Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up, roll up, for the Real Johnny Anglais Show!
♦You’ll gasp with (feigned) shock, as his Nice Guy (TM) mask slips, to reveal the ugly misogynist underneath!
♦You’ll laugh out loud, when you realise he thinks objectification is literally about where ones eyes roam during sex!
♦You’ll groan with despair, when you realise he hasn’t answered a single awkward questions about the sex industry!
♦You’ll laugh out loud again, when he claims he’s being forced to spend his time defending porn!
♦You’ll laugh and groan, as he descends into sub-literate ranting!
Johnny Anglais (teacher, stripper and porn performer Benedict Garrett, who was found guilty by the General Teaching Council of unacceptable professional conduct but permitted to continue teaching), in response to this post here claimed that he’s able to answer awkward questions about the porn industry. But, instead of actually answering any such questions, he only gave wishy-washy answers that didn’t address any of the specifics of the types of abuse women (and men) suffer in the sex industry, and continued to insist that abuse is not common, and no different to the abuse that occurs in any other industry.
Instead of responding to any of the specific points I made, he twice set up a straw woman to attack instead, and resorted to misogynistic insults in response to the ‘insults’ against him that he made up in his head.
“You nasty, nasty, vile woman. […] the pure nastiest [sic] and vindictiveness of your entire essence and argument. You’re not a feminist, you’re a vitriolic, bitter man-hater.”
Being called a ‘man-hater’ or ‘angry’ (‘bitter’ is just a synonym for ‘angry’) is probably a terrifying prospect for any non-feminist woman, and he would probably have completed the triumvirate with ‘lesbian’ if he wasn’t going to later accuse me of ogling penises! Trying to intimidate a radical feminist with these words is just pathetic, and, quite frankly, boring, but it is useful as a demonstration of how quickly this supposed Nice Guy (TM) was happy to start flinging such words around, and using a made-up excuse too.
Johnny also made this rather bizarre statement in relation to objectification:
“So, every time you look at a penis, you make sure you have the whole body in view too? Get real!”
Poor Johnny, I did accuse him of “[viewing] women as disembodied vaginas” so it’s perhaps not surprising that he got confused. The meaning of ‘to view’ and ‘to see’ is not just limited to the workings of our eyes, the dictionary definition of ‘to view‘ includes:
“16. to contemplate mentally; consider: to view the repercussions of a decision.
“17. to regard in a particular light or as specified: She views every minor setback as a disaster.“
The mainstream tends to confuse objectification with being ‘looked at’ or ‘found attractive’, so let’s remind ourselves of Martha C. Nussbaum’s seven notions of objectification, these are, briefly, instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility (being interchangeable), violability, being owned, and denial of subjectivity. A field slave is undoubtedly objectified (treated like an instrument to be used, denied autonomy, interchangeable, violated, owned and denied subjectivity), but nobody actively wants to look at him.
It doesn’t really matter where Johnny is looking while he’s fucking, he spoke and wrote about women as ‘its’, as ‘things’, as interchangeable objects that he acted upon and manipulated; he watched porn to learn how to ‘pleasure’ them, but didn’t mention at all actually asking a woman how she would like to be interacted with.
Johnny has this to say about his efforts defending the porn industry (parse it if you dare!):
“But this is the limelight in which I have been thrust and one thing I fight for against the narrow-minded and irrational, like you, although, I believe, probably with your heart in the right place, just with your blame targetted [sic] at the wrong source and your tarnish-brush out in full swing.”
Johnny seems to be claiming that he doesn’t have any choice about defending porn! So, while no woman is ever forced into making porn, he is forced into the public light to defend it!
Johnny is a trained teacher, one would assume he therefore understands the importance of proofreading his own work (and of reading his source material properly to make sure he understands it before responding to it), and is capable of producing a high standard of written English, but he chose to submit a comment that, in the final paragraph (and especially in the final sentence of that paragraph, as quoted above), is barely literate. Johnny can’t be that stupid, he wouldn’t have managed for any length of time as a teacher otherwise, so maybe he was genuinely upset over the stuff he made up in his head? That might stand up, except that he links to his comment from his Facebook page, on the very same day, saying:
“Here we go again. This time the anti-porn ‘feminist’ gets personal. So, I throw a little back at her”
He even goes to the trouble of using the feminist graffiti image from our sidebar as an illustration. That’s not the behaviour of someone who is genuinely hurt or shocked by something, that’s the behaviour of a smug, stupid bully who thinks he’s done something to be proud of. So then, this is either a cynical attempt at an ’emotive’ performance, to distract attention from his tilting at straw feminists, or he has such a bloated ego that he thinks everyone else (including his supporters) is so stupid that they won’t be able to see the cheap tricks he’s pulling.
