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Kelly Brook is no ordinary woman. Men have voted her the sexiest woman in the world; women have declared her to have the best British female body. And the world’s most politically incorrect deodorant, Lynx, reportedly paid her £1m to promote its Axe body spray. Oh and another thing, she thinks it’s funny to punch her boyfriends in the face.
If you’re smart enough to avoid celebrity gossip, you may have escaped the fact that Brooks has been accused of repeatedly trivialising domestic violence. When the model released extracts of her autobiography, they revealed that she had punched two of her former partners, Jason Statham and Danny Cipriani, in separate incidents.
The ManKind Initiative, which runs a national helpline for male victims of domestic violence and abuse, spoke out last week about its disappointment at the lack of public backlash. The story had all but faded when the Jeremy Paxman of daytime television, Phillip Schofield, confronted Brook about her violence and she giggled, guffawed and smiled her way through the interview before indulging in a spot of victim-blaming, saying: “I’m not going to do that in the future, I’m just going to pick more wisely in the men I be with.” Ah yes, that’ll solve it Kelly. If you find yourself repeatedly punching your partners in the face, all you need to do is keep changing your partner until you find one you don’t want to punch.
Brook’s world view is both saddening and unsurprising. Our cultural understanding of violence and gender is shaped by a relentless, binary narrative that maintains our unconscious, collective belief that men are problems and women have problems. It’s a cultural meme that seems to have taken up permanent residence in the mindsets of both social conservatives and progressive liberals. Traditionalists think men should protect women and children from the unpleasantness of the manmade world, while progressives think women and children should be protected from men and their patriarchy.
There is little room for the female perpetrator or the male victim in mainstream modern discourse around violence and gender. It’s a story where there are only two major roles on offer to men – the unhealthy masculine perpetrator or the healthy masculine protector. Women are also offered an equally limiting binary choice between being the unfortunate victim of male violence or the heroic victor who fights to overcome the problems that men cause.
When our public story of violence and gender offers men and women such narrow options, how does a successful model like Brook make sense of her violence? Take gender out of the equation and it’s clear she is the perpetrator and Statham and Cipriani are the victims. Her violent behaviour seemed to be driven by her inability to express her feelings of jealousy and betrayal to her partners in an appropriate, adult manner.
Yet, in the pantomime world of gender and violence, there is no mainstream script for female perpetrators to take responsibility for their offending behaviour. In Cipriani’s case, Brook says: “Four bouncers leaped on me, they picked me up like the crazy, betrayed woman I was.” In other words, “it was the drink’s fault, he made me do it, I was temporarily insane, your honour”.
It’s unlikely that Statham or Cipriani will put themselves forward for the role of victim. So, like the male victims of more serious crimes, they will probably remain silent. This is the world we have created. Together, we have gendered our beliefs around violence to the point where we have no language to support people who fall outside the rigid norms of male perpetrators and female victims.
Women are committing violence against men and boys on a daily basis and their male victims are less likely to report the violence to anyone, fear they won’t be believed and are less likely to see the perpetrator held to account when they do come forward. International research suggests that as much as half of domestic violence is committed against men, but in the UK, fewer that 7% of convicted perpetrators are female. So what can we learn from Brook’s refusal to take responsibility for her own celebrity violence? She is clearly no ordinary women, but the gender script she is performing is predictably ordinary.
What victims of all genders need is extraordinary individuals with the wisdom to create a new public story about violence that gives voice to the experience of men and women in all our diversity. Brook could get the ball rolling by making an unequivocal public apology for her violence against men and a donation the size of a Lynx contract to the ManKind Initiative.
• This piece was commissioned after a suggestion from mike65ie
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