“Not all sexual assaults are equal. Violent rape is not the same as psychologically coercive sex, which is not the same as regrettable sex, which is not the same as fielding an unwanted kiss at a party. All of these experiences are bad, but they lie on a spectrum ‘ranging from truly horrific to merely annoying’. The official line now is that ‘sexual assault and victimhood exist as absolutes’. Thus, a drunk student who “has sex she neither exactly consented to nor exactly resisted” is said to be as much a victim as ‘the clearly brutalised woman’. And the student who continues to hang out with her alleged rapist long after the deed supposedly occurred is said to be suffering the same syndrome as a battered wife. It’s wrong, say campus activists, to ‘privilege’ one kind of trauma over another.
“What claptrap. It’s both insulting and counterproductive to confuse the fight against rape culture – a phenomenon that is all too real – with the petty complaints of grievance culture”. (Meghan Daum, Los Angeles Times, reported in The Week)
I suppose Meghan Daum is right, but I believe personally in the joy of wooing an attractive girl (who even uses the word ‘wooing’ nowadays?). A gentleman takes a genuine and flattering interest in her life, asks her opinion on the issues of the day, is charming, funny, respectful and tries to discover mutual interests. He is attentive, caring, unhurried, even a bit casual (not that keen). Above all, he takes “no” for an answer. Period.
And when and if the young lady ever becomes his life partner he continues in precisely the same way as he began when he was wooing her. An Epicurean treats others as he would like to be treated himself.
I fear the uptick in the incidents of tape uncovers an unhealthy attitude to the opposite sex, developed from childhood. Children take their cues from their parents. The idea that you can force yourself on another human being is not just to do with alcohol or peer pressure – it derives from the examples set by the older generation from way back. It’s true that some people are just born jerks, but an uncivilised attitude towards women surely mainly derives from the way you see your father and other adults talk about women and behave .
Of course not all degrees of rape are the same- it depends entirely on the situation how severe the offence is. And of course all rape and sexual assault is wrong, and any allegations of rape should be taken extremely seriously. The problem is when radical feminists use incidents of rape to argue that our society is becoming increasingly misogynistic, when actually it has never been less so. And guess where rape is most common? That’s right, ultra-feminist Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#/media/File:Rape_rate_per_100,000_-_country_comparison_-_United_Nations_2012.png. The bottom of the graph? Socially conservative Indonesia. Look, I’m absolutely socially liberal, and I applaud Sweden’s record on issues like gay rights and prison reform. But the radical feminists are disproportionate in their unpatriotic critique: always condemning the UK and the US for their so called ‘rape culture’, while turning a blind eye to rape not just in Sweden, but in the Middle East and Africa- where their high rates of rape are a direct result of Qu’ranic teaching on the inferiority of women,