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Julien Blanc and swearing on talk radio

by · 20th November, 2014

This morning on the Nick Ferrari show on LBC (which I don’t listen to very often; I always preferred the BBC London station), they were talking about the American “pick-up artist” Julien Blanc, who has been going around the world giving seminars on how to “pick up” women, which he seems to think involves using very physically aggressive methods, who was meant to be coming to the UK to give seminars but, following widespread protests from feminists in particular, now will not be as he has been denied a visa. Nick Ferrari (right) had two feminist guests on (unusual), namely Rahila Gupta and Louise Pennington. The discussion, however, came to a premature end when Pennington used the F-word, leading Ferrari to cut her off and say he would never invite her onto his show again.

Rahila Gupta opposed blocking Blanc from coming into the country, because she said that immigration laws were racist in themselves and because it is better to expose their ideas in debate than ban them. Pennington said she agreed with Rahila on the matter of immigration law being racist, she said that “we have to work within the system we have”. However, she then opined that “we live in a rape culture” in which girls are groomed to be sexually abused from an early age and women are not regarded as having the right to say no. Although this kind of thing is a standard argument on a certain type of feminist blog, including Pennington’s, Ferrari reacted as if this was the most stupid thing he had ever heard. She then said something about girls being trained or groomed to be “f**kable”, at which point the host said, “you know, when you’re losing an argument, you resort to foul language” and said he would make a note never to have “that woman” back on air. Later on, a (male) emailer challenged him by reminding him that he had said that Julien Blanc’s words were just words, and surely the same was the case with Pennington’s; Ferrari said that the word was on a list of words they couldn’t use on air, and told him that if he wanted his kids hearing that sort of language at 7am, he was listening to the wrong station.

I’ve been listening (on and off) to talk radio for years, pretty much as long as I’ve been driving for a living, and there’s a blanket ban on swearing on air, and unlike on TV there is no watershed (i.e. a time after which it’s permitted), so people have been cut off at any time. There was one occasion where a lady called in to the Eddie Nestor show one Sunday morning, saying that she had been smoking cannabis for years and was now dying of cancer. She said that while on the drug she would go into work and say “oh, f**k this”, at which point Nestor cut her off and issued a sanctimonious apology to us for her language, irrespective of the fact that some of us may have been more annoyed at the woman’s story being interrupted. On the other hand, when Jonathan Ross was heard telling Andrew Sachs, on air, that a man had “f**ked his granddaughter”, he was suspended only for a short time despite this having been recorded, and played at prime time. He got off far too lightly for that.

I turned over not long after he cut Pennington off, but they did not really get to why Julien Blanc should not be allowed into the country. The laws involved are not immigration laws and in this case the matter has nothing to do with race; the Home Secretary can block anyone from coming to the UK if their presence is deemed “not conducive to the public good”. If he was coming to teach people how to plant bombs or rob banks, he would certainly not be allowed in, so the same must be true given that he teaches men to sexually harass and abuse women. It is not just a case of someone with some unpopular ideas or someone who offends the sensibilities of certain powerful and vocal minority lobby groups. I do not know if Ferrari was familiar with the ideas Louise Pennington threw into the discussion (although he or his researchers must surely have read her blog or Twitter feed, where they appear pretty regularly), but they would have seemed extreme to many listeners and weren’t really relevant, as Blanc is not that typical of popular culture, even “lad culture”, but an openly racist, misogynist criminal that most people did not know about until last week. It is right not to let him into the country.

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