Natasha Walter: Russell Brand’s old-fashioned misogyny is being driven out of TV. But it still thrives online

I never met Russell Brand. But I knew enough about him to be sure, when I published my book Living Dolls back in 2010, that he was a clear example of the misogynist culture that was poisoning women’s lives.

I was inspired to write Living Dolls by a teenage girl who wrote to me lamenting that she felt like the only person she knew who objected to being harassed in clubs and exposed to pornography by her boyfriends. In it, I went deep into how a culture that dehumanised women and reduced them to sexualised objects was being maintained from top to bottom of society.

Brand was just one example of that. For instance, I wrote about how he boasted about paying for sex in Thailand when he was just 17. He said that he “fucked loads of prostitutes… never wore a condom” and that this experience had made him “comfortable around women” and “confident about sex”. The exploitation that so often underlies sex work was completely overlooked by Brand, as it was so often in the culture of the time. 

I also wrote about Brand’s attitudes towards professional women, quoting a writer who went to interview him and then heard him discussing her breasts on air, and what it would be like to have sex with her. “It was out of order,” she said at the time, “and reductive: woman, ergo piece of meat, fair game, punchline, non-person.”

This went to the heart of the culture I and other women were trying to resist. We could see that despite decades of campaigning for equality, women were constantly coming up against attitudes that saw them as less than human, that only valued them as sexualised objects. And we could see that it had become particularly hard for women to dissent because these attitudes were so often presented as unexceptional, ordinary, as simply banter. They were being dripped into society all the time through mainstream comedy and magazines and television. It had become very, very difficult to stand up against this misogyny that dressed itself up as light entertainment. 

The conviction of Russell Brand last week exposed that misogynist culture for what many of us had been arguing it was for so long – a culture that genuinely harms and hurts women. In the trial, we heard the evidence of the assaults and coercion and rape that lay behind that thin veneer of boasts and banter. 

So I pay tribute to all the women who have been standing up against Brand and other men over the last decade. Rosamund Urwin of the Sunday Times did amazing work in exposing the reality behind Brand’s behaviour and bringing women together to speak out – and for her trouble, she had Brand’s barrister tell her “you fucked it” outside court.

But we should not mistake the shifts we are seeing for victory. Not yet.

The culture that I was exposing in the 2000s had certain characteristics, such as Page Three and lads’ magazines, that seem wildly old-fashioned now. In mainstream comedy and television and music, things have shifted, and broadcasters like the BBC and ITV are being more careful about the messages they put out. That’s not just about Brand’s downfall, of course, it’s also about ongoing revelations about others – and there are a number of names swirling around the internet, as well as the depressing stories about David Walliams that were finally published last week.

But even if it’s being pushed out of certain spaces, misogyny has not gone away. It has found other places where it can mutate and grow, other methods it can use to grip men’s minds, other ways to dehumanise women and to harm them. 

When I decided to go back into the fray with my recent book, Feminism for a World on Fire, I welcomed the fact that some reckonings with sexism are taking place in mainstream culture, and that certain men are being exposed. But at exactly the same time, I found that there is a much darker misogyny being nurtured in many places today. It may no longer be beamed into our sitting rooms through entertainment shows made by big broadcasters. But it is being beamed to every boy and man in the world through social media platforms and through powerful influencers who have far greater reach than even Brand in his prime. 

And it is being protected by the most powerful elites in the world. Donald Trump himself still sits in the White House despite all the accusations against him, and his power protects others and helps to ensure that the new misogyny goes unchallenged. The tech elites, too, are deeply entwined with this new misogyny. And that means that those who defend the kind of attitudes that Brand helped to make mainstream no longer need the BBC or Channel 4 to communicate them with millions of others: they can hang out on X or Substack or YouTube, where men with tens of thousands of followers are earning money from publicly throwing mud over Brand’s victims and questioning the verdict. Russell Brand has received public support from Elon Musk and his account is still active on X. Indeed, far from challenging this misogyny, those who run these media platforms are constantly amplifying it, and monetising it. 

So I want to celebrate the courage of the women who have shown up for one another and for justice in the 16 years since I first wrote about Brand. But I also want to recognise there is too far to go before we can declare any kind of victory. The doll's house is turning out to be a real house of horrors, and it’s time to burn it down.

Natasha Walter is an author and the founder of Women for Refugee Women. Her most recent book, Feminism for a World on Fire, is published by Virago; you can buy it at the Nerve Bookshop at a discounted price. Living Dolls can also be ordered from the bookshop, and should be back in stock soon