Stephen Fry Attacks Victims of Child Sex Abuse

[pErvinalia]

Yes, we must blame the victims.

How about the people who are offended by alleged "self pity" get over themselves and realise that child abuse is far more offensive?

The many tragic cases of real child abuse are important, and do need better responses from society. That's why it is also important not to let real child abuse blur into the imaginary kind, which from all accounts is a real issue...

No one is talking about "the imaginary kind".

[Rum]

Rev, If you go back to the original article this thread was based on there is a link to the actual text of the actual interview he gave. That is where the context is to be found, not in the article which lifts out a small section in order to bash him with it.

[pErvinalia]

I've seen the interview. It's not in anyway taken out of context. What context am I missing?

[Rum]

"Using child sex abuse as an example, Fry said people who wanted warnings on disturbing texts needed to grow up.

“There are many great plays which contain rapes, and the word rape now is even considered a rape,” he said. “If you say: ‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class, or you can’t read Macbeth because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because uncle touched you in a nasty place’, well I’m sorry.

“It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place, you get some of my sympathy, but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity.

“Get rid of it, because no one’s going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. The irony is we’ll feel sorry for you, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Just grow up.”"

[pErvinalia]

He's belittled people who have been abused as a child. That's fucked.

[cronus]

Sick mind at work to use child abuse as a foil in a argument in this way Rum.

[cronus]

Something about the entertainment industry attracts the wrong ones. Like the establishment? He's most likely picked up bad values from those with a hidden agenda of some kind? Trivialising child abuse is important for the establishment circles Fry mixes with, given recent scandals?

[Rum]

Well he has mental health issues. That is well known. But he is also clever, supremely intelligent and an example to many of us. He is a secularist atheist and general all round liberally good fellow as far as I am concerned who can make an arse of himself occasionally. He was commenting on the bleating of butt hurt liberal pansies who are so 'sensitive' to any reference to anything remotely connected to their 'pain' that they try to make the rest of us walk on egg shells. The object of his criticism as I read it, is that phenomenon, not people who have actually been abused.

[rainbow]

for in 2016, an absolutist interpretation of free speech has become popular among the chattering classes

Excuse the ignorance of a poor uneducated African, but what are the "chattering classes"?

Is this not in itself sort of microagression?

[pErvinalia]

So why did he mention abuse victims?

[Rum]

How the hell do I know? I do know that he was on the receiving end of some kiddy fiddling as a school boy and that it didn't, as he reports it, affect him. In any case it was clearly one example of the sort of behaviour most people here find loathsome.

The problem with this is that people get on the bandwagon band the frenzy feeds on itself. The Mirror said this:

"The actor and QI star hit out at the “infantile culture” of sex abuse sufferers in an interview in the US with David Rubin, adding that people who have been victims of the torture as children are “too sensitive” as adults and should “get over it”.

Cunts.

[pErvinalia]

How the hell do I know? I do know that he was on the receiving end of some kiddy fiddling as a school boy and that it didn't, as he reports it, affect him.

Kind of sounds like it might have.

[Seth]

Something about the entertainment industry attracts the wrong ones. Like the establishment? He's most likely picked up bad values from those with a hidden agenda of some kind? Trivialising child abuse is important for the establishment circles Fry mixes with, given recent scandals?

He's not trivializing child abuse, he's telling victims that it's unproductive and harmful to society for them to obsess about it and demand that they be wrapped in cotton batting and protected from anything that might "trigger" them. I have to agree. Denying and submerging emotional responses to past child abuse by demanding that society never say or do anything that might trigger an unpleasant memory does nothing to deal with the abuse or the memory and relieve the victim of the harm.

If you can be "triggered" then you need to be in psychotherapy, you don't need to be protected by society from potentially hearing or seeing something that you might find disturbing. It's bad for you and it's an affront to a free society, which has no obligation to censor itself just to pander to your psychosis.

[Seth]

How the hell do I know? I do know that he was on the receiving end of some kiddy fiddling as a school boy and that it didn't, as he reports it, affect him. In any case it was clearly one example of the sort of behaviour most people here find loathsome.

The problem with this is that people get on the bandwagon band the frenzy feeds on itself. The Mirror said this:

"The actor and QI star hit out at the “infantile culture” of sex abuse sufferers in an interview in the US with David Rubin, adding that people who have been victims of the torture as children are “too sensitive” as adults and should “get over it”.

Cunts.

Well, for their own mental well-being and happiness, they should. They likely need psychological assistance in doing so, but to imply, as you do, that it's wrong to tall the victim of abuse they are "too sensitive" and should "get over it" is to suggest that the victim should remain a victim forever and never be encouraged or required to address the trauma and find ways to keep from being re-victimized any time something "triggers" them.

Yeah, if you're the victim of trauma that results in your being "triggered" by the everyday functioning of a free society, which happens to include free speech, then you are "too sensitive" and need to "get over it." Go get some professional help and get over it, your life will be better for doing so.

But don't expect the rest of us to tiptoe around your mental issues just because you might be uncomfortable addressing them. That's your problem, not ours.

[pErvinalia]

He needs to "get over" his depression. And his obesity.