A Challenge to the Feminist Thinking About Rape

A Challenge to the Feminist Thinking About Rape

by Simon Marley (Pen Name) May, 2019 Email: simon_marley@outlook.com

Preliminary

This paper is one of a number of papers that I intend to write in order to challenge various deeply rooted social values. Despite the Western world today being run by a political correctness which despises challenges to ideas that it holds sacred. I personally describe political correctness as the use of force and coercion against free individuals, and therefore consider it the duty of thinking people to challenge its principles. It is a healthy thing to challenge the prevailing ideas in society, regardless of whether one is wrong or right. In the course of writing these papers, I will not only challenge the topic at hand, but will take the opportunity to challenge further norms that intersect with the matter at hand. I feel that debate is a very healthy thing, and to this end I am happy to attach any genuine comments provided (anonymously if required) as an appendix to this document and with a response if required.

Author

I am a business consultant but additionally into philosophy and debate, and have written a number of political papers as well as engaging in various political lobbying activities. I tend to split my extra-curricular work into three categories which are public meaning for all to see, private meaning that the work is posted anonymously and shared with friends and family, and completely anonymous meaning that the work is shared anonymously with everyone. The category of this work is completely anonymous.

Introduction

 I need to open this paper by making it clear that rape is a very serious crime that has potentially a devastating impact on victims and is therefore something that society should seek to effectively prevent. I am in anticipation of the fact that because I am challenging conventional views on rape, I will be called a "Rape Denier" or "Rape Apologist". I want to therefore make it clear in advance that I am neither belittling the idea of rape, not the impact on its victims.

I also need to state that I have sympathy with the argument that most men who have actually committed rape, are not dealt with, and that this is an injustice. I am writing this paper, because it recently occurred to me that there is something seriously wrong in this area. I have come to believe that there is a great stigma against people who identify with people accused of rape, or have any sympathy for them. For this reason, it is rare that any enquiries into the conventional beliefs about rape take place.

I believe that it is reasonable to say that victims of rape have a tremendous amount of support, and this is the support of billions of people worldwide. Those accused of rape, on the counterside, have almost no support. I believe that if there are gaps exposed in the thinking about rape which have caused injustices for the accused, it is the duty of thinking people to fill this gap because the gap is addressed by the population as a whole.

I have had a personal experience to reflect on that happened many years ago. When working away, I met a younger woman in a Northern British city. The relationship became sexual and we would spent time together in the hotel room I had when I was in the city in question. I have to admit that for me it was an association of convenience, and that I did not regards this person to be suitable to be a long-term partner. We would meet regularly and go for dinner and drinks, and went to my hotel room for intimacy. Several meetings into the relationship, we had sex, and afterwards the lady went to run a bath while I was on the bed. Several minutes later, something did not seem right, and I went to check on the lady. To my surprise, she had left the hotel room. I messaged her to ask what was wrong, and the young lady replied stating that I had been too rough with her. I was baffled by this, and tried very hard to be self-reflective about this and think back to the sexual events that we were involved with. I tried painstakingly to recall the events and I could not recall any heavy handed behaviour. I also could not recall any comments being made at the time. I was completely unable to understand the comment. Was I in fact rough with the young lady? What exactly did that mean? Was simply her imagination or perception? Was it caused by emotional problems in the young lady, or myself? Was it psychological game playing? Was it an excuse to quit the relationship?

I will never know the answer to these questions. Following this exchange, we agreed to meet again, but the young lady did not turn up, and subsequently there was no further contact between us. Following this, I buried these events in my mind, and they have recently resurfaced as I have begun to think about the question of rape.

The argument of this paper is that there are 5 types claims which relate to rape as follows:

a. Actual rape

b. False accusations of rape

c. Differences in perception

d. Political rape

Actual rape

Actual rape relates to a person having sexual intercourse with another while being aware that the intercourse in unwanted. Rape is usually carried out with the use of physical violence and force, or threats of violence. In other circumstances, rape relates to situations where a person has sexual intercourse with a person who is incapacitated either medically, or through drink or drugs, which are sometimes administered by the rapists themselves. Rapes can be carried out by strangers or persons known to the victims. 

