Russell Brand thrived in an era of masked misogyny

Sunday producer Nadene Ghouri lived in London in the heady era of ladette culture, when the drinks flowed, the lap-dancing clubs opened for lunch, and Russell Brand's notorious sex addiction was just another ironic joke.

The fallout of the Russell Brand saga has left me pondering the noughties.

It was supposed to be an era of female liberation, of "you can have it all" equality. There was the have-your-pint-and-drink-some-more ladette culture that saw young women like me party hard by night and smash glass ceilings at work by day.

As a young journalist living in London my life felt like a never-ending whirl of parties, nightclub launches and fun. So much fun. Clacking on my kitten heels, cigarette in one hand, cocktail in the other, I unashamedly slept and danced my way around town – just like my heroine, Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City. Men were our allies. We rocked our careers. Sex was uncomplicated.

How could a time that felt so truly liberating have been the same one where a blatant sexual predator became a cultural phenomenon? How did millions of fans laugh along to choking blow job and rape "jokes”?

I’m left feeling conflicted by how these happened in parallel – although, looking back, I realise we were very aware of these dual forces at the time.

And I know from talking to female friends here in New Zealand that, though we look back through a different lens, their experiences and sense of unease is similar.

I catapulted into the 21st century in London on a wave of galactic social change. Hearts had been blasted open by the mass awakening that was 1990s rave culture. Barriers of race, gender, sexuality, all seemed to disintegrate as we felt the deep resonance, the "one-ness" of dancing all night, gazing into a stranger’s eyes in a field or a warehouse. The lad/ladette culture that followed felt like a new equality. We wore trainers and tracksuit jackets over ball-gowns and normal lads could become hero DJs overnight. In the UK, it also felt like there was a big and much-needed class shift after the long and divisive Thatcher years. Add to that the internet, with global information at our fingertips, and there were so many reasons to brim with excited hope and optimism.

But although young people culturally ran the show in the 1990s, broader society remained deeply sexist, homophobic, and elitist. Being groped at work was ordinary, brushed off. I can count at least half a dozen times something like that happened to me, but interestingly it’s only now – in the post MeToo era that my friends and I share the stories. Painfully, we all have them. And what’s worse is the realisation that we often guarded secrets for the same people – the toxic colleague everyone knew was a creep, a bit "off", best not to find yourself alone with.

I thought of this when ‘Rachel’ told her story on Sunday – about the time Brand exposed himself to her in a work situation. (Then went on-air 20 mins later to brag about it on his BBC radio show.)

Back then it just was what it was, knowing nothing would be done simply outweighed the pain of reporting it. Plus drawing attention to yourself in a negative context was risky – we saw that play out in the tabloids where countless women from Paula Yates to Britney Spears were slut-shamed for our entertainment for daring to leave marriages or suffer mental breakdowns.

Somehow this growing and normalised misogyny became wrapped up in post-modern irony and the type of spiteful "edgy" comedy Brand so excelled in. The '90s were significant for the birth of another cultural phenomena, the Lads' mag – glossy magazines for young men, the original and best of which was Loaded.

Perhaps Loaded’s most genius moment was a pull-out poster, a glamour model on one side and a juicy bacon sandwich on the other. The gag was you got to choose which you felt like. Pretty much every 20-something man I knew had it on his kitchen wall. We thought it was clever and funny. I didn’t find it offensive because as long as men and women were laughing together that was alright. Right?

Next came the advent of lap-dancing clubs. Seemingly overnight, they popped up everywhere – even offering lunchtime special deals. My male colleagues would often pop along, and none of us batted an eyelid. Newspapers were full of interviews with newly minted "empowered" lap dancers. And if you were willing to go to one with your boyfriend on a Saturday night, you were the "cool" girl, so confident in your own sexuality that you didn’t question the narrative. My life was littered with events like that, where if I was "in on it" I was on it. Even if I wasn’t enjoying myself, I pretended I was.

We revelled in how ironic it all was, but looking back it was moronic. Because the joke on us.

Brand’s much publicised sexual addiction was the equivalent of dark glasses, a wig and false moustache – an effective disguise, and a funny one at that.

It was no surprise to learn from a female friend who worked with Brand at Channel 4 how he would allegedly pop to the local brothel in shoot breaks, then come back and regale his colleagues with the lurid details. As a young runner at the time, she laughed along because she didn't know what else to do. She now realises he was feeding off her discomfort.

And those Sex and the City-inspired cocktails? Beneath the tinkle of our clinking glasses something uglier was brewing. By the early '90s alcohol sales had plummeted, Ecstasy being the mainstay of electronic dance culture, not booze. So, a panicking drinks industry sought a new target market – women, inventing new "female friendly" products like alcopops. We bought into it hook line and sinker. Perhaps there would be no "Mummy wine time" or “Prosecco Hour" today without that period of history.

Could it be that the young women of my generation were gaslit en masse?

Was the equality we thought we had, a mere façade for a new generation of male entitlement and corporate marketing? Was it really all a lie?

Right now, it’s hard not to believe that.

But perhaps the penultimate word goes to Samantha Jones, the unashamedly sex-loving best friend of Carrie Bradshaw. Her character summing up the noughties in one simple sentence: “Wake up. It’s 2000. The new millennium won’t be about sexual labels it will be about sexual expression. It won’t be about sleeping with men or women, it’ll be about sleeping with individuals, soon everyone will be pansexual, it won’t matter if you’re gay or straight.”

She would have been even more prescient if she’d added, “and it will be a time when we realise predators are simply not sexy.”

Brand once said: “Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.” I assume he was talking about the heroin and other drugs he’d abused in his past. But perhaps he underestimated the haunting power of his other addiction – women.