Sorry, but this is bigger than a Dáil thong stunt
Compared to most stunts pulled in the Dáil chamber, Ruth Coppinger’s scene-stealing thong display was brilliantly effective. From inside her sleeve during Leaders’ Questions, the left wing TD produced a lacy undergarment, deftly injecting the troubling rape case taken by a teenage girl that was slowly slipping from the public agenda with the oxygen of publicity.
‘It might seem embarrassing to show…a pair of thongs here in this incongruous setting,’ she said to her mostly male audience. ‘But the reason I’m doing it is how do you think a rape victim or a woman feels at the incongruous setting of her underwear being shown in a court?’
How indeed? The Cork rape case where the defendant was acquitted attracted outrage not because of the verdict but due to the closing comments of the defence, a female barrister ironically.
‘Does the evidence outrule the possibility that she was attracted to the defendant and was open to meeting someone and being with someone,’ the barrister is reported as saying in court.
‘You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.’
Now in the bad old days when men were men and women were taken, and any underwear apart from a corset and stays was a sign of sexual availability, this vital bit of evidence might have led to the barrister to conclude with a flourish of ‘Case closed M’Lud’.
But things have moved on. We understand now that rape is a crime of violence and women don’t invite it any more than they do any other dreadful crime. The problem is that, as Coppinger highlighted, the legal system governing rape has not moved with the times. Our protest system perhaps has the reverse problem, or at least it has been too influenced by the more hysterical attention-grabbing antics of #MeToo.
For it’s hard to see how the juvenile and offputting farce created by a closed Facebook group called Mná Na hÉireann – who posted images of their own smalls on social media with the hashtag This Is Not Consent – highlights the backwardness of the legal system. If you ask me, some of it looked more like a novel marketing drive from Victoria’s Secret.
The protesters who enthusiastically left their underwear on the steps outside the Cork courthouse, and activists who gathered around the Spire in Dublin to hang various pieces of underwear onto a makeshift line between two trees, doubtless had their collective heart in the right place. As did the women who carried placards with slogans veering from the harmless Thongs Don’t Talk to vastly more vulgar messages. For all I know they genuinely believe they are bravely shattering some intimate taboo while hopefully offending the stuffy taste police.
But in order to do that, thongs need to have a mystique or be illicit in some way, while the reality is that they are completely mainstream.
Indeed, like the Calvin Klein underwear waistband on permanent display by image-conscious young men, the thong is also a runof-the-mill fashion statement. It may be news to the barrister in the Cork rape trial, but whatever racy image the thong had back in the day that Monica Lewinsky flashed hers at Bill Clinton, it is over.
Being behind the times on fashion matters is of course a minor misdemeanour compared with the offence of scrutinising a victim’s undergarments for signs of culpability in an alleged rape. It is a throwback to Victorian times when women did not have equal rights and it is solely confined to rape trials.
The misogynism underpinning the legal system as regards rape is out of kilter with the culture of equality that now legally exists between both sexes. Let’s take to the streets in protest at that paradox – but leave our thongs at home.