Our Empire of Ugliness

The recent violent attack against this lesbian couple has filled me with such anger. Late at night on a London bus, four men demanded the couple kiss for them. The men threw coins at them and made lewd comments. The couple naturally refused, and so the men beat up the couple, leaving them severely bloodied.

Sadly this story was all too familiar. I have not witnessed such physical violence before -- this attack is certainly an extreme but nonetheless relevant example -- but I frequently see vile behaviour by men (mostly) when travelling to and from London late at night. You hear men joking about gang rape, telling women they look like sluts, drunk men aggressively flirting with woman, men verbally sexualising a woman in every imaginable way, from her dress to her race, men telling less attractive women they look like men, men jeering whenever a young woman passes them in the carriage. An attractive woman, unless dressed in a burka, is likely to get several ugly remarks from men as she walks down a train carriage late on a weekend night. (And perhaps the women in a burka will receive ugly comments too, though of a different kind.)

(One never sees a conductor, though, and the transport police only seem to turn up once a year, usually in an almost empty train, or occasionally at the gates of a terminal station checking people's tickets -- which seems to be all they really do here, raising revenue for our confusing and overpriced transport system.)

We are an ugly society. We live in ugliness, we build ugliness, and so naturally our behaviour is ugly. It is an 'empire of ugliness', as Simon Leys called it. The beautiful is made pornographic. Selfish motives are the only ones that matter. Power is all that matters. 'Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge,' wrote Leys, 'obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule.' These four young men were asserting themselves. They could not tolerate the fact that these young women refused to live down to their pornographic, primal expectations of society.

Do these men realise the consequences of violent attacks like this? I don't think people generally realise the severity of such violence. On top of the mental trauma, which can alter the habits and psychology of a person forever, it can remove a person's sense of smell or taste, it can damage their eyesight, their hearing. One of my greatest joys is to play music. But just break one of my fingers and I will never be the same again; you will have taken away years spent advancing my skill. A life forever changed, almost ruined. Usually for the stupidest, most horribly meaningless of reasons. I hope these women suffer no permanent damage. And I hope the men who did it do suffer a just punishment, which, we can only hope, changes them for the better.