Why I Speak Out. Since You Asked. And Even If You Didn’t.
On free speech, Dylan, the rights nobody is allowed to rank, the university management that told me not to upset anyone, and what I am actually doing here.
God, I love women. My mother is one. My girlfriend too. Most of my good friends are women, have always been women, and I have never entirely understood men who find that arrangement puzzling. So that is the personal disclosure out of the way, offered not as a credential - the notion that you need a permission slip from your social circle to hold a coherent opinion is one of the more tedious innovations of recent decades - but as simple context. I am not writing from hostility. I am writing from the opposite of hostility, which is a form of paying attention that has become, apparently, controversial.
I came from what would, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, have been called the far left. I own that. I do not apologise for it and I do not pretend it was something more respectable, because it was not, and retrospective respectability is the refuge of people who have forgotten what they actually believed. What I never bought, even at the height of my youthful enthusiasm, was the rather extraordinary notion that “progressive men are lesbians, politically.” I never bought the idea that the fight for LGB rights, women’s rights, the dismantling of racial discrimination, and the fight for disability rights were separate, divisible, rankable things. They are not. They were not then and they are not now. They are all, in my humble but entirely unshakeable opinion, equally as important as the right to free speech, free thought, and free political expression - which are themselves not luxuries but the preconditions for any of the others being worth anything at all.
“I am something of an absolutist on free speech. You should be able to say absolutely anything you choose to. But you must be prepared to accept the consequences of saying it. This is called being a well socially adjusted adult. It used to be considered unremarkable.”
On free speech, I am something of an absolutist. You should be able to say absolutely anything you choose to. Anything at all. But - and here is the part that the current generation of speech enthusiasts consistently omits - you must be prepared to accept the consequences of saying it. This is called being a well socially adjusted adult. It used to be considered unremarkable. There is a wonderful Bob Dylan song, “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” which is a magnificent riff on the old folk tradition - a young man, a farmhouse, a farmer’s daughter, temptation, and a promise he’s made to her father. The punchline, if you can call it that, arrives when the situation requires an urgent exit and he sings: “I had to say somethin’ to strike him very weird / So I yelled out, ‘I like Fidel Castro and his beard.’” The old man chases him off with a gun. Precisely as intended. He knew exactly what he was doing, exactly what response he would get, and he had calculated that the consequence was preferable to the alternative. That is free speech in practice. You say the thing. You take the consequence. You do not then demand that the farmer put the gun down and apologise for having opinions.
Most of us know, without being told, what is risqué, what is merely controversial, what is genuinely offensive, and what is beyond the pale. We self-censor accordingly, not because the state requires it but because we are social animals with a functioning read on the room. The distinction between that - the voluntary, socially intelligent management of one’s own expression - and the enforced, institutionally mandated suppression of anything that might produce discomfort in a person who has been encouraged to treat discomfort as damage, is rather an important one. I first noticed the latter arriving in my university sometime after 2012, when management began, with increasing frequency and decreasing embarrassment, to warn me to “be careful not to upset students”.
What the actual flying fuck, I thought. My entire professional role was to provoke, to incite, to be controversial, to introduce students to ideas sufficiently challenging that they could not walk out of the room unchanged. One of the clauses in our Award with the university enshrined, in writing, an academic’s right to do precisely that. It was not a courtesy. It was a condition of employment, placed there by people who understood that intellectual life requires the freedom to say dangerous things, because the alternative is not safety. The alternative is stagnation. Imagine if the great academics and teachers of the past had never said anything that made anyone uncomfortable. We would, right now, be treating women, same-sex attracted people, minorities, and the disabled with the enlightened humanity of contemporary Afghanistan or Iran. The discomfort was the point. The discomfort was the mechanism. The discomfort is how things change.
Right now, women’s rights are the most obvious casualty of the current retreat from that principle. I have been vocal about this. I write about it extensively. I do so because the abuses are visible, documented, and being conducted in broad ideological daylight by people who have convinced themselves that they are the progressives in this situation, which is an act of self-deception so thorough it would be impressive if the consequences were not so serious. But I want to be precise about something, because precision matters here and imprecision has already done considerable damage.
I do not see myself as a “male feminist.” I regard that phrase with roughly the same scepticism I apply to “sex change” - a notion so internally contradictory that its widespread adoption tells you more about the ambient intellectual standards of the era than about the thing it purports to describe. I do not see myself as a leader of men, women, or of anyone. I do not position myself as a spokesman for a cause that belongs to other people. What I watched in the 1980s, with some disquiet, was the argument for sectionality - women fighting exclusively for women, LGB fighting exclusively for LGB, each group retreating into its own corner and regarding anyone outside it with suspicion. I rejected it then and I reject it now. The idea that sex, sexuality, or any other characteristic is itself the primary qualification for holding a valid point of view is not, as it presents itself, a form of solidarity. It is the ultimate rejection of the very principle we claim to be fighting for, which is the right person for the job, irrespective of anything other than their talents and competence. Apply that principle to its advocates and it falls apart in your hands.
“What you are seeing right now - the assault on women’s rights, on free speech, on the basic integrity of public institutions - is the tip of an iceberg that goes down considerably further than anyone is currently willing to look. I have looked. I intend to keep looking. And I intend to keep writing about what I find there.”
What you are seeing right now - the assault on women’s rights, on free speech, on the basic integrity of public institutions - is the tip of an iceberg that goes down considerably further than anyone is currently willing to look. I have looked. I intend to keep looking. And I intend to keep writing about what I find, not because I have appointed myself anyone’s representative, not because I expect the audience to be large, and not because I have any illusions about the capacity of a tiny Substack to alter the course of institutional capture. But because I seem to have the ability to do it. Because the Award clause, as it turns out, did not expire when I left the university. And because silence, at this particular moment, is not a neutral act. It is a contribution to the problem.
People can think what they like about my motivations. From where I sit it is genuinely very simple. I see something that is wrong. I have the ability and the habit to say so, clearly and in writing. I do not require the wrong thing to affect me personally before I object to it. That, I would have thought, was the minimum standard for a functioning civic conscience. It used to be called decency. It did not used to require an explanation.
Apparently now it does. So there it is.