… it’s all just normal stuff.

The TV listings showed… yay!… Luther’s back. So reading through the blurb on the BBC site for what we would be letting ourselves in for, why was it that my heart sank? Because the first line said,

“Luther returns to investigate a twisted fetishist who is murdering women… ”

It was, of course, excellent and truly gripping (here’s a typical review).

It was only recently we were watching the excellent and truly gripping The Fall, which was about… a twisted fetishist who was murdering women. Anybody see the similarity between the two?

True, just like with the excellent and truly gripping The Killing, the latter featured a female lead, which I guess is some kind of emancipation. But why is it that in just about every detective series, the real feature is the grisly dispatching of women… especially good looking ones?

Uh oh, I think I can feel an answer coming on, and I think it might get me into trouble.

Because that’s the way it is.

Of course, there’s the age-old argument that depictions of nastiness, depravity and bad behaviour in print and film don’t inspire the unhinged and unstable amongst us to ‘have a go, ‘cos it looks doable’. As in, “The Bayeux Tapestry was made after the event, and didn’t inspire war, rape and pillage after it was put on show.”

Personally – and with no scientific or statistical data to back me up – I would tend to disagree. I have no doubt that the big wall-carpet did indeed inspire others to what they thought of as deeds of derring-do. Just like I have absolutely no doubt that films depicting violence have influenced many a twat to do likewise. Because I also have no doubt that films depicting acts of love, kindness and cooking have influenced deranged audience members in a similar way (Michael Caine’s omelette being a seminal point in my own deranged head).

And depictions of violence against women exist exactly because sexist chauvinism is ‘normal’ the world over. It’s just that we – and by that I can only speak for men – simply don’t see it, as it’s so all-pervading. Wood and trees and all that.

Having been what I always chose to call an internationalist for most of my life (I was the first to befriend the first black kid – Joseph – in our primary school, and had no idea why his mum stood away from the other parents after school), hanging around the front line in Brixton, drumming reggae and funk in London clubs and pubs, buying my first record when I was 15: ‘For Once in my Life’, Stevie Wonder*… I found it easy to fall into the trap of assuming the rest of the world would be inexorably following in my multi-cultural wake.

But no: most of them are still snuffling around in the mud-banks.

Which was, as it turned out, where I was wallowing. I found out by going to lunch with a couple of Indian friends one day – guys I’d worked with for a few years. We were chatting about this and that, and something came up about racism… and I said something flippant about how much better it was now for non-whites/non-Brits, as the National Front had all but disappeared and everyone appeared to be getting along.

Thwap! Came the answer, in the form of a thorough word-bashing from the two people I’d lazily assumed to be living easy-going lives, snuggled down with their Asian-ness in our welcoming duvet of British-ness. They told me horror stories of how they were treated on a daily basis on all scales from personal right up through socio-economic and on to pan-galactic. And not just them: it was a run-down of all the despicable shit that was doled out to all the ‘Asians’ they knew, and how they had to somehow make their lives fit within our oh-so-welcoming society.

And so it’s the same for women, here, there and everywhere.

A couple of days back, during the women’s tennis finals at Wimbledon, John Inverdale said some stuff that was almost awe-inspiring in its oafishness. Try this: “Do you think, Bartoli’s dad told her when she was little, ‘You’re never going to be a looker, you’ll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight’?”

Later, he tried to squirm out of it by saying that, “… she is an incredible role model for people who aren’t born with all the attributes of natural athletes”.

She’d just won fucking Wimbledon! How much of a ‘natural athlete’ can you be?!

I used to quite like John Inverdale.

And what, you may think, is the direct connection between dumb-arsed misogyny and eviscerating women on the telly?

And if you do, I’ve been wasting my time writing this: just open your bloody eyes – it’s all around you.

See you after my hols, when I’ll be visiting some of the most gender-equitable countries in the world: Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia.

* By the way, when I bought Stevie’s single, I’d never seen him. Imagine my confusion when he was on Ready Steady Go (or something)… and he wasn’t a blonde white kid a ‘klickin’ his fingers and a’stompin’ his feet.

Most mostly: imagine my delight!