Banterwatch update - PC who called threats to kill protestors 'banter' jailed for assault

Andrew Ott, the police officer who joked about killing protestors, gouging their eyes out and 'clouting' them 'to get a bit of justice back' - and claimed that all the above was 'just banter' - has been jailed for eight months, ITV news reports.

Apparently he sobbed in court as the sentence was read out. Typical bantzman.

Banterwatch: Bantz, Bantz - that's the sound of the police

PC Andrew Ott. Picture from Central News, via the Daily Mail website (sorry).

Meet PC Andrew Ott, a member of the Metropolitan Police Force on trial over allegations of -  and I know this is going to shock you - assaulting protestors at a tuition fees demo.

It's alleged that PC Ott struck student William Horner with his riot shield at the demonstration in 2010, then said 'he's going to have to have done something, coz I've put his tooth out.' 

PC Ott seems to have been quite loquacious at the protest - his own voice recorder  reportedly captured him saying 'I wanna kill this little lot', 'I'll gouge their eyes out' and 'I've clouted a few, just to get a bit of justice back' (one wonders if that is anything like Justin Timberlake bringing sexy back - is PC Ott saying those other coppers don't know how to act?).

That's all quite serious, but as you know by now, it takes

more than just beating up protestors to get an entry on this blog. PC OTT here is our subject today because he claimed, in court, that his comments were down to 'bravado', 'frustration' and - yes - 'banter'. 

The British bobby, eh? Best in the world...

Banterwatch: Sportsball Special

Meet Andy Haden. Andy is from New Zealand. Unlike the last Kiwi we had cause to examine in Banterwatch,  however, Andy isn't in politics. Andy is famous for carrying a ball from one end of the pitch to another. Or rather, that's what he was famous for. His ball-carrying days behind him, Andy seems to have taken up a new career in professional douchery.

The most recent effusion from Andy's nozzle came in response to a new study,  Out On the Fields, which surveyed gay and lesbian athletes and found that 80% had witnessed or experienced homophobic actions in sports, with 19% of gay men and 9% of lesbians reporting being physically assaulted, and at least 82% of respondents saying they'd heard anti-gay slurs. Unsurprisingly, these experiences led them to stay closeted, with 48% of gay men and 32% of lesbians hiding their sexuality because they feared the response from their teammates, and 31% of gay men and 15% of lesbians worried about discrimination from coaches or officials. 

A pretty damning indictment of homophobia in the sporting world there, you might think. But Andy has a different take: yes, according to Andy, all those homophobic slurs and physical assaults are just banter.

It turns out, though, that it isn't just homophobia in sports that Andy Haden has opinions about. Haden has previously referred to Pacific Islands rugby players as 'darkies', and has dabbled in rape apologism as well, saying that women raped by sportsmen 'are targeting rugby players...and they do so at their peril'. What a charmer!

Andy Haden, then, is a man who throws around racial slurs, thinks rape victims are asking for it, and considers homophobia harmless bantz. So, Andy, this one's for you:

Well, gosh. There are a lot of you, aren't there?

So there we have it. You voted for a man who hangs out with Jeremy Clarkson and the racist cheesemonger Alex James. A man who calls women who disagree with him 'frustrated'. A man who patronises other women who disagree with him by sneering 'calm down, dear' at them. A man whose election campaign was based, essentially, on the fact he's supposedly a barbecue-attending, Aston Ham supporting 'lad' while his opponent is a 'North London geek' who can't eat a bacon sandwich properly.

In large parts of the country you chose to put a cross in the box next to a party whose candidates routinely engage in racism,  homophobia and misogyny, all because you reckon you could have a drink with its ale-quaffing leader. In the city where I work, and the town where I grew up,  enough of you voted for this genial bigotry to come in second place, behind Labour.

And so many of you, so many of you, will have voted on the basis of the relentless propaganda from a pair of newspapers which regularly publish prurient pictures of half-naked female celebrities while simultaneously moralising about their sex lives, and whose owner sent his venal minions to harass a seventeen-year-old girl for supporting the geek instead of the laddish misogynist.