During wartime situations, it is known that rapes have been used as a method of inflicting terror on civilian populations. (For example the Soviet army rapes against women in Germany after the Soviets broke through the German defences and into Germany at the end of World War II). Victims of rape often suffer from trauma or posttraumatic stress disorder.  

False accusations

False accusations of rape relate to situations where a rape is reported, but in fact the alleged victim is conscious of the fact that no rape has taken place. Commonly cited statistics for the prevalence of false rape accusations are around 2% to 10% of the number of rapes reported. In a number of cases, women falsely reporting rape will not accuse a specific individual.There are a number of reasons for false accusation of rape, and these include rejection, spite, convenience, gain or attention.

A court found that Jemma Beale invented a string of false rape and assault allegations against 15 men in order to gain compensation money from the public purse. Her accusation resulted in one of her male victims being jailed for seven years. The courts sentenced Ms. Beale to 10 years in jail.

In another famous case, Canberra based Sarah-Jane Parkinson made 32 horrific false allegations including false rape claims against her partner, prison guard partner. These false allegations were made several days after the relationship ended. Her partner spent several months behind bars after losing all his wealth trying to defend himself and was suicidal claiming he had lost everything. The court sentenced Ms. Parkinson to three years and one month in jail without parole.

In India, Pavan Gupta, 24 had been in a sexual relationship Geeta Jain for 18 months. Pavan was subsequently pressured by his family to marry a chosen women, and he accepted. Following this Ms. Jain claimed she had slept with him only on promise of marriage and, since he had not married her, consent was procured on a false pretext, making the sex rape. “Even if I had misled her and told her I’d marry her, it still wouldn’t make the sex rape. How can consensual sex for over a year be rape?” asks Gupta. Following a spate of false rape claims, India's courts rules to 'Spare innocent men anguish' and to end false rape claims.

Sophie Pointon, a criminology student approached a taxi cab while extremely drunk and holding a kabab. She threw money covered in grease at the driver, who refused to transport her. She opened all of the doors of the taxi and made a nuisance of herself. Subsequently, she reported the taxi drive, and father of five for rape. Ms. Pointon was subsequently jailed for 16 months for the false allegation.

The case of Robert Adlington received public attention because he was convicted due to a failure of the police to disclose evidence. The evidence in question was a text message by the rape accuse right after the meeting in which the rape was said to take place. The message read: “Oh darling, that was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. Let’s do it again.”

Mr Adlington was held on remand in jail for several months while the case was investigated and in the process lost his business and his livelihood. Mr Adlington remarked “I cannot believe my case is unique. I would imagine there are other people who have just decided to try to put the matter behind them and not speak out. But I believe it is essential to try and ensure things change and other people don’t have to endure the nightmare that I have experienced. I fear my case might be just the tip of the iceberg. It is a crucial that newspapers like the Daily Express are able to shine a light on police wrongdoing.”

It is logical to assume that because there are cases where innocent men were convicted of rape and then exonerated due to evidence in the form of records of communication, that equally innocent men are convicted and unable to clear their name due to the absence of records of communication. There are therefore innocent men who are currently languishing in jail due to false rape allegations.

Anti-rape activists often use a political mantra which is 'believe women' which is the same as asking to lock up any man who is accused of rape. One needs to ask such activists whether women always tell the truth.

Differences in perception

Material differences in perception occur where two people see the same thing differently to such an extent that the differences do not represent slight differences in interpretation or differences concerning minor properties of something, but these are differences in processing that are so large that they produce two materially different interpretations that effectively represent two radically different and incompatible events.

An example of material differences in perception are the differences based on people's observation of Jordan Peterson. To one group of people, Jordan Peterson is an interesting, useful and unconventional liberal and freedom loving academic that relaunched his career by challenging some very deeply held assumptions in Western culture. To another group of people Jordan Peterson is a "fascist". These perceptions of the same person are materially different and incompatible differences in perception. In these cases one perception is correct and the other is incorrect, because both incompatible views cannot be correct.

