Random mid-week thoughts

▲The following is a snippet from a 1979 AP news article about the passage of the bill in the California state senate outlawing marital rape.  (Note that while marital "rape" was not a crime until relatively recently, assault and battery were -- a husband could not physically force himself on his wife, contrary to current thinking that back in the old days, men could do whatever they wanted to their wives.) Anyway, during the senate debate, Senator Newton Russell openly wondered if the new law would allow wives to falsely cry "rape" against their husbands for revenge.  Senator Barry Keene had similar fears, but read his quote, below. It's a microcosm of the male reaction to all feminist rape initiatives of the past 30 years -- the equivalent of "I guess I have to bend over and take it like a man":

▲Much of radical feminism has a seething "payback" quality underlying it, as if women are now going to get back at men for what hypothetical males in the past did to long dead females.  Here's feminist icon Germaine Greer on the payback aspect of feminist art: "Late 20th Century feminism protested against the dehumanization of the female as the passive object of the male gaze with a duty to beautify and decorate herself for a man's delectation. A number of committed women artists began working with the male nude as if consciously seeking some kind of revenge for what they perceived as centuries of the portrayal of women in art as mere sex objects."

▲Have you ever noticed that every time a feminist discusses false rape claims, she becomes an actuarial?  False rape claims, she posits, are an acceptable risk because there are so few of them and because there are so many actual rapes -- especially of the unreported variety.  "I'll start to become concerned about false rape claims," she gushes, "when false rape claims become half the problem rape is." Or, more likely, when she has a son who is falsely accused. Nothing turns a rabid radical feminist into a reasonable human being more quickly than a false rape claim lodged against her son.

▲Here's a plug for a major post we're going to run on Friday: a look back at one of the most widely reported false rape claims in recent American history -- when two Dallas Cowboys were nearly destroyed by an unholy alliance of a false accuser, a local TV station, and the local police.

▲Whenever the people charged with solving a problem are dependent on the problem's continued existence for their livelihoods, you can be certain they will never admit when the problem goes away. We'll never hear that the so-called rape "epidemic" is no longer an "epidemic" because the sexual grievance industry has too much to lose by admitting it.

▲The reason that was most commonly given for scrapping the very modest anonymity proposal in Britain (it would have allowed men accused of rape to remain anonymous until they are charged) was that anonymity would "send a message" that rape accusers aren't to be believed, which would lead women to decide not to report their rapes.  Has anyone seen even a scrap of evidence to support this epiphany? It rings especially hollow in light of RAINN chief Scott Berkowitz's recent U.S. Senate testimony that women are not failing to report due to fears that they won't be believed.

▲Finally, a few quotes from Prof. Alan Dershowitz:

•“Rape is such a serious crime that deliberately bringing a false accusation of rape should be an equally serious crime and women are not being punished for those crimes. I believe that being falsely accused of rape is as traumatic as being raped.”

•". . . the rules of evidence have been changed to make it easier to convict defendants of rape and harder to cross-examine alleged rape victims."

•"The idea that these youngsters should be branded rapists and the girl should be labeled a victim is preposterous." (Addressing a case where male teens who engaged in consensual sex with a female teen should be prosecuted for statutory rape while the girl was not charged)

•". . . objective data show that the problem of false rape reports is a serious one, and that the percentage of false reports in rape cases is considerably higher than the percentage of false reports for other violent felonies. One reason for this disparity is that the police rarely prosecute women who deliberately file false rape reports."

•"How can you publish the name of the presumptively innocent accused but not the name of the accuser?"