So I dedicate this poem to you: every man who saw Cameron say 'calm down dear' and had a naughty little chuckle because ho ho, that's how to put the little woman in her place. Every sickening little shit who says Katie Hopkins 'says what we're all secretly thinking' - that may be true in your case, but not in mine. And every single one of you who voted for Boris Johnson because hurr, Boris is a legend! This is for you  Enjoy your laughs now. Because one day, the ones you laughed at might just make you disappear...

Hey, relax, lads. It's just banter.

Banterwatch: It's Not Just Girls

Normally I like to start off these Banterwatch posts with a photo of the guilty party, but there are no photos of today's subject, Grimsby resident Neil Withers, accompanying any of the reports.  So I've whipped up a quick artist's impression, instead:

Grimsby resident and 'intimate grabber' Neil Withers: artist's impression by the author.

You may wonder why I describe Mr Withers as a total shit. Well, as the Grimsby Telegraph reports, Mr Withers 'intimately grabbed' a colleague at work, which shocked and upset said colleague to the extent that they had to take time off work to get over it. 

This is sexual assault,  clearly: but Mr Withers doesn't see it that way, of course. He calls it 'horseplay and banter', one of those 'things that happen in the workplace'. It is, he says, 'just lads being lads'.

'Lads being lads', because the victim of Mr Withers' intimate advances is a lad: a male co-worker. A case like this highlights the fact that Banter Culture isn't just harmful to women, but to men, too. Indeed, it can have a particularly insidious effect on men, as objecting to it often leads to their masculinity being called into question. A response from a male respondent to a survey carried out by one of the NUS Reps at the Tackling Lad Culture Summit has stayed with me:

"If you stand up to banter, you face further ridicule, and either don't have a sense of humour or don't have any balls."

This is the kind of attitude men who stand up to Banter Culture have to put up with, so all credit to the man who took Neil Withers to court for not putting up with it. We need more people like him regardless of their gender. 

It's becoming traditional for me to dedicate a poem to the bantzman criticised in these reports, too. So to Neil Withers, I dedicate this poem, about my own encounter with a bunch of 'lads being lads' in the woods of my hometown, back when I was still presenting as male. I recorded this a while back, so there is a rambling introduction complaining about Julie Burchill, but just ignore that bit. I also thought it would be a good idea to record it in my bra, for some reason. Really, I ought to record a new version: aside from anything else, I have much better tits these days...

There's a happy ending to the tale of Neil Withers and his intimate grabbing. Withers was found guilty at Grimsby Magistrates Court, given an 18 month conditional discharge, and ordered to pay £100 compensation. While I would have preferred him to face jail time, it's good to know his 'banter' has now landed him with a criminal record. Maybe this will make him think again the next time he considers 'intimately grabbing' someone,  whatever their gender.

Banterwatch: Election Edition - Part Deux!

This morning, I was disappointed to see that while Sedgefield Ukip candidate John Leathley had said a number of astonishingly racist and sexist things about the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, he had forgotten to issue the customary excuse that these comments were 'just banter', opting instead to make an apparently contrite - although misspelled - apology.

Thank God, then, for this man:

This man being Jeff Armstrong, Ukip candidate for Bolton South East. Jeff has been criticised for making and sharing posts on Facebook which have been described as 'crude and offensive' - including one joke comparing an 'ugly, fat woman' to a farm animal.

Unlike Leathley, however, Armstrong has followed the time-honoured tradition of seeking the last refuge of the douchebag,  telling the Bolton News that his posts are 'just a bit of banter' and pointing out that 'we live in a country where we have free speech'.

We certainly do, Jeff - though that didn't seem to stop your party leader complaining to the police about Have I Got News for You. Still, here at Howl of the Bantee we, like you, believe strongly in free speech, which is why I'd like to dedicate this poem to you:

I read that to a bunch of EDL goons who turned up to threaten the protest against your man Farage speaking at the Sage, Gateshead. Funny how guys like that always support your lot, isn't it? I mean, what with you not being racist and all.

Banterwatch: Election Edition

Meet John Leathley. John is a 23-year-old student at Durham University, and finds time between his studies to play at being the Ukip candidate for Sedgefield, County Durham. I say 'play' because Sedgefield is Tony Blair's old seat, and the Labour machine have it pretty much locked down.

Maybe that's why John decided to relieve himself by indulging in some rather unparliamentary language about the writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, when she appeared on Question Time last November.

Posting in a Ukip members' forum on Facebook - and let's all pause for a moment to imagine the sort of Socratic symposia that must go on in that virtual venue - John posted that Alibhai-Brown 'needs a good shag'. It's unclear how this would have helped exactly, as Leathley's prescription came at the end of a screed which began with the assertion that 'sleeping with women (when done properly) makes them crazy'. Perhaps Alibhai-Brown was being entirely too sane for Leathley's liking?

A fellow Kipper responded to Leathley's assertion by stating that they would 'stick a cannon up her arse and fire her into Israel, see how long she lasts :D' (there's no word, as yet, on whether this bizarre, emoticon-capped statement was the result of its author being slept with properly).

Leathley warmed to this theme, chortling that Alibhai-Brown would 'love a big black thing up her arse'. What he's doing there, you see, is comparing a gun to a black man's penis. Such wit! Doubtless the debating societies of Dunelm are distraught at the thought of losing such a gadfly to the world of professional politics.

In Leathley's defence, it might be pointed out that he has apologised, and hasn't tried to pass this particular exchange off as 'just banter'. Perhaps, however, his apology might mean something more if he'd bothered to spell Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's name correctly.

(For more on Ukip, and the way they attempt to cultivate a bantz-y reputation in order to distract people from the more cynical side of their policies, check out this piece I wrote for So So Gay last year.)

On This Historic Day

Decided to reply to David Cameron's tweet about the Royal Babbykins.

Yes, it's fucking violent

Since the Baltimore Uprising began this week, there's been a lot of discussion in the media of the limits of nonviolence as a political tool, and the cheek that white people have in lecturing people of colour about how they shouldn't resist state violence with violence of their own. To take this position is to judge people for smashing a few car windows or looting a drugstore, while ignoring the fact that for nearly a year now, US police forces have essentially been on a rampage, killing black men, women and children with impunity. That's a hypocritical position to take, and I condemn it. As far as I'm concerned, it isn't for me to dictate exactly how black people should resist state violence. 

It also set me thinking, though: because one of the worries I sometimes have about 'You're fucking dead LOL J/K', the key poem in my show, is that it's pretty goddam violent:

So violent, in fact, that there are places I've chosen not to perform it. When I played the women's tent at Newcastle Pride in 2012, for example, I deliberately decided to leave this poem out of my set because I didn't want to bring such violent imagery and language into a women-only space. 

Of course, one of the first things I was asked, by another woman, as soon as I'd finished, was: 'why didn't you do that banter poem?'

Actually,  the poem tends to get its most enthusiastic response from women. Men tend to sit there rather uncomfortably when I perform it. Understandable, really, with all the talk of kicking balls and introducing sharp objects to the urethra masculina. Women, however, tend to absolutely love it, because they know where it's coming from. They recognise it as an act of revenge on a culture which does terrible things to women and then laughs them off as 'laddishness', 'boys being boys' or, yes, 'just banter'.

(I should point out that not all women have been quite as receptive. One cis woman told me after a gig that 'of course, a real woman would never write something that violent'. At the time I was just shocked at the blatant transmisogyny, but looking back I should have showed her the violent, graphic death threats I'd been sent by a cis woman just a few weeks before, and which led, years later, to me writing this: 

But I digress...)

So many women have came up to me after gigs where I've performed the banter poem and told me about their own horrible experiences at the hands - sometimes literally - of Rape Culture.  And of how good it feels to envision the people who did those things to them being on the receiving edge, for once.

I mention Lisbeth Salander in the poem, and I think one reason women react so enthusiastically to the poem is for the same reason so many of us felt a rush watching or reading about Salander's brutal revenge on her rapist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Yes, it is brutal, yes, it's problematic, yes, it's fucking violent but this once, just this once, the tables are turned. 

'You're fucking dead LOL J/K' is a violent poem. But it is violent as an act of resistance. It's an act of linguistic violence which makes explicit the violence of Banter Culture and then reflects that back at the aggressors, the oppressors, the bantzmen, the boys-being-boys. And I don't apologise for that, and I refuse to be lectured by people who claim we will only win by taking the moral high ground. Women have been doing that for centuries, and men haven't exactly stopped treating us like crap. Maybe it's time we started making them scared shitless instead.