The two radically varying recollections of the sexual encounter that I experienced where it was suggested that I was rough with the women, would qualify as material differences in perception.

I will use as my example for this category of rape, Joshua Strange. Joshua was a student at Auburn University and he entered into a sexual relationship with one of his female peers at the university. As Joshua puts it, the day came where the accusation came. Everything then changed for him. He lost most of his friends, and was alienated by most students at the University. He heard people talking about him over his shoulder. Eventually his hearing came up and he was placed alongside his accuser with a black sheet between them, as he puts it presumably to stop him from further traumatising his former partner. This was the black sheet that symbolised the social killing of the spirit of a young man with all his dreams ahead of him. As predicted, the outcome of the hearing was his immediate expulsion from the university. Joshua has carried on giving talks and lectures about what happened to him and works with men he believes to be falsely accused of rape to help them.

It appears to me that Joshua is genuine in his perception that he did nothing wrong, and this is because of the fact that he continues to work in this area. I don't think that it is likely that someone who knowingly did wrong would continue to work in this area and thus further damage his name, and therefore the only explanation for continuing to work in this area publicly is a continued believe in truth and justice. Further, the way in which Joshua tells the story seems genuine, and the language used is consistent with someone who genuinely believes in their innocence. Similarly the accuser does not seem to have a motive for making up the story. It seems that each party in this case has a different perception of the events.

Postmodern Social Theory

The prevailing political theory in the West is Postmodern Social Theory. To use Jordan Peterson’s explanation of Postmodern Social Theory (PST), it relates to a fusion of postmodernism and post-Marxism. Postmodernism in this context refers to the relinquishing of reason, logic and structures, and therefore the use of the idea that all interpretations of reality are correct. Post-Marxism involves moving beyond Marxism where rich and poor (or bourgeoisie and proletariat) as the victim and oppressor groups, which cause an overriding imperative to level the playing field. Post-Marxism uses the additional actors of race, gender, religion, sexuality and disability, while determining the oppressor and victim groups in each category.

PST classes whites, males and Christians to be oppressor groups and females, Muslims, blacks and gays to be victim groups. PST's overarching narrative is to claim that the victim groups are being oppressed day and night, and it uses as a tool selective reporting of such cases to asset its belief. PST is rooted in biased thinking, and therefore has to reject events that contradict its narrative. Examples of events that contradict the narrative of PST are the routing killing of families of white farmers in South Africa, the male suicide rate and Christians targeted by Muslim terrorists in Sri Lanka. Jordan Peterson argues that in PST, reason, truth and logic don't matter because it is about a route to power for people it considers to be "the right thinking people" i.e. most people in the political, media and educational establishment today. The route to power for "right thinking people" is all that matters.

Feminism as a theory is part of PST, and as such is designed to be a route to power based on the premise that women are oppressed. As with all other branches of PST, "any means necessary" can be used to achieve the overriding objectives and members of oppressor groups as well as anyone who gets in the way are expendable. One only needs to refer to quotes from prominent feminists to discover that the feminist view of reality is that men are pigs, all sex with men is rape, unjust outcomes for men are acceptable, and men are criminals who belong in a maximum security prison. (Citations can be provided).

There is a wide range of attitudes among advocates of PST including:

a. people who just assume that the theory is correct because it is the prevailing narrative but are happy to be challenged,

b. people who are conceited in their ignorance and cannot cognitively process any challenges to the theory, and yet they are still polite

c. people with an obnoxious attitude that are intolerant towards any opposing viewpoints, and resist opposition with force, and sometimes violence.

Totalitarian regime: PST is a totalitarian and fascistic belief system that punishes transgressors often by ruining their lives through accusations of racism and ironically "fascism" (often with the accuser having no idea what "fascism" actually is).

Political Rape

Political rape refers to the wilful interpretation of events that do not factually constitute rape as rape. A parallel example of this is the example of a political prisoner. The political prisoner holds views that are contract to the state and for this has been convicted for a crime, while no actual crime has taken place. The political prisoner may be legally a criminal, but not actually a criminal.

PST is highly correlated with rape. One example of this correlation was the British phenomena of Muslim Grooming Gangs who sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain, however authorities ignored these events out of fear of being called racist. The phenomenon was first noticed in Rotherham, however it emerged that the same phenomenon was taking place in many British towns and cities. These gangs were allowed to operate with impunity for between 10 to 20 years. Admitting the phenomenon would go against the PST narrative which states that Muslims are a victim group and not an oppressor group.

The #Metoo movement was effectively a Twitter hash tag where anyone could freely make specific named accusation about anyone in terms of rape and sexual harassment, and thus signified an acceptance that unvalidated and unverified accusation should be taken as fact and have an impact on the accused. Some of the accusations on the #Metoo hashtag are serious accusations, while other comments claim "victimisation" by comments on dress, a touch to the knee, or looking at someone the wrong way. The #Metoo hashtag became an American national frenzy with tens of millions of people jumping on the bandwagon. It was as if a person wasn't anyone unless that had an assault to speak about on the #Metoo hashtag. Eventually the #Metoo hashtag was killed off when one of its female founding members, Christina Garcia was accused of inappropriate touching male softball players.

The #Metoo message is very much open to interpretation. Either we are all sexual predators, or we are all too sensitive, and should just accept that people sometimes touch us as to the Italians gesticulating in excitable conversation, or that we all feel that we have a political reason to jump on the victim bandwagon. The response of many Wall Street firms to the #Metoo movement was to reduce the hiring of female staff and to recommend that a male does not go into a room with a single female, in order to avoid costly litigation. In order to resolve the complaints from the #Metoo movement, it would be impossible for men to make any sexual moves of advances on women because such moves would be construed as sexual harassment.

Alternatively, it could be argued that the situation could be resolved by asking permission to make a move. This reads well on paper, however it is not the way that human beings operate in the real world, and further a man who asked permission would most likely be perceived as wimpy by the woman and be rejected.

Julian Assange was accused of a rape in Sweden in 2012, however the records of the case suggest that the sex was consensual. Records suggest that Julian Assange slept with two women in Sweden who were friends and in the process communicated a disease to the both of them. The two women went to the police with a message to pass onto him to tell him to get checked for a disease. One of the women said 'he didn't wear a condom' as her cause for complaint not 'he raped me.'

The two women asked the police to contact Assange for this reason but they refused and a rape prosecution followed.

Notes from Mr Assange's lawyers contain text messages between the two women SW and AA — the two women who made allegations against the WikiLeaks founder, read as follows:

• On 17 August, SW wrote "JA did not want to use a condom".
• On 20 August, while at the police station, SW wrote that she "did not want to put any  charges on Julian Assange" but that "the police were keen on getting their hands on him".
• According to the statement she was "chocked (sic shocked) when they arrested him" because she "only wanted him to take [an STD test]".
• On 21 August, SW wrote that she "did not want to accuse" Julian Assange "for anything" and that it was the "police who made up the charges (sic)"
• On 23 August, SW wrote that it was the police, not herself, who started the whole thing.

Ched Evans, a footballer was convicted in 2011 and jailed for five and a half years which he served, for rape, when in fact consensual sex had occurred. Ched and a colleague, McDonald had been drinking and visited a nearby kebab shop. Ched started talking to a 22 year old woman who was also said to have been drinking. The two voluntarily took a taxi cab back to Ched's hotel room. McDonald asked the woman is she would be interested in a three ‘some and she agreed. The three took part in 3 way sex. At one point the women involved said "F*** me harder". After the sexual encounter, Ched felt guilty because he had cheated on his partner. He left through a fire escape. The complainant alleged that she was dunk and awakened hours later alone in the room. Two witnesses who had previously had sex with the alleged victim were called and they cited sexual preferences of the alleged victim that were exactly in line with what the victim requested from the two footballer.

Ched managed to appear the conviction in 2016, and the conviction was quashed.

It seems that there is a commonality in these cases of political rape, and that is that they involved questionable sexual etiquette, and questionable moral standards. The language used often seems towards questionable sexual situations seems to be about punishing men, and many men have adopted this stance in order to be in line with the status quo. This is consistent with the idea that PST activists need to take down the oppressors down a few pegs. PST activists cannot take down men as a single group, but through punishments for questionable sexual situations, they can pick off individual men and victimise them. Society has accepted PST, and in its spirit, ignoring the male perspective on this issue, because it is perceived as the perspective of the oppressor group.

Treatment of men in criminal justice system

The criminal justice system was set up with the presumption of innocence. This presumption was based on the notion that it is better that a guilty man goes free than an innocent man is hung. This presumption has been reversed in recent times with regards to rape, and has instead been replaced with bias in favour of the victim. In Britain the criminal justice system gives anonymity to the alleged victim given anonymity but not to the accused. There was a recent UK police initiative to automatically believe all women who reported rape of sexual assault.

This police stance was dropped after a public outcry following the case of Mr Adlington who was convicted despite the fact that police were in possession of mobile phone evidence that proved his innocence. A number of people have argued that police should not be given mobile phone evidence because this could exonerate alleged rapists. Common sense would suggest that the spirit of justice is to make decisions based on all of the evidence. 

Liam Allan, 22, was charged with rape and sexual assault but his trial collapsed after police were ordered to hand over phone records crucial to the case. Without this order the police would not have handed over the evidence that cleared him. This evidence included 40,000 text messages from alleged victim where the victim has pestered him for "casual sex".

One naturally has sympathy with genuine victims of rape asked to turn over information about their lives because this is intrusive. However on balance, if one has to weigh up an inconvenience to one person with the wrongful conviction of another of a serious crime, full disclosure seems to make sense.

I heard an argument made that mobile phone evidence or evidence about the alleged victim should be withheld because it’s often used to twist perspective of the rapist. This is an absurd argument because evidence does not twist the perspective in any way, and nor can evidence be at fault. Evidence is just evidence. If there is a fault in the conclusion drawn from the evidence, then the evidence should not be blamed, it is the court processes that should be blamed, and the criticism should be directed at these processes as opposed to suggestions that evidence should be withheld. Withholding evidence is a form of coercion used to steer the court in a certain direction and that direction may not be the right direction.

Conclusion

The premise that it is much worse to be raped than accused of rape, is not true. People who are accused of rape suffer irreparable harm, and their lives will never be the same. These male victims lose friends, are alienated by family, get expelled from universities, suffer from ruin reputations, livelihoods and lives. The bad numbers for rape convictions don't matter to individual whose life are unjustly ruined. While these people might be in a minority statistically, they are in actual fact a person and not a statistic and the injustice rate towards them personally is 100%, and perceived as such.

Lowering the bar for rape in order to gain more convictions is principally unfair, due to the by-product of massive amounts of damage done to innocent lives. While it is true that the conviction rape for rape is low, this is not an injustice that should be borne by random people just because they happen to be male and sexually active. Calling for blood from men for strange or questionable acts where no victimisation has taken place is simply the act of unjust people. A woman's life being ruined by rape is a terrible thing, but an innocent man is not disposable pawn to be used to remediate this.

There is also the perspective of things women do that are incompatible with claiming rape. I am indeed sure that this statement will attract comments claiming that the statement is claiming that women case rape by wearing short skirts. The statement is not claiming this at all. A woman should not freely go home with a man, get undressed, go into a bed, and engage in sexual talk and actions, and then - for whatever reason claim rape (unless of course the situation is one of clear battery which is immensely rare).

I will refer back to Joshua Strange; suddenly the accusation comes, and your life is changed forever. The accusation can come for any of the reasons listed above, and from anyone including a partner. You may have any idea why the accusation was made and why therefore society has decided to killed the person inside the man.

Because he raped her you say. I say how do you really known that?

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