Friday 6 April 2018

Playing feminist roulette


There is a contradiction in feminism. Perhaps this extends to modern women in general. Feminism demands equality with men and wishes to minimise the difference between men and women to the greatest extent possible, but it also and at the same time demands special treatment for women. This is fundamentally because of a quality that is inherent in and special only to women.


The reality, of course, is that men and women are very different indeed with natures that are compatible but unalike. These differences are not merely in the external characteristics which allow us nearly always to recognise instantly a stranger as being either a man or a woman, they are also in the way that men and women tend to act and to think. A few examples:

How many women in their forties and fifties do you know with a husband 20 years younger from Thailand?

How many men do you know who on approaching the age of thirty suddenly become obsessed with either getting married or having a baby?

How many men do you know who respond to something bad happening with either going shopping or in eating large amounts of chocolate or ice cream?

Do you think women or men watch more pornography on the Internet?

There are exceptions to every rule and human behaviour is complex, but at the heart of the relationship between men and women is our differing attitude to sex. In general men from their teenage years onward want to have sex as much as possible. A reasonably attractive young woman will have no trouble at all finding someone to have sex with. If anything there will be a queue. Women on the other hand, throughout human history have been more interested in finding a long term husband with whom she can build a family.

It is lucky, or perhaps rather it is by design, that men and women are as they are. If both were like men, then there would be lots more sex, but rather less stability. If both were like women it is unclear there would be any sex at all. Men seek sex and require little more than its being available. An emotional attachment to them is not necessary. For women sex without an emotional attachment has (at least until recently) been considered unattractive and undesirable. Until the past fifty years or so it was most unusual for women to have sex casually with people they just met. It is for this reason above all that women, with few exceptions are uninterested in paying men to sleep with them. Most women would pay to avoid such an experience.

We are as we are. Men and women are different. But we need each other. The highest happiness for humans is to be found in a relationship. Family life and children are the source of the greatest fulfilment to us both. So we must work with our different natures and try to understand each other as best we can. As much great fiction shows, it is difficult. Men and women continually find each other baffling.  Misunderstanding is at the heart of many great novels. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy misunderstand each other, for which reason they have to overcome their pride and also their prejudice. We all do.

Unfortunately misunderstanding is also at the heart of recent developments that have taken the battle of the sexes in a new direction. The battle damages men, but perhaps it damages women still more even if the wound is largely self-inflicted. The legacy is not merely increased misunderstanding, but more importantly increased distrust. But without trust how can men and women form relationships at all?

Few if any men have been prosecuted as a result of the MeToo or Timesup movements. Lots of women have made claims about various forms of sexual assault taking place in Hollywood and elsewhere, but remarkably little evidence has been provided. Certain aging Hollywood actresses have been able to find a new purpose metaphorically knitting as the guillotine falls once more on their next victim. It’s enough just to denounce. No further evidence is required, before the next head is held up before the crowd of knitters. Various careers and lives have been ruined. Some lives have been lost. Each of us may have an opinion about the guilt or innocence of these people, but none of us really know.

This is the essential difficulty about a crime that if it takes place usually takes place in private. It is difficult enough to prove that a sexual assault happened yesterday, it is practically speaking impossible, unless there is a confession or some form of physical evidence, to prove what happened ten or twenty years ago. But that’s ok, for the fundamental aspect of MeToo and Timesup is that we should always believe women.

This is the basic inequality at the heart of feminism. Women are inherently truthful, while men are inherently liars. It is for this reason that when faced with a situation where there is only testimony, the testimony of the woman should always be believed, while the testimony of the man should be treated with suspicion. Do we have any evidence that men are more likely to lie than women? Should it be the case that whenever there is a trial involving a woman that we should automatically believe what she says and disbelieve what any man says? Alternatively we could perhaps argue that the testimony of one woman should be worth that of two men? That sounds familiar. Can't think why. 

The truth however, is that we all have had experience of both men and women telling lies. Which of us has never lied? So on what basis do we assert that women are inherently truthful and should be believed? It looks as if this is an article of faith, indeed blind faith. There is far more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than that women should always be believed, yet it is considered to be an act of blind faith to believe that He rose again, while it is simply common sense to suppose that whoever says MeToo was in fact assaulted. The claims of the New Testament are based on multiple eyewitness