We know it's the case that "if you know their name, they're in the game", meaning that if the establishment media machine gives a great deal of coverage to an individual, whether positive or negative, it's because that individual is somehow involved in pushing the establishment agenda, and therefore the establishment wants you to know about them (hence the phrase, "there's no such thing as bad publicity". If the establishment press doesn't want you to know about someone or something, it ignores it).
It's not just the case for people, though: it's also the case for cultural offerings, in terms of TV shows, films, and particularly books. Thousands of excellent books are published every year, but for the most part, their authors toil away in obscurity as the proverbial starving artists, very rarely acquiring anything remotely resembling fame or fortune. The vast majority of authors have to resort to self-publishing and self-publicising, wholly ignored by the publishing houses (the odds of a submitted manuscript getting published are around 1%), and totally dismissed by the media.
Therefore, when major newspapers publish lengthy excerpts of new books - especially debut books from novice authors - we should pay attention.
I wrote an article on this theme once before, regarding the (debut) book from (first-time, young) author, Louise Perry, "The Case Against The Sexual Revolution". Perry's tome enjoyed three lengthy excerpts in The Daily Mail and was trumpeted across the press - left-wing and right-wing alike - as a seminal masterpiece.
"Right then," I thought. "How does this play into the agenda?"
So I read it and drew my conclusions, which you can read about here.
In short, this book had been promoted so heavily because it was meant to be a key cog in the imminent social shift away from arch-liberalism towards its exact opposite.
So when, a couple of days ago, The Daily Mail excerpted at length another debut book from a young, first-time author about matters pertaining to the sexual revolution, I knew immediately that this tome was meant to give us some major cultural cues about where we are going next.
I purchased the Kindle edition (I know, I know, but my rapidly deteriorating eyesight - I spent some time the other day stroking one of my hats, mistaking it for a cat - means backlit screens are much easier to read...) and read it in a day.
Not because it was particularly brilliant - although it is well-written - but because it was so hideously, transparently clear what it is going to be used for.
The book, entitled "Ten Men", charts the "year of casual sex" of the author, the then 25-year-old Kitty Ruskin. A survivor of a childhood sexual assault, Ruskin eschewed sex and relationships until the age of 22, and soon afterwards, decided she "needed to make up for lost time" by sleeping with as many men as possible.
Living in London and with an encyclopaedic array of dating apps at her disposal, she does not find it difficult to meet a multitude of suitors, but what she describes about her subsequent sexual encounters with them reads like the graphic descriptions of sexual abuse, because that's what it is.
Within her year of "exploration", she is raped twice (both times the men do not use protection), subjected to all sorts of non-consensual brutality including choking and slapping (so hard it leaves marks), and, on every occasion, is ultimately left humiliated, dehumanised, and - as she puts it - "discarded".
It is a nauseating read and has little to distinguish it - despite the fact Ruskin is a middle-class professional, with degrees from a top university - from an account of trafficking or prostitution. In fact, it might be a little bit worse than prostitution, because at least prostitutes get paid, whereas Ruskin actually ends up paying for her hideous encounters, as she on multiple occasions requires the morning after pill. On one such occasion, having recently been robbed (possibly by one of the men who raped her), purchasing the morning after pill pushes her bank account further into the red.
She proceeds to have a bad reaction to the emergency contraception, bleeding so profusely she nearly passes out, and is on the brink of requiring hospitalisation.
I felt deeply uncomfortable reading this book, not just because of the explicit sexual violence and all-round degradation described, but because I could not shake the increasing feeling, this is just compounding her exploitation.
Here we have a still young (she's only just turned 30), deeply traumatised rape and sexual abuse survivor, who is suffering a range of mental health problems including PTSD, anxiety, depression and (I strongly suspect) substance abuse, platforming her trauma in forensic and graphic detail to the entire world.
The book is the kind of deeply personal catharsis a trauma survivor might disclose to a seasoned, trusted therapist (she has one, and is also on antidepressants) - not the the entirety of the world's media and cruel, unforgiving general public.
She's using her real name and real face, and everyone who knows or will ever know her can read it. She will never be able to escape it or put it behind her, and when she's older and less acutely consumed with trauma, she might well want to do just that.
The book reminded me a lot of the infamous 2010 "Duke Sex Thesis", a graphic account written by then 22-year-old student, Karen Owen, about the men she had had casual sex with at Duke University. These men treated her in a very similar manner to that depicted in Ruskin's book. Owen, however, never meant her "thesis" to go public, and when it did, with the attendant huge controversy and backlash, she - recognising the catastrophic effects it could have on her personal and professional future - changed her name and disappeared from public view.
