"I would actually put them in some sort of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans," said radical feminist Julie Bindel, in an interview with RadFem Collective. "I would give them a choice of vehicles to drive around with, give them no porn, they wouldn't be able to fight—we would have wardens, of course." If you think she's talking about captured members of ISIS, you’d be wrong. Bindel is referring to men. But if you're a woman, don't worry, you'll still be able to see them sometimes. "Women who want to be able to see their sons or male loved ones would be able to visit or take them out and bring them back again, like a library book," she explained.
Bindel’s a regular columnist with the U.K. daily newspaper, The Guardian, and makes television appearances. Speech is not constitutionally protected in the U.K. as it is in America, and words threatening or intended to alarm or distress someone based on their color, race, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion, or sexual orientation can land you in prison. By my reckoning, advocating putting half the population in internment camps because they’re heterosexual (Bindel wants to eradicate heterosexuality) is intended to alarm or distress, but Bindel hasn’t been charged with any hate crimes.
Imagine substituting "blacks" or "women" in Bindel's statement, and the uproar—not to mention the arrest—that would occur. She’d immediately be fired from The Guardian, but portraying herself as a victim allows her to say almost anything because victimhood culture immunizes those identifying as victims. Even if you're a decent man who respects and treats women well, Bindel still wants you interned. This is how she explains it: "And I am sick of hearing from individual women that their men are all right. Those men have been shored up by the advantages of patriarchy and they are complacent, they are not stopping other men from being shit." That's right, no men at all try to stop other men from "being shit," so off to the concentration camp for them too!
The irony is that Bindel and RadFem Collective are on a crusade about radical feminists being "no platformed" at various U.K. colleges. She wrote: "The campus craze of banning outspoken women from university events and debates across the country is such a gift to the misogynistic ‘men’s rights’ movement, that if I were a conspiracy theorist I would be insisting this is a global plot to end women’s liberation." It's a global plot because some U.K. educational institutions don't want to give a platform to radical lesbian feminists like Bindel who advocate mass incarceration for possession of a Y chromosome? I'm thinking she is a conspiracy theorist, not to mention lunatic.
I don't believe in any law that would prevent Bindel from expressing her hatred for men, or even advocating specific ways of punishing them, but if the U.K. is going to have these speech laws, they should enforce them equitably. There’s something wrong in a society where a woman who "likes" an innocuous a Facebook joke about a burqa loses her job of 20 years, which recently happened, and people like Bindel get rewarded.
Bindel’s clever enough to know how to exploit identity politics and its victimhood culture to get away with spreading her vitriol, while still claiming the moral high ground. She’s an example of how things can go very wrong in the rampantly politically-correct U.K., and her case demonstrates the hypocrisy of speech laws where a politician can be arrested for making a speech and quoting a passage on Islam by Winston Churchill. Hate speech laws are a global trend now, and the U.K.'s current political climate can serve as a warning for the U.S. when various speech criminalization legislation is proposed by the political left. While liberals envision a utopia where everyone talks politely and civilly about each other—under penalty of law—what you actually end up with is a place where the Julie Bindels of the world get to say any hateful thing they want, while others get the word police coming after them.
—Follow Chris Beck on Twitter: @SubBeck
