The Guardian reports on the Goldsmiths-Smurthwaite collision.
One item strikes me as very odd…
The first she heard about the gig at Goldsmiths being pulled was an email exchange with the college on Sunday evening. She was told of “complaints” about a range of past subjects in her shows, including her views on prostitution and on Muslim women being forced to cover up, but was not given details or any right of response.
Smurthwaite favours decriminalising those selling sex, while criminalising those who purchase it. Goldsmiths students, she was told, support legalisation of the sex industry.
What? How can anyone even know that? What does it mean to say that? How can anyone possibly know that all Goldsmiths students support anything? Let alone something as specific as what attitude to have to “the sex industry”? The answer is that there is no way. Nobody can know that. The claim is ridiculous.
Maybe what they mean is “Goldsmiths students are expected to support legalisation of the sex industry”? Maybe they’re foolishly admitting to imposing an orthodoxy on their students? But if so – why the fuck would it be that, in particular? I could see something large and generic like “Goldsmiths students are expected to treat all people as equals,” but I can’t see getting more detailed than that, especially not about what the students think and approve and support as opposed to how they treat people.
At any rate…as Kate said in her post, somebody at Goldsmiths seems to be determined to shit on Kate by way of explaining the idiotic decision to cancel her gig at the last minute.
The president of the comedy society said: “Despite many complaints from students about the content of Kate’s act in the past we were planning to go ahead with the gig until Kate told me 24 hours before that there was likely to be a picket with lots of students and non-students outside the venue. I couldn’t verify this. Up to this point we had only sold eight tickets so I decided to pull the plug.”
Nice. Really nice. That’s throwing someone under the bus with a vengeance.
Ungrateful creeps.