|
Hatred of things male has led
to the rape of justice
- Minette Marrin, Sunday Times, 24nov02, sect. 1, p19
Minette Marrin, Your article summarises the crisis. All the experts I respect, including Erin Pizzey, are deeply pessimistic. Erin tells me we look forward to “a desert”. Implacable man-haters like Stanko, MacKinnon, Jay, Harman * and Sloss **, along with their poodle-men, are deeply entrenched in all our institutions, and will cause enormous damage during the next twenty years. I thought that the controlling backlash would be the rapid growth of a fascist party which the oppressed youths would join. However, it is possible that the demographic crisis; the collapse of the birthrate as men “lit out”, to use Minette’s earlier phrase ***, will cause childless women to act first against the harridans, and fend off the much more dangerous fascist reaction of disenfranchised young men.
Invited to a Home Office one-day conference on sex offences in the family in Leicester in 1999, I was appalled by the attitude of the Home Office women in particular and the rest of the 50 people present in general. It was my last invitation. http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/19164.htm Ivor Catt, 121 Westfields, St. Albans AL3 4JR tel 01727 864257 24nov02 * http://www.ivorcatt.com/2201.htm ** http://www.ivorcatt.com/2210.htm *** See http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/REFLE.htm ; “Feminists have been talking for some time of a male backlash against them. I don't think we've seen anything yet, but I suspect we are just about to. And I'm afraid what we will see is men not lashing out but litting out altogether." - Minette Marrin, "Why men won't take feminism", Sunday Telegraph, 20oct91. I Catt 1dec02. My letter to the Editor, which contained the above without the website links or mention of Sloss, was chopped down in today’s edition to the bit in red. This meant that the next item; “Give me a good plumber any day”, did not have to be cut. . |
Hatred of things male has led to the rape of
justice
- Minette Marrin, Sunday Times, 24nov02, sect. 1, p19 'All men are rapists"
was one feminist battle cry of the 1970s. Not many people actually thought
so, even at the time, but it did express an animosity towards men that was
widely shared and has taken a firm hold in mass culture. What the gender warriors
probably meant is that all rapists are men. Not only do men have a monopoly
on rape, they also have a near-monopoly on mugging, grievous bodily harm,
warmongering, torture and crimes against humanity. Illogical people might
therefore be led, by the same upside-down syllogism, to think ,hat all men
are awful and the root of all evil. Many do, and increasingly. Even little children sense
this prevailing orthodoxy in the playground. I will never forget the moment
my nine-year-old daughter told my four-year-old son that men do all the bad
and cruel things in the world and are wicked. But not girls. The poor little
fellow looked at her in shame and horror. Since then he has been growing up
in a climate of increasing misandry, the opposite of misogyny. We hear endless complaints
about misogyny, but actually misandry rules. Or if not exactly misandry, a
profound misunderstanding of masculinity: Boys and men are
increasingly blamed and belittled. Girls meanwhile have been doing better and
better at school and university, making the most of positive discrimination;
whereas boys have begun to underperform in most things, except in breaking
the law. The stereotypes of the
co-operative, hardworking and sociable girl compared with the disaffected,
lazy and antisocial boy truly exist across society. Testosterone has become a
vulgar term of abuse. The reasons are legion but the result is the same; this
is a bad time to he a boy. An absolutely typical
example of this uncritical misandry was to be found last week in the home
secretary's new white paper on sex offences. It is true that many laws on sex
crimes badly need revision and David Blunkett has proposed many very sensible
and welcome changes. But so great has been his
determination to convict more date rapists, presumably to please our powerful
feminist lobby, that he is prepared to violate two of the most sacred
principles of English criminal law: the burden of proof and the presumption
of innocence. So powerful is our public obsession with rape and date rape
that most critics have said very little about Blunkett's rape of justice. Under current law if a man
accused of rape can convince a jury that he honestly believed his alleged
victim had given consent; no matter how unreasonable his belief might have
been, he will be acquitted. It is therefore very hard to convict in such
cases, and, according to the white paper, that explains why conviction rates
for rape are indeed very low - only 7% of reported cases. That is why
Blunkett proposes to move the goalposts of justice. The two central principles
of criminal justice in this country have been the presumption of innocence
and the requirement of proof "beyond reasonable doubt". The burden
of proof, in every way, is upon the prosecution. Traditionally, as everyone
knows, it has been felt that it is far better that the guilty should go free
than that the innocent should be convicted - doubt should go in favour of the
accused. With rape this belief and
these principles seem to be losing their ancient power. The white paper, in
its attempts to get more convictions for date rape or acquaintance rape, is
undermining the assumption of innocence and suggesting a new test of
"reasonableness": The white paper proposes
that if the prosecution can show there is a reasonable doubt that an alleged
victim did consent to sex, and that the alleged rapist did not take
reasonable steps to make sure he had obtained consent, he' s guilty of rape. The law will list circumstances
in which it would be presumed that there could not have been consent, such as
when a woman was frightened, or unconscious through drink, drugs or sleep. So, though the prosecution
will have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that sex took place, in some of
these listed circumstances, the defendant would then have to prove his
innocence by persuading the jury, on
the balance of probabilities, that the victim did indeed consent. So he will
be presumed guilty, it seems to me, until he can prove himself innocent, and
under the most imponderable of circumstances. It is true that rape is a
particularly horrible offence, second only in its most flagrant forms to
murder. But there are degrees of rape, and it is sometimes genuinely
difficult to distinguish between them. For many years now there has been a
strange sort of hysteria about it. I was woken up to this by
a women's magazine investigation of rape about 20 years ago, following a big
survey of readers. The writer pointed out with furious indignation that a
great many unhappy women had written in, after reading the series, to say
that they hadn't realised until then that they had been raped. Call me
conventional, but I think rape is the kind of thing you would notice, at
least if you were awake. I was shocked by another,
more recent case of two students who got very drunk and collapsed into his
bed in his room. "Penetration took place," as the men in wigs say,
and the next morning the girl was friendly not only to him but to some of his
friends who turned up, and she stayed around cheerfully for a couple of
hours. Only much later, after
conversations with others, did she cry rape. The boy was convicted. So was
poor notorious Angus Diggle; who went to jail for a four-minute fumble with a
girl who took off her clothes in front of him, having come to his room to
spend the night after a dance. Although he stopped touching her almost as
soon as she protested, he was found guilty of attempted rape. Guilty only of attempted
consensual sex, I should say, and foolishnenss and bad manners; her presence
and her behaviour suggested consent, and when she protested he stopped almost
at once. Sex is full of
ambiguities. Human relationships are full of vengefulness and lies, as well
as love and tenderness. Some people are blinded by silly political agendas,
or the bad advice of foolish friends. On the wilder shores of
sex, among the S&M and bondage "community", some people love
precisely that "force or, fear of force" that Blunkett would make a
presumption of guilt (or at least a `presumption of lack of consent?")
in the courts. Hasn't, Blunkett listened
to Mozart's famous seduction scene in Don Giovanni, when the woman sings
"vorrei e non vorrei" or "yes and no all at once"? Why
should men always be blamed for these ambiguities of human nature?" Rape is a dreadful
violation, date rape may sometimes hardly deserve the name and there is a
spectrum of crimes in between. But no crime is bad enough, and men simply are
not nasty enough, to justify undermining the most important principles of
criminal law. New laws like this will
only increase the misunderstanding between the sexes, and the growing
resentment men feel against women. minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Cry of victory? http://www.ivorcatt.com/2310.htm |
|
24nov02. As the crisis deepens, government officials find they are crassly ignorant of the subject, and also saturated with false information including false “statistics” compiled by the likes of Stinko using government “research” funding. Using taxpayers’ money, they have paid to be brainwashed with anti-father propaganda. To cover their backs, as
it becomes blatantly ludicrous to refuse to discuss the growing crisis with
fathers or to learn from their experience, expertise and insights, they are
now seeking out the more ignorant among fathers campaigning for reform with
whom they can commune without betraying their lack of grasp of the key
issues. This evasion will continue for the next ten years, during which time
any attempt at reform by ignorant officials will be fatally flawed, and
merely inflame the situation further. Government officials and
politicians will only be brought to their senses when the crisis becomes
blatantly obvious from the mayhem in the streets. There is virtually no sign
of that yet. We have a long way to go, all of it downhill, with an ever
increasing suicide rate among young men. This is a major
international crisis. Ivor Catt 24nov02Editor of Ill Eagle, 1999-2002 http://www.ivorcatt.com/01.htm http://www.ivorcatt.com/99.htm |