The Bluestocking, vol 110: Wilful blindness

Happy . . . Sunday?

A special edition: there's a theme to this week's newsletter, and it's "wilful blindness". We all like to fit in with our peer group. We all like to seem like good people. Sometimes that over-rides our scepticism. See if you can spot the blind spot in every case.

Helen


The fatal, hateful rise of choking during sex

Since December last year, a group of women have attempted to gather “sex games gone wrong” defence killings under one place – the website We Can’t Consent to This. In the decade since Vicky’s murder, such killings have risen by 90%. Two thirds involve strangulation.

Strangulation – fatal and non-fatal – “squeezing”, “neck compression” or, as some call, it “breath-play” – is highly gendered. On average, one woman in the UK is strangled to death by her partner every two weeks, according to Women’s Aid. It is a frequent feature of non-fatal domestic assault, as well as rape and robbery where women are the victims. It is striking how seldom it is seen in crimes against men.

This is an extremely sobering piece about how "it was a sex game gone wrong" is becoming an increasingly common alibi for a violent sexual killing. It very carefully picks through the statistics, and individual cases, and presents a compelling argument that there's an unsavoury and gendered phenomenon underlying them. Of course, that didn't stop some women on Twitter, desperate to prove their Cool Girl status, from implying the whole piece was "kink shaming".

If you can bear it, read about the case of Natalie Connolly, found dead at the bottom of the stairs with more than 40 injuries and bleach poured over her face. Her millionaire boyfriend was convicted of manslaughter - his defence was that she liked rough sex, and that she consented to the injuries which led to her death. However, she had five times the drink-drive level of alcohol in her blood, and the highest combined level of cocaine and alcohol the pathologist had ever seen. She had a bottle of carpet spray cleaner shoved into her vagina, which lacerated blood vessels inside her as the boyfriend extracted it. In his own telling, he left her slurring, with blood coming out of her nose, at the bottom of the stairs and went to bed. When he came down the next day, she was dead. He got three years and eight months.


Is Bruce Hay the most gullible man in Cambridge?

But when Hay and the women returned to Cambridge two days later, Hay and Zacks’s beautiful Italianate home on a quiet corner of Mount Vernon Street had been emptied of his family’s furniture, cookware, toys, documents, books, Zacks’s mother’s and grandmother’s heirlooms — and everything replaced with the women’s furniture. When Shuman had gone MIA in Quebec, Hay believes, she wasn’t seeing a doctor. She’d been overseeing the complicated move, all $10,000 of which had been charged to Hay’s credit card.

One of those grifter stories that's so implausible it has to be true.

The Many Lies of Carl Beech

Beech repeated and further embellished his stories to Operation Midland. “The Group” had now been expanded to include swathes of people with nothing in common except that his internet searches revealed they had been part of “the establishment.” Conservative Party politicians from the left of the Party (like Sir Edward Heath) were said to have conspired with their bitter political foes from the right, such as Harvey Proctor. Beech claimed he had been tied up and had his bones broken by Generals and Field Marshals. He said that doctors were employed to patch him up after abuse sessions. Wasps and spiders were set upon him. He had been orally and anally raped and subjected to near-drowning. Worst of all, he had witnessed the murder of three boys, two of them at the hands of Harvey Proctor.

The full story of "Nick", who rode the police and media's post-Jimmy Saville desire for atonement all the way to Mad Allegation Town.

The life and tragic death of Trinity graduate and writer Sophie Hingst

Though wary of offering a long-distance diagnosis they agreed, independently of each other, that Sophie appeared – from her confused story but also her physical signals – to have a psychological disturbance.

Such disturbances were eminently treatable, the therapist friend said, adding that Germans claiming to be from Jewish families touched by the Holocaust was not an unusual phenomenon. The need to be associated with the victims rather than the perpetrators in such a context was, he said, often linked to another trauma in a person’s life.

This section from a thoughtful, measured piece on a troubled fantasist, who claimed her family were killed in the Holocaust, really struck me. First, because Germany's post-war decision to take responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era is both extraordinary and commendable. (Poland is now rewriting history to erase any suggestion its citizens collaborated with the Nazis, and any reference to "Polish concentration camps" earns you a huffy letter from the ambassador instructing you to change it to "German-run concentration camps in Poland".) And second, because I think this impulse to be a victim rather than a perpetrator is felt in other cases, and it partly explains why people go to AA or find God in prison. It provides a definitive break with their previous identity and allows them to live with what they've done.

The case of Jessica Yaniv's testicles

Last year, Yaniv used social media to contact 16 female aestheticians in the Vancouver area, most working out of their own homes, who advertized Brazilian waxing—the removal of some or all of a woman’s pubic hair by applying and then yanking off strips of heated wax.

Sometimes, Yaniv would use the name Jonathan and a clearly male profile pic. Only then, upon being told that Brazilian waxing is for women only, would Yaniv reply to the effect of “I am trans.” The women would then convey that they were unwilling or unqualified to wax male genitalia. At this point, Yaniv would put in a complaint to the human-rights tribunal, alleging discrimination on the basis of gender identity, a protected characteristic under British Columbia’s human-rights code.

We finally have a demonstration of the conflict between gender self-identification and women's rights so obvious and so egregious that even the Guardian declared "it's not a hate crime for a woman to feel uncomfortable waxing male genitalia".

"While the Yaniv case has been going on for a while now, you may not have heard much about it, as it has largely been covered by the rightwing press," notes the Guardian writer, who might want to have a word with her own newsdesk? "But does that mean that Yaniv is a brave crusader for human rights who should be supported? Absolutely not."

Until next time,

Helen