Bergdorf, Jones, Makings, and the Reckless Endangerment of Us All
[Adult content note.]
Decades ago, sensible gay men, bisexuals, lesbians, and feminists, and particularly the lesbian feminists, kicked the pedophile advocacy brigade out of the gay rights and sexual liberation movements because, although this is not known to be a direct quote, to hell with them.
On the basis of that unappreciated work, the modern LGBT movement has been able to make the entirely reasonable point that same-sex attracted people are no likelier than straight people to prey on kids. Further, that if you care that it’s taking advantage when it’s adult men and boys, but you’re willing to entertain the idea that it’s a legitimate relationship or marriage when it’s an adult man and a girl, this is sexist, and homophobic. Therefore, it’s an irrational prejudice to presume that LGB people are unsafe around children, or are more likely to sexually harass or assault other adults, than straight people.
Because reporting on sexual abuse is much more acceptable and direct now, it’s further clear that people, mainly grown men, who want to abuse children are opportunistic entryists who’ll go to incredible lengths, and join any kind of organization or profession they can, to enable access to vulnerable people. Men who want to sexually abuse children will become international experts in child poverty, start entire charities, become priests, become law enforcement officers or child carers, offer babysitting services, or even marry women with the intention of fathering their own future victims. The problem is not localized to any sector of society, nor any general class of persons, excepting that the vast majority are men.
Fast forward to 2019, and a known homophobe named Munroe Bergdorf was appointed, then just as quickly unappointed, as the LGBTQ ambassador for NSPCC Childline, a UK children’s safeguarding charity. It turns out that Bergdorf had also suggested that kids having a hard time at home should get in touch with him privately over social media, and he still sees nothing wrong with it.
Having private conversations with kids that their parents aren’t supposed to find out about is a huge red flag. Unless you’re a professional social worker, mandatory reporter, or law enforcement agent who is specifically trying to extricate the child from a situation where they’re in physical danger at home, no adult should ever teach a minor to keep secrets from their parents; it endangers them. Bergdorf, a lingerie model who thinks that calling a woman a “hairy, barren lesbian” is appropriate public discourse, is not in any kind of work where telling kids to contact him privately is ever appropriate.
Nonetheless, Bergdorf’s firing has been reported as “transphobic,” and “harassment,” an “attack,” no less, by chief UK trans ally, Owen Jones, and a number of media outlets whose staff have evidently been forbidden to use Google.
Screen capture of a recent Google News search for NSPCC, featuring headlines about Bergdorf’s firing from The Independent, The Guardian, and the BBC, that focus on NSPCC’s apology to Bergdorf, or Bergdorf’s claim related to this incident that trans-identified people are “like second-class citizens.”
Then it was discovered that the man who brought Bergdorf into the role, James Makings, who happens to be gay, has made amateur porn of himself masturbating in the toilets at his job at NSPCC. It might reasonably be asked whether he’s appropriate staff for a children’s charity, let alone a gatekeeper for the charity’s public representation. Criticism of this sorry and disturbing behavior has been blasted by self-appointed global gay rights leader, Owen Jones, as “homophobic.”
Journalists Owen Jones and Chris Godfrey, in tweets from June 12, 2019, dismissing criticism of James Makings workplace sexual behavior as, “homophobia.”
Worse, Makings’s bosses at the child protection charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, know about his production of amateur porn for public consumption in their offices, and they are fine with it.
“We have been made aware of the images. The NSPCC has guidance for staff on social media and, if there was a problem, we would take action,” an NSPCC spokesperson told PinkNews.
The spokesperson for organisation also said that the employee had been spoken to and received support from colleagues “right up to the chief executive.”
“NSPCC EMPLOYEE WHO HIRED MUNROE BERGDORF GETS HOMOPHOBIC ABUSE,” BY LILY WAKEFIELD, PINK NEWS, JUNE 12, 2019
Decades of work, mainly by women, to keep reckless, sexually obsessive men from ruining everyone’s reputations, and these ridiculous men and their friends are throwing it all away by putting forward that it’s “phobic” — irrationally and excessively fearful — to say that grown people should not be asking children to contact them privately, nor upload video of themselves masturbating at work at a children’s charity.
Jameela Jamil, and a Twitter user who goes by the handle @/Legoshoes, describing journalist Janice Turner’s concern for lesbians as “cover” for her being a “monster” and a “pro-lesbian …TERF,” suggesting that her questioning of Bergdorf’s public behavior was motivated by animus towards trans-identified men, on June 11th, 2019
One wants to ask oneself, is this actually happening? Did we all wake up in Pat Robertson’s 1980s-era nightmare, or, heaven forbid, an Onion article? It’s as ostentatiously gross as Kevin Spacey trying to make the story about his sexual harassment episodes go away by coming out.
What is the matter with these porn-obsessed men that they think this is the right way to lead a movement full of vulnerable people who are still subject to public brutality because of whom they love?
Have any of them spent as much as ten seconds thinking how this cascades into harms against lesbian women who are publicly beaten up for saying no to men, or perhaps even raped because they refuse to be sexually available for men’s entertainment?
Have they thought at all about the way their conflation of same-sex attraction with poor boundaries, compulsive pornography use, and transgressive public ethical violations, contributes to the objectification of bisexual women, who face unusually high rates of male intimate partner violence?
Have they thought about the reputations of the majority of gay or bisexual men who don’t want to be smeared as obligate perverts through this kind of misrepresentation, or who have suffered abuse as children or adults at the hands of other men whose sexual entitlement is boundless?
Clearly not. Clearly, they have no sense at all, lacking even a basic instinct of self-preservation, as we had previously observed in our declaration of no confidence in movement leadership. We at WoLF completely renounce this amoral nonsense, as well as the leadership of these entitled men who are trying to conflate reasonable anger over their inappropriate public behavior with irrational paranoia over their sexual orientation.
To clarify, if a straight person had done these things, they should, and probably would, have been fired from a job in child safeguarding yesterday. Decent people don’t act like this in connection to children, or at a place of work where such behavior could also constitute sexual harassment of their adult colleagues.
Tweets from feminist accounts critical of James Makings’s behavior, June 12, 2019, featuring a still shot from the amateur porn movie that he made in the toilet cubicles at work, entitled, “Cub pisses and wanks in rubber: wearing my rubber under my clothes to work, decided to film myself …” under a picture of Makings’s rubber-clad hips with a cartoon mouse covering his genitals.
Owen Jones thinks we at WoLF should be embarrassed over talking to conservatives at the Heritage Foundation? Nothing especially likely to happen could be more embarrassing than being represented in the political sphere by men like Owen Jones and James Makings, who apparently think it’s fine to masturbate at work, at a children’s safeguarding charity, and put it on film, then share this descriptively labeled amateur movie with the entire world.
Though if Jones is genuinely fearful of ordinary conservatives, let alone alt-right extremists, he should be so lucky as for them to think of women who have a care for child welfare, rather than himself, as representative of LGB interests. It’s disgraceful to suggest that aberrant sexual aggression and disregard for child safety is anything to do with same-sex attraction.
-Natasha Chart, Board Chair