The Stephen Fry Thread

[Trigger warning for misogyny and sexual violence. This came up in an unrelated thread this weekend, so I thought I'd open a post about it for discussion.]

So, Stephen Fry gave an interview. And in the interview, the openly gay writer and actor (whose sexuality I'm noting only so that readers know when he talks about how straight men feel, he is not merely treating personal experience as universal, which would be bad enough) was quoted as saying some pretty nasty things about women and female sexuality:

[Fry] said he believed most straight men felt that "they disgust women" as they "find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are".

"For good reason," he declares in a candid interview in the November issue of Attitude magazine. "If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: 'God, I've got to get my fucking rocks off', or they'd go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn't happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it."

Fry, 53, continues: "I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want," he said. "Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

Fry then took to his Twitter account to denounce the interview, and to accuse The Observer, who quoted the article, "of portraying him as 'the antichrist' after it reported that he said women do not really like sex."

"So some fucking paper misquotes a humorous interview I gave, which itself misquoted me and now I'm the Antichrist. I give up," he tweeted.

He then wrote about the incident on his blog (via), and said, in part: "For reasons that should be obvious now if they weren’t before, I don’t give print interviews. I never consent to them any more than you, dear reader, would voluntarily consent to being mugged, raped or burgled, but when under pressure I will compromise by agreeing to do a profile for some small magazine or other."

Yes, being misquoted is exactly like being raped. (No, it's not.)

And, oh yes, about that "misquote." Attitude stands by its reporter. As well they should do, considering that Fry has made exactly the same comments before:

Text Onscreen: Men & Women. Stephen Fry then speaks, sometimes onscreen, intercut with images of women and men running in marathons and other pointless images (emphasis original): Women, for some reason, like to claim that they're as excited about the idea of sex as men are, but it's manifest nonsense. I mean, when do women hang around in parks, looking for casual encounters with men? They just don't. Well, the only ones that do are prostitutes, who do it for money, which proves the very point. [laughs] They have to be paid to do it. Whereas, when it's just men, they don't want to have a relationship; they just want to have sex. Now, if women were like that, we all know, men would say, "Oh, thank you!" And for some bizarre reason, women don't want you to believe this. "Oh, that's not true at all! I saw a waiter the other day with quite nice buttocks—made me quite juicy just thinking it!" And a man would say, "The other day?! What about every fucking minute of every hour of every day?! You just don't get it! You don't get it; you don't get it, what it's like to have one of these in your bloody trousers. You have no idea what it's like!" And women don't. Lucky for them!"

So, what we have here is a gentleman who claims to have been misquoted saying misogynist things he's said on camera previously, and then saying it's like being raped.

Yikes.