Anti-Porn Feminists 
Oh Johnny will you never learn? Calling feminists ‘man-haters’ is such an old, old misogynistic insult and yes we real feminists are shaking in our boots because we are soo afraid of ‘upsetting menz’s fragile feelings!
You are clearly incapable of answering specific questions Anti-Porn Feminists have raised so you resort to the most common male trick and that is to hurl pitiful insults at us. We see through your claims particularly your claim to be the ‘real victim.’ Ah yes men always whine about their being ‘the real victims’ and that too is a ploy because men really do believe the world revolves around them and we dehumanised female creatures only exist to serve men’s demands 24/7. Such claims are very useful when the male can’t or won’t answer questions and so attempts to divert attention away from the real issue concerning male supremacy’s tools which are used to justify male domination over women. These tools are pornography and prostitution both of which are male sexual violence against women.
By the way Johnny no one forced you to enter the pornography industry because you made a choice and we must not deny men their agency must we? Unlike women who do not start life from the same level playing field as males and hence are denied their human rights and status because male supremacy declares default human is male and therefore females are not human.
This is not a comment about the article – I simply want to point out that we cannot expect a trained teacher to have a good grasp of the English language in its written form as many simply do not! On many a parents evening, and upon receiving letters from the school, I have been stunned by the poor standard of English. Most shockingly I received a letter purported to be from the Principal and sent to all the parents which was so poorly structured that one had to decipher the meaning! So Johnny Anglais is unusual in that he is a porn performer/ trained teacher, but not that his literacy skills need improvement/ is a trained teacher!
Ellesar,
What a bizarre comment! Of course we can have the expectation that teachers are able to communicate effectively in English, in the same way that we can expect a maths teacher to know maths!
That you have experienced poor quality teachers shows that those particular institutions have failed in some way, it doesn’t mean that we can’t have the expectation that they won’t fail!
The majority of teachers are sterling individuals doing a difficult, thankless job under very trying circumstances, it’s just a shame they’ve had Johnny in the public eye recently, dragging the whole profession down.
Oh my Goodness, I have never heard so much ridiculous dribble in my life. Do not judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. Ben is a highly educated man and genuine friend, anyone who knows him personally as I do, knows that he is a good honest person with a heart of gold. The way he chooses to make a living, which we all coincedentally have to do to survive unless we wish to scrounge off of the benefit system is his choice, at least he gets off of his backside and earns a wage, the same could’nt be said for a large amount of the population. Ben was and still is an excellent teacher who has a good rapport with his students. I am appalled by the way you have judged him. And lets be honest he does not make porn movies on his own does he? There are women participating who in my opinion have their own free minds to do as they wish.
“Oh my Goodness, I have never heard so much ridiculous dribble in my life”
That’s pretty much what I thought on seeing Johnny’s last comment here!
“Do not judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.”
I don’t have to walk a mile in his shoes, I just have to look at the comments he freely chose to leave on this blog – have you actually read his comments? Do you think they make him look good? Do you think he should be proud of his behaviour here?
“Ben is a highly educated man and genuine friend, anyone who knows him personally as I do, knows that he is a good honest person with a heart of gold.”
Well he has a funny way of showing it – again, have you actually read the comments he left on this blog? There’s nothing there that would make me think ‘heart of gold’, that’s for sure, or ‘highly educated’ either for that matter!
As for your pro-porn arguments, I find them incredibly weak; being in porn is better than claiming benefits? Perhaps, then, Job Centres should threaten to take young people’s benefits away unless they accept a job in the sex industry?
“There are women participating who in my opinion have their own free minds to do as they wish.”
Emma, you have a tin-ear for the English language, which reminds me of Johnny …
Also, if it’s not ok to “judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes”, how come it’s fine for Johnny to judge me, and call me, among other things, ‘vile’, ‘bitter’ and a ‘man-hater’?
Or is it a different set of rules for people you agree with?
Johnny is pathetic, throwing a massive fake tantrum when the conversation got too difficult for him to deal with.
And is friend isn’t that smart either, at least he has a job? He already had a job, as a teacher, remember? If he had been teaching a real subject, he’d have been too busy marking work to be moonlighting as a porn star.
Crocus,
You are correct that Johnny is pathetic, but it is not correct to say that sex and relationships education (SRE) is not a ‘real’ subject.
Children and young people need and deserve comprehensive, factually correct, age-appropriate SRE; they also deserve better than to be taught it by men who are actively part of the sex industry, and are interested in being “over-familiar” with them.