It’s terribly sad news to learn that journalist Rod Liddle has died today at the age of only 66. He was not only a rare mainstream figure who publicly sympathized with men’s rights issues, but he went beyond the so-called MRAs to speak out bravely against paedohysteria. Unsurprisingly, some of those past comments are already being used by the vile left on social media to besmirch his name. In 2012 he wrote a piece for the Spectator criticizing the hounding of a male teacher (Jeremy Forrest) who had run off to France with a 15-year-old schoolgirl he had been teaching in Eastbourne, complete with some typically honest humor.
The year before he had written another piece for the Spectator in which he criticized the decision of the BBC to stop playing Top of the Pops editions that had featured “disgraced” pop mogul Jonathan King:
On the BBC issue, as Terence Blacker pointed out in The Independent, if you removed from Top of the Pops all performers who somehow offended liberal sensibilities you’d be left with a very short show. King was convicted via the offices of Max Clifford, of course, almost twenty years after the alleged offences took place. There was no corroborating evidence and King was effectively unable to defend himself. At least one of the men who claimed he had enjoyed consensual sex with King (there was never a suggestion that the sex was anything other than consensual) later admitted he was over the age of consent at the time. King had believed them all to be over sixteen. Anyway, as a consequence, he lost his liberty for a remarkable seven years and has become a sort of pariah — which is a shame, because he is a very clever man and, as I later found out, extremely good company. He has made a film of the case against him called Vile Pervert: The Musical which is a fantastically berserk, bravado performance. You can download it from the computer thing, if you want.
Perhaps most controversially of all, back in 2003 he had a piece published (astonishingly) in the Guardian in which he asked “should it really be illegal to look at child pornography“.
How absurd the law is. But at least it is an appropriate reflection of our collective neurosis and confusion about paedophilia generally. The one laudable and necessary aim – to protect children from abuse – has become warped by our consuming, obsessive hatred for those who find children sexually attractive. There is no causal link between viewing child porn and abusing children. And even if there were, it would not be sufficient, within the philosophy of our judicial system, to simply assume that an unpleasant penchant for the former presupposes guilt of the latter.
How much police time is tied up in Operation Ore, the police investigation which has so far uncovered the names of 7,000 people who have visited child-porn websites? And how many children will be protected from abuse as a result of the prosecutions? No matter how vile we may consider the sexual predilections of paedophiles, we should not be in the business of putting people in prison for simply looking at things. The law should be above the blind, howling, rage of Rebekah Wade’s moronic vigilantes. But there is the whiff of Salem about it all.
A few years ago I read his book “Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy“, which I highly recommend. It is half a commentary on modern British society, and half an autobiography. I remember being struck by how similar his upbringing and family life as a teenager was to mine. I was also moved by a passage in which he describes how he is more anxious flying as he gets older and increasingly aware of his mortality. RIP Rod Liddle, another rare and great Male Sexualist departs.
His grandparents were Jewish Germans who had fled from Hitler.