“A sad little hello to women in their 30s having an evening of shit Proustian flashbacks to the mid-2000s,” the historian Hannah Rose Woods tweeted after the airing of In Plain Sight. I am one such woman. While the most distressing aspect of the documentary was the women’s testimony, the chaser was the film-makers’ clever juxtaposition of footage of Russell Brand and others that so encapsulated the specific misogyny of that time. Cue several days’ worth of retrospective dredging of 2000s media culture.
While it’s useful to hear from those who were working in the institutions and environments in which Brand thrived, I also feel angry at the complicity of some of them. While Brand denies all the allegations made in the programme, insisting that all his relationships have been consensual, clips from his own standup, TV and radio routines show his outspoken misogyny. In all these places there were journalists and TV executives who facilitated, encouraged and failed to challenge these all-pervasive attitudes towards women, and there were those who contributed to the culture more broadly at this truly heinous time – from the men working on lads’ mags and telling rape jokes onstage, to the postfeminist women’s magazine journalists who seemed to have forgotten the concept of sisterhood.