Ruskin, however, has intentionally submitted this tome to the public, and while she says she "knows she's going to get a lot of hate", I don't think she's remotely prepared for the extent of it, because of the way she concluded the book.
Her book is essentially an excruciatingly acute example of exactly what the aforementioned Louise Perry's book is railing against - the pornified "casual sex" culture which endangers young women and completely warps their attitudes to relationships and sex.
Rather than conclude there might be something wrong with this culture, however, Ruskin concludes (just as, indeed, Perry does) that there's something wrong with men, because, Ruskin unbelievably declares (I had to re-read this sentence several times to make sure I'd got it right), "you shouldn't have to get to know a guy before having sex with him".
That's the extent of the trauma and indoctrination she's still under: after everything she's been through, she still believes that, to be as physically intimate as it is possible to be with another person and to be in a situation where you are inevitably hugely vulnerable, "you shouldn't have to get to know the person" first.
This would be a stupid enough thing for a man to say - there are plenty of crazed women out there who could turn nasty on you in all sorts of ways - but for a woman, it is delusional to the point of psychosis. The vast, vast majority of violent criminals are men, and the only way to have a robust chance of discerning whether a handsome stranger in a bar is such a man is to get to know him first. Of course men one knows can still be abusive, but if you take the time to get to know someone before becoming intimate, you've got a much sturdier chance of spotting red flags and calling it quits, rather than going home with him drunk the first time you meet and discovering then and there he's a violent rapist.
One of the first things we're taught as children is "don't trust strangers", and they don't become any more trustworthy just because we're a bit older. You can only trust someone you know, you don't know someone you've only spent a drunken couple of hours in a bar with, ergo, it is not safe to become intimate with them. So, yes, you should have to get to know a guy (or a girl) before you sleep with them.
Therefore, that this is the conclusion of this book (that you shouldn't), makes it very clear to me that this author is being used and exploited - yet again, just as she has been so many times - by the publishing industry and media machine, to push an agenda.
The reaction to this book (and believe me, the publishing houses know this) is going to be utter horror and revulsion from more conservative quarters, using it as a stark example of just how depraved modern culture has become and how (irreparably?) damaged its young women.
Now, I agree with that assessment in a lot of ways - this book from Ruskin is an anguished howl of agony depicting just how bad things have become - but the point is, what's it going to be used to facilitate?
Although she doesn't realise it, what Ruskin has done is produce robust justification for our culture returning to archaic attitudes to women, where (just as it is in Islamic countries), they have their opportunities and freedoms dramatically diminished, because the alternative is they turn into mentally ill whores. That's what extremist Islamic regimes think, and unfortunately, Ruskin's book rather ratifies that philosophy.
The worst stereotypes about what feminism has done to women are typified in this book, which, tellingly, Ruskin admits was inspired by binge-watching hideous indoctrinating tool, Sex And The City.
As Ruskin details, Sex And The City glamourises casual sex and makes it seem infinitely cool and aspirational (Ruskin's favourite character was the "man-eating" Samantha).
It is of note to consider that Sex And The City was not initially scripted to be about four women: it was initially intended to be about four gay men (note its creator is a gay man), but producers decided audiences weren't ready for that yet, so changed the characters to women.
While I don't think casual sex is psychologically good for anyone, it is nevertheless a biological fact that men are far better equipped to handle it than women, so a television show about four wealthy gay men having a lot of sex with strangers and not seeming too negatively affected by it, might have been more plausible.
Instead, devious social engineers had women acting out this wildly unrealistic scenario, knowing starry-eyed young girls would simply copy it. Just as Ruskin says she did.
This is not a new tactic, either: the biography of former Cosmopolitan staff writer, Sue Ellen Browder, details how, when she worked for the magazine in the 1960s, she would be told to write "case studies" about glamorous single young women sleeping around with powerful men to advance their careers.
None of the "case studies" she wrote were true, but shadowy individuals she describes as "higher-ups" told her to write them as if they were... knowing that impressionable young women would read them, and copy them.
That's how "the sexual revolution" was mainstreamed: social engineers putting out fake and distorted accounts (including things like the Kinsey Report) alleging that most of the populace were already having plenty of debauched, adulterous, promiscuous sex, so you might as well get in on the action too.
In fact, they weren't, and it was only after sexual attitudes were re-sculpted by subversive forces like Cosmopolitan magazine and the Kinsey Report that sexual behaviours radically changed.
And what might have looked like exciting liberation in the 1960s, two generations later, looks like anything but: Kitty Ruskin, for example, looks like what she is, a sad, broken, mentally ill abuse victim. As well as her litany of mental health diagnoses, she admits to having long-term suicidal ideation.
I couldn't help but notice, as well, that her father gets no mention in the book (her mother gets a cursory one-liner), which speaks volumes. "Daddy issues" have become such a cultural cliche for a reason - because so many young women suffer from them. Girls who grow up not feeling loved by their fathers typically crave male validation, and that craving becomes sexualised at puberty, so they often start seeking it out from unsuitable men - men who will treat them badly, and thus reinforce the sense of worthlessness they already feel.
I don't know anything about Ruskin's biographical details beyond the fact she was sexually assaulted aged ten (by another ten-year-old), but I strongly suspect her parents separated when she was young and her relationship with her father subsequently deteriorated.
All of this makes the book prime fodder for conservative cultural critics to leap on and use as evidence that we need to dramatically clamp down on liberal social trends, such as family breakdown and sexual liberation, because look what happens when we don't.
But what shape will that clampdown take?
Look at The Handmaid's Tale (made into such a prominent cultural talking point for a reason). At the pre-Gilead beginning, when the cool, young conservative activists go around the colleges promoting their ideas, they present them entirely moderately and reasonably: they merely want to stem damaging liberal excesses and reinstall some common-sense moderation, they claim. They get a lot of support for this, from people damaged by these excesses.
Yet once they're successfully in power, any pretence at "moderation" goes right out the window, women all become house prisoners entirely at the mercy of male authority, and are stripped of even the most basic rights: just as they live in certain regimes today, such as Iran - a country the West just happens to be gearing up for a world war with, and which Iran and its allies would certainly win.
So taken in this wider context, one can see that Ruskin's book is a strategic clarion call for revolutionary change. The call doesn't come from her: as I say, she's just being used and abused, yet again, to fulfil a wider agenda she has no concept of.
The call comes from high-level social engineers who, when they saw this manuscript, realised this was the perfect vehicle to unequivocally demonstrate just how sordid and debased the West has become, and that we desperately need drastic change.
And I'm not saying we don't: but not the changes they have in mind, and which an imminent world war could very well bring in (I wrote more about that here).
You can easily tell that they are using Ruskin as fodder to fulfil an agenda, by the way they present her in publicity photos. Her she is in a bikini. Here she is in a very low-cut top, clearly not wearing a bra. Here she is wearing an off-the-shoulder top that has mostly been cropped out, so she almost looks naked.
When the media wants to create sympathy and support for sexual abuse victims, they don't present them like this. They present them looking modest and demure and even a little sad (minimal make up, slight frown), the message being, this is a good girl. She didn't deserve this. She deserves your sympathy and her perpetrators brought to justice.
That they have chosen to present Ruskin - a woman who has been serially raped and sexually abused since the age of ten - in sexualised, titillating ways, tells us everything we need to know about how they want the public to respond to her. They want people to respond with (as they already are on social media), whore. Slut. Of course it's wholly wrong that people respond that way, but they do, and the media knows it.
The PR agencies behind Ruskin's promotional campaign know exactly what they are doing, and she - still reeling from years of complex trauma and abuse - does not. She is being ruthlessly used and exploited, and the publishing house behind her book should be shut down for failing in its responsibilities to safeguard a vulnerable adult.
Nevertheless, Ruskin's book is out there, and could very well be the start of a significant unseaming of liberal Western attitudes to women, sex, and relationships. That it is already getting prominent coverage throughout international Western media - both the New York Post and Australia's News.com have covered it - makes this look even more likely.
It also feeds into prominent cases where women have been acutely abused, to the point of being murdered, by becoming intimate with men they didn't know very well.
There's the case of Grace Millane, who was choked to death on her 22nd birthday by a man she met on a dating app whilst travelling in New Zealand. There's Ashley Wadsworth, 19, who was murdered by her "internet boyfriend" when she flew over from Canada to England to meet him.
Put into that context, critics could even make the case that Ruskin was "lucky": at least she wasn't killed (though she details how she knew she came close in one encounter).
This all gives ample ammunition to make the case that freedom isn't a suitable quantity for women to possess. They can't handle it. They put themselves in danger. Men aren't to be trusted around them. We need more repressive rules in place to keep everyone "safe" (sound familiar..?).
We are under a full spectrum, lockstep attack to diminish our lives as much as possible, all under the guise of enhancing our safety, and that this book has been published now (in a cut-throat publishing industry where 99% of manuscripts are rejected), and given international media attention straightaway, speaks deafening volumes.
The question is, will enough people be able to hear what the real message is?
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