People sometimes like to make things complicated, and I sometimes find that their motive in avoiding simplicity is to avoid realizing, or thinking about, something which they find mentally indigestible.
Consider, for example, the matter of rape. Rape is a complicated subject, and yet . . . in certain connections it is very simple. I would like to enlarge upon that, but first I should point out that it is customary to insert a pious disclaimer in dicey discussions like the one to follow—reassuring everybody that rape is a terrible, terrible crime, and that one would never excuse or condone it. I say this is customary. However, it is a custom I will ignore. I have never in my life stated that rape is permissible, and if you impute such an opinion to me, and broadcast your imputation under color of fact, then you are guilty of libel or slander.
Nor am I morally obligated to prove how sensitive I am. Sensitivity is very well in its season, but other qualities too, have their season. And in the present case, my emotional posture toward rape simply does not matter. Whether I praise or condemn it, or view it in any emotional context at all, is simply not germane to the points I am raising.
Very well. Rape as a social issue is presently unsettled. It is in flux; you might say it is “swirling”. And in the unsettled flux of popular discussion on blogs, web forums and the like, the talk swirls around mere description or mere definition of what might happen in hypothetical rape cases, while shunting aside the unforgiving existential question of what truly DOES happen in actual cases.
They argue back and forth about questions, definitions and possible scenarios: Is date rape really rape? Is marital rape really rape? What percentage of rapes go unreported? What percentage of women get raped in their lifetimes? What is or isn’t ‘consent’? And ought she know better than attend a party where horny frat boys are present? And if she dresses provocatively, does she deserve it? And if she goes back to his room with him, does that mean she wants it? And what if she happens to be drunk? And what if HE happens to be drunk? And what about this . . and what about that? Flibberty-jibberty-jibberty!
No, it does not interest me to quibble over the infinite shades of grey which separate consent from non-consent, or to waste much time on mere hypotheticals when the material point does not require them. I confess that I am unspeakably jaded by such meandering, involuted blab sessions, and I believe I am doing certain people an enormous favor when I graciously consent to fry my brain with their tedious, boring, repetitive, hand-wringing drivel— which goes nowhere but ’round and ’round the mulberry bush, and appears to serve no purpose but to evade the real issue.
If there were any point or profit to such talk, I would sing a different tune, but as matters stand, such windy exercises fascinate me in just the same way that counting angels on pinheads would fascinate me, and I have no patience with the countless pinheads who natter ad nauseamabout such things. In the end, most of it is bullshit.
And why? Because: in the real world, all of this eventually funnels down to the simple, timeless, bedrock questions of arrest, prosecution, trial, conviction, and most of all the jurisprudential and adjudicatory principles which govern these things at their various stages of operation. What are the facts, how do we even know, and can we ever truly know?
Know then, that the majority of rape cases are by their nature unprosecutable. Such is my considered assessment. When you point your finger at somebody and say, “he did such-and-so”, you need to prove it. For it is the easiest thing in the world to point your finger and accuse:anybody can do this to anybody, anywhere, at any time. But that does not mean that anybody may send anybody to prison simply by pointing a finger. If you aim to accomplish such a thing, the criminal justice system (at least in theory) makes you work for it by means of a little device called “standards of evidence.”
So let us consider the crime of rape. Yes, rape is a felony under law—I do not dispute this.
First, consider that most people are publicity-shy about two activities: 1.) sexual intercourse, and 2.) the commission of crime. In neither of these activities will the average man or woman invite witnesses—these are distinctly private activities. So, rape packs two-for-one because it is both sexual intercourse, and a crime. Briefly, it is a sex crime, and I can assert with confidence that almost no rapist wants to be seen raping. Therefore, the great majority of rape cases have no witnesses apart from the plaintiff and the defendant.
In addition, a somewhat smaller, but still quite large number of rape cases, have no forensic evidence suggesting that the alleged intercourse fits the legal definition of rape, i.e. that it was non-consensual.
Finally, under today’s lax standards, a fair number of rape cases lack forensic evidence of any kind — due to the elapsed time from when the rape allegedly occurred, to when the plaintiff filed a police report.
So that is why most rape cases are (in this writer’s opinion) inherently unprosecutable: because they amount to little more than her pointing a finger at him without any positive, indisputable, corroborative evidence that a crime was in fact committed. This state of affairs is commonly known as a “he said-she said”.
“Rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused, tho’ never so innocent”.
Yes, it is hard to think of a crime which is more difficult to prove than rape. And in saying this, I am saying nothing new. But I say it anyway, because the simple lesson it ought to teach us remains so stubbornly undigested. People cannot or will not learn, because they insist on making it complicated.
I have a modest proposal that would save a lot of time and taxpayer money. Why don’t we eliminate all police work and all criminal justice procedure from the rape question by simply holding a lottery? Every male above a certain age would have his name thrown into the lottery pool, and once a year a certain number would be drawn from this pool. The lucky winners would be charged with rape sight unseen, and dispatched straightway to the penitentiary for a predetermined number of years. From this there would be no appeal.
But seriously: the system of rape prosecution that we’ve presently got, is in a moral and practical sense indistinguishable from the lottery system I have described. And if certain legal innovations go through, this will become even more the case.
Lowering the standard of evidence weaves the net tighter, giving it a smaller mesh. Reversing the burden of proof (if instituted) will augment this effect. These factors can generate more guilty verdicts (hence more convictions), but they can do nothing to differentiate the guilty from the innocent. In fact, the system is not meant to assay guilt or innocence: it is meant to get convictions in conformity to feminism’s judicial worldview.
And feminism’s judicial worldview is collectivistic. Women-as-a class have been violated by men-as-a-class; such is the feminist narrative. Therefore men-as a-class must pay the penalty as a class. This means that a certain percentage of the class “men” must be sacrificed to meet the requirements of feminist justice—and it doesn’t matter who these men actually are or what they’ve actually done. Male blood is what’s wanted and, men being collectively guilty, this may flow in an undifferentiated river from any or all male sources irrespectively. Such is feminism’s judicial worldview.
Retribution for collective male guilt is feminism’s shadow subtext,meaning that it stays in the shade. So as you might expect, only a few brash individuals at unguarded moments will admit what is happening. Now, in most rape cases, the lack of third-witness corroboration or conclusive forensic evidence makes it well-nigh impossible to ascertain guilt or innocence with any certainty — so the practice is, to railroad the defendant. All the same, a charade of justice must be kept in place, and so the rape lottery is dressed in black robes and procedural frills.
And that is why the only thing which matters is the existentialpositionality of the innocent defendant — his particular Golgotha. He is not “men” in some abstract cloudy way. No, he is a man: a living, breathing, sentient creature who has done no crime, and yet he is being destroyed. And his well-being is of interest to me because his case could be my own, or that of any other man. A feminist does not care about the suffering of men. As the saying goes, “sure, men can suffer, but they cannot be oppressed.” In other words, your suffering is of no account to a feminist because you are not “oppressed”—and the distinction between suffering and oppression is, I have been assured, mighty critical!
So, the innocent rape defendant is not oppressed when he is railroaded into prison. Got that? But consistent with the feminist dictum, I am permitted to say that he suffers. And since the feminists do not care about this innocent man’s suffering, then I reckon I must take up the slack. In fact, I must do double duty along that line, and re-budget my capacity for caring by redistributing it away from focal points where it might otherwise be applied.
All right. To those who insist on making things complicated, consider that it does not matter to the innocent rape defendant how many rapes go unreported. Nor does it matter how many women get raped in their lifetimes. That information has no bearing at all upon the facts of his particular case. None. Whether it be ten unreported rapes per year, or ten thousand, sheds no light whatever upon his own guilt or innocence in the matter under adjudication. None. And whether ten women get raped during their lifetimes, or all of them do, similarly sheds no light. None. Granted that to the feminist mind, imbued with a collectivistic worldview that seeks retribution, such apparently peripheral data hold a key importance. But to anybody else such data are, as said, peripheral.
As to the matter of consent: if no corroboration is available this becomes, if not peripheral, then at best immaterial. This is where the question of what is or isn’t consent becomes nearly fruitless if not entirely so. One may certainly avow in principle that consent ought to be given, and that “no means no”. This is easy in classroom discussions or internet bull sessions. But when actual guilt or innocence are at stake in a real life rape trial, and you have only her word against his, then it makes not a damned bit of difference how you gerrymander the line between consent or non-consent. All that matters is to know who is telling the truth. And if you are a feminist, you will say the woman is telling the truth because you cannot afford to say otherwise. As a feminist, you have a confessional interest in upholding the thesis that “women don’t lie about rape”.
Yet evidence is now to hand, and abundantly so, that women can and do lie about rape and are far from being delicate blossoms in that line of work! This evidence is piling up like stacks of lumber in a warehouse, and the warehouse is getting full. We need to build another one! And if you would persist in telling me that women don’t lie about rape, then you would be living in a bubble of cognitive dissonance that could be warrantably termed neurosis.
So let us be deadly clear about what is happening. Innocent men are being torn to pieces, and ANY man might, in principle, live at the mercy of a lying woman. Our civilization has seen fit to bestow such power upon women and such hatred upon men, and the ideological movement called feminism has been the prime instigator in bringing this about. That is the simple, ugly, indigestible truth which lies at the bottom of all the complicated palaver about definitions and hypothetical scenarios. And it is a truth which, by the look of it, our civilization does not want to face honestly and squarely. Feminists certainly do not want to face it; that is no surprise. The surprise is, that large numbers of anti-feminists too would rather dance around with things which are not critical or central. They might be lazy, they might be ignorant, or they might be unconsciously blocking something they find mentally indigestible. I don’t much care; I am bloody tired of it.
Innocent souls are being cast upon a sacrificial bonfire. This, as we are instructed to conclude, is not oppression—and I’m sure it is a great semantic comfort for certain men to be told that their suffering is not oppression. Still, it is a sacrifice. A holocaust, if you will. A holocaust of the innocent under color of the judicial. A war on rape is underway, and the powers-that-be figure it is acceptable to make the innocent suffer right along with the guilty, and guess what. . ? They are pondering how to turn the heat up even more!
We must consider, that there might be NO solution to the problem of rape—or at least none that would satisfy a feminist. That is harsh to think about, but what if it’s true? Rape could very well end up being one of those god-damned things that we can’t do ANYTHING about—or at least nothing that a feminist would find mentally digestible. But did anybody ever tell you that the universe was fair? Naturally, I would be interested to meet the wizard genius (be this man or woman) who can devise a surefire way to INFALLIBLY catch the guilty party in every case, and onlythe guilty party. I await that day, but I am not holding my breath.
Meanwhile, unless you consider the judicial holocaust of the innocent to be acceptable damage in the war on rape, then I would seriously question whether practical solutions in this domain are realistically (read: humanely and equitably) within reach.
Yes: the judicial holocaust of the innocent. I do not feel that “holocaust” is too strong a word for what is happening here. Just try telling the victim of such abominations that he has NOT been thrown upon a sacrificial fire. That is one meaning of holocaust: a sacrificial fire. And too, a fire whichburns up everything. The holocaust of the innocent is a sacrificial fire upon which any and every innocent man might be thrown: in principle, no man is exempt. The guilty, you would say, deserve it—so accordingly,they are not the sacrifice. It is the innocent who are sacrificed, and no innocent man is secure from the reach of those flames—certainly the law affords no protection.
And the inferno spreads, engulfing more and more of the surrounding world—for as befits a holocaust, it is holistic and caustic. The suffering of the innocent is only the beginning, and what happens to them does not happen in a vacuum. Therefore, what happens to them does not stop with them. We must equally consider the fallout upon society. We must consider the ramifications, branching far and wide in all directions, eating deeper and deeper into the social fabric, both holistically and caustically.
Yes: the judicial holocaust of the innocent. That has a ring to it—a ring of truth, I daresay! It is perilous stuff, this incineration of innocent souls under color of law. It is, mark my words, a fire that shall burn us all; a deadly flashpoint that could, in the fullness of time, ignite a deadly social war. And I do mean war; the kind where real blood flows. Literally. Would that be “holocaustic” enough for you? Or would you rather be a holocaust denier?
Oh very well, go back to sleep. I am sorry to have troubled you.
