of addressing a gay magazine, he chose to make a 'comical' riff intended to be a celebration of the freedoms of homosexuality which characterised women as frigid ball-breakers who merely tolerate fucking as a means to an end - said end being the manipulation of straight men.
One would imagine that such a high-profile LGBTQ icon would have encountered lesbians at some point; presumably he thinks they live lives of tea-drinking celibacy? Or that they simply...don't exist? Or just don't count?
That aside, coming from an intelligent man the assertion that clearly women don't like sex just because there isn't a centuries-long tradition of women going out cottaging is PAINFULLY stupid. He's speaking from a position of unreflective privilege, as a physically imposing, wealthy, upper class man who has precious little need to consider the very real possibility of getting pregnant as a result of casual sex (birth control being regrettably imperfect) let alone being raped, brutalised, or having to deal with slut shaming, having one's sexual history used against one in the event of somebody raping you. And that's just in those parts of the world where women ARE able to be sexually permissive without risking imprisonment, honour killing or stoning to death by one's community.
Fry is an intelligent man. For him to fail to take on board the simple reality that women have EXCELLENT reasons for being less casual about indulging their sex drives than men reveals a painful lack of empathy or intellectual rigour. He decided to go with the "women are frigid bitches, ho ho, those poor straight boys" interpretation of the facts.
And, hell, he's ignoring the fact that in societies where they DON'T need to fear social ostracism/imprisonment/stoning to death, some women DO go out on a Friday night in search of a good no-strings fuck. Yes, by and large women are less liable to separate physical and emotional intimacy than men are; no, this isn't an indication that they're only tolerating sex in order to use men for money or social status. That is STUPID and corrosive, and Fry should know better.
Everything you just posted illustrates my point! You've heaped on a massive amount of things Fry didn't say or even really allude to. To say that gay men like to go out for a fuck ISN'T to say that straight women don't. He never disregrards a woman's sex drive, he isn't really talking about women for the bulk of teh inteverview, but rather using a preconceived joke platform that THOUSANDS of comedian have used before, to launch into a preconceived joke platform that thousands have also used before. He spends most of the interview talking about overblow gay male sex. It's a farcical interview, a joke of an interview talking about gay men having lurid sex at times, and that there are those women who don't. I grow weary of the tired old joke, "Oh ho ho, you got married, you'll never be having sex again, oh ho ho," but I wouldn't be so foolish as to heap an entirely different debate about women's rights to sexual freedom onto such an obviously low brow and average interview and joke as Fry gave.
Find something else to direct your anger at, like perhaps those very people who stone a woman for attempting sexual freedom, rather than a man who has has his own hellish journeys through ignorant dehumanisation as Fry. You have very many more legitimate targets out there for your ire, don't waste that passion on this ridiculous Stephen Fry interview. If his comments do move the needle of ignorance further into the dark side, I imagine it moves but a whisker in the grand scheme, and his overflowing apologies later should bloody well move it right back again.
Read this, educate yourself on the man, be satisfied and move on. If you don't at least read it, then you shame yourself and your notions: http://www.stephenfry.com/2010/11/04/silliness/single-page/
"Much as you may wish to think me a compound of the most misogynistic, ignorant, sexist and antediluvian pig who ever trod the planet I can truly report that I know and love enough women to be quite assured of the fact that women do indeed enjoy sex. I would have to ignore evolution, precedent, personal experience and the empirical observation of vibrator sales and teenage pregnancies and all kinds of obvious and unavoidable facts in between to believe anything else."
So the feminist Taliban are jumping about this, saying how on earth would Fry know, because he's one of those awful gays. And yet it's ok for "Sex and the City" to stereotype gays as flouncing interior decorators? So how would women know?
I don't think Fry meant any offence by what he said, but I might say that the overblow reaction to it makes me even happier to be gay.
Agree with the first comment entirely. Beautifully put. And while it is, of course, important to pay attention to the horrific treatment of women in third world countries, it doesn't negate the fact that stupid, ill-researched, pompous comments such as those from Fry need to be questioned and argued with.
As to the "Feminist Taliban" commenter - an extremely crass and disturbing analogy which speaks volumes about your ability to engage in normal discussion - Sex and the City has largely been shaped by the gay producers Michael Patrick King and Darren Starr and was described by one reviewer as "a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls", so maybe you need to place the blame for the flouncing depiction of the gay characters elsewhere.
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