I’ll declare myself immediately: I won’t defend to the death your right to say it.  But the arguments around freedom of speech, beautifully nuanced though they doubtless are, have been rehearsed far beyond the point of satiation by Cambridge students of late, and I suspect no one is really for turning on the issue.  Instead of throwing in my less than a tuppence worth on who has a right to what kind of platform and under what circumstances, for what purpose, I just want to ask the question: Why would you want Dominique Strauss Kahn to speak at the union?

There’s no denying that he’s better known as an international sleazebag than economist.  In fact, the first page of google results on his name is dedicated to his implication in a prostitution ring, or 'pimping,' to call a spade a spade.  He’s actually being questioned as I write, so there’s more than smoke to make me think there really is a fire in this case.  And same goes for the other allegations against him – police found prima facie evidence for the accusation of sexual assault brought by Tristane Banon.  He got off going to court for that one on a technicality merely (too much time had passed between the assault and the accusation).  He frequents orgies where he doesn’t trouble himself to find out whether or not the women involved are being controlled for gain.  And his lawyer’s defence is that the women are naked, so, um...  I’m not really sure what difference it makes either.

It should be beyond anyone’s reasonable doubt that he’s an unsavoury character.  But it’s not only that – he’s also boringly unsavoury.  It’s not that this man is breaking boundaries and taboos which his prudish and repressed opposers want firmly re-established.  This opposer for one is unapologetically sex-positive.  It’s that he’s the most old-fashioned lech you could get hold of: a powerful, rich, old man with an entitlement complex: a textbook chauvinist, who, sadly, are ten-a-penny, so why, what possible interest can there be, in listening to him speak at the union?

There seem to be three camps of people who defend his invitation.  The first is perhaps the most troubling: otherwise nice boys who are alarmed that you would dare call someone a rapist who hasn’t been convicted, ignoring the fact that this only leaves 6% percent who can be identified as what they are.  This defence seems to stem from an anxiety that unless every single sexual predator is defended to the max in every endeavour of his life, the floodgates will be opened for any kind of standard of sexual behaviour to be demanded of them.  But most of these boys wouldn’t actually be interested in hearing him if he weren’t known for his mistreatment of women over whom he has an inordinate advantage of power and privilege.  Then there are those who defend his invitation because it is being opposed, the would-be Voltaires of the university, who would defend the right of the Devil himself to a platform, but who can’t seem to find a reason for which they would actually want to listen to him.  Then there is a presumed third group, whom I’ve happily not met in reality but who must exist, specifically amongst the Union Society committee members, otherwise why would he have been invited?  Those who actually want to hear him speak.  Some people must think there’s something interesting, something worthy of prestige, in being an international sleazebag.  Perhaps in their mind, Strauss Kahn is a renegade hero – he seems to be constantly 'getting away with it,' and what the 'it' is, is that most glamorous thing of all – sex.  But when sex is something you 'get away with,' then you’re dangerously close to the category of those 'lads' who wrote and found the 'banterous' 'joke' that '85% of rapes go unreported – sounds like good odds.'  In DSK’s case, he’s actually in that category and being rewarded as some kind of figurehead for a culture that sees sex as a power game of 'who can get the most undue gratification with the least consequences,' or in his case, the best consequences, given that his notoriety is actually lending him prestige and platforms such as our own students’ union.

Hopefully, that third group is small and the group who sign CUSU’s petition to uninvite him will be bigger.  There are no advantages to his coming, but it will surely cause distress not only to the survivors of the kind of games he likes to play, but to anyone who thinks it’s perverse that those games should lead to anything other than true disgrace.