Thousands of column inches are available for those who want them dealing with Danczuk's inept attempts to justify his increasingly erratic and bizarre behaviour, and I am not going to repeat what others have said about the man here. My concern is with something altogether more insidious - the media establishment in the UK and its responses to and reporting of stories which involve sex.
Let's start with the young woman with whom Danczuk shared a series of 'inappropriate' exchanges, who has since come forwards to the tabloids with her story, expressing concern and shock at the content of messages sent from her MP to her when she contacted him supposedly looking for work. Within hours, the Sunday People were running an article declaiming said young woman as a 'dominatrix' who sold sexually-based humiliation online through a 'specialised website'. According to its breathless prose, the time stamp on the pictures on said website would have put this young woman - who I will not name here - at 16 at the time they were taken.
For starters, this reeks of victim-blaming and patriarchal bias. Danzcuk was engaged in a relationship at the time the messages were sent, and was asking a 17 year old whether she would like him to spank her. This is a man who 'tirelessly' worked to expose the child abuse committed by the late Sir Cyril Smith and the subsequent cover ups. A man who has made a name for himself with a book on the subject and various high profile pronouncements and work with victims of abuse. At best, one might describe his conduct with regards to this young woman as odd, given the whole circumstance. At worst, one might say it was downright creepy. Nonetheless, the fact of the man engaging in extra-relationship 'sexting' is less important than the reaction of the young woman in question. She had said to the papers that she was 'shocked' by the messages he had sent. Then the papers dug up the 'revelation' that she was a dominatrix. The message was clear - if she sold sex online, she couldn't possibly be shocked by the advances of a man. Or to put it more simply, she deserved what she got, and was clearly now grubbing for money.
If that wasn't disturbing enough, I decided to follow this one up and see for myself this 'specialised website' which showcased her sexual degradation. What I found, after not much effort (given how willing the papers were to print not only the young woman's online persona but also her real name and photo) was a tumblr account, set up on the 2nd May 2014. Every photo on there (there were about 5) was stamped as having been uploaded on the 2nd May 2014. The update which proclaimed this to be the new location of her 'findom' (financial domination - a sexual kink whereby men send money in return for being humiliated and dominated by women) service was also dated 2nd May 2014. There were no further updates after that day. Not one. No entries, no pictures, no updates, nothing. Even the pictures were no more shocking than anything you would see on the average newsagent shelf - a young woman in underwear type garments. You would see nothing any more graphic on the front page of Closer! or Heat!, let alone the 'lads mags' which seem thankfully to be dying out, much less half the tabloid papers in the UK. Yet from this one element, this young woman's character had already been determined by the media to be that of a calculating sexual dominatrix, wise to the sexual ways of the world and therefore in no way entitled to be 'shocked' at a man thirty years her senior sending her sexually suggestive messages.
What message are we sending to women here? As fast as Danczuk's (alleged) attitude of 'we are married so I can have sex with you whenever I wish' towards his first wife is being decried as a relic of a bygone, mysoginist era, the modern media tells us that if a young woman in any way takes charge of her sexuality in any area of her life, she forfeits the right to sexual agency, and must accept the sexual advances of any man, regardless of whether she invites them or not. This young woman, apparently a college student, is being trumpeted as a 'dominatrix' on the basis of a few tame pictures and a declaration that she is here to humiliate men for money made - it would seem - one day two years ago and then utterly forgotten.
And then we have the accusations of the first Mrs Danczuk. According to her, Mr Danczuk was a heavy drinker (which he himself has admitted, indeed blaming his drinking for his 'moment of madness' in the texts to the aforementioned young woman), a drug user and an abusive partner who told her that sex was his right as her husband, and allegedly had sex with her while she was asleep (which in itself is rape). Danczuk's immediate response to this story, printed in the Daily Mail, was that it was all ridiculous and that if there were any grain of truth to it then his ex wife would have gone to the police, not the papers. This proved slightly short-sighted at any rate after it was revealed shortly afterward that the police had indeed been contacted and were investigating but again the response which troubled me the most was the insidious undercurrent which seemed to suggest that the former Mrs Danczuk was merely selling outrageous lies to make a buck. What really disturbed me was the fact that one of the most strident voices declaiming this was none other than the second Mrs Danczuk. Taking to the airwaves in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari, the so-called 'selfie queen' (thus dubbed because of her tendency, when married to Mr Danczuk to post pictures of herself in low cut tops no more racy than those of the 'dominatrix' who caused Danczuk's 'moment of madness') brayed that she couldn't believe what her predecessor in the Danczuk marital bed was doing. Why didn't she think of her children, she whined. What would they think when they saw these sort of lurid revelations about their father in the papers? How dare she have said, days earlier, that she was changing the children's names because of her embarassment at the antics of her ex-husband? And anyway, it turned out that 'that young girl' was a 'dominatrix anyway' as if that explained everything. She went on to give a sickeningly cloying account of Mr Danczuk's attendance at her church last weekend, at which he had been greeted with warmth and support from fellow parishioners. Indeed, the local people, if his second ex wife is to be believed, absolutely love Simon and are happy with the job that he does. Which apparently includes texting young women about spanking them while moaning about having to work in Spain and getting very drunk. Mrs Danczuk 2 did admit, when pressed by Ferrari, that Simon had a problem with drink, but insisted that she had given him a stern talking-to and would be maintaining her dignity for the sake of her own children by him. And what a sterling example she is setting for those two young boys - that a woman who speaks out about mental or sexual abuse from a former partner is to be automatically disbelieved as a gold-digger or troublemaker. That it's ok if you are a drunk who sends inappropriate messages to women who are literally young enough to be your granddaughter as long as you say you regret it (when you get caught) and that you were simply drunk and 'have a weakness for young girls'.
That last is perhaps the most chilling facet of the story in itself. That Danczuk attempted to brush off the revelations as a 'drunken mistake' was to be expected in an age where politicians lead the way in abstaining responsibility for any of their actions. That he went further, casually dropping the fact that he 'has a weakness for young girls' (which he then 'justified' with allusions to the fact that his first wife was 10 years younger than him and his second wife and most recent girlfriend were both 17 years younger than him) is indicative of the sort of mindset he has. That the media at large seem not to have made much more of this than that it is a fairly lame excuse is downright chilling.
As a man, it has taken me a long time to realise the extent of the privilege which I basically inherited thanks to the accident of my gender. They are the kind of blinders it is difficult to remove, not least because the influence of the patriarchy is so very insidious and far-reaching. A woman can go from a sexually precocious teenager to a 'dominatrix' in the tap of a keyboard. A woman who alleges rape must be doing it for any other reason than because she was ever actually raped, and a woman who alleges rape should 'think of what her children will think of their father' before she considers her own wellbeing, or the wellbeing of any other young woman who comes into contact with her abuser.
Perhaps if the second Mrs Danczuk stopped and thought for a moment, she might think it appropriate that some of the sympathy she is so eager to gush about having for her hard-drinking ex husband and his 'weakness for young girls' might be better placed for the lives of the other women whose lives have been ruined by contact with the man, either directly or via the machinations of a scandal-hungry media and its willing public audience. In a toss up between feeling sorry for a 49 year old man who gets so drunk while 'working' abroad that he apparently starts sending suggestive messages to young women or the young college student being systematically named and shamed as some sort of whorish temptress by half the UK media establishment, I know which side I come down on. And it isn't Mr Danczuk's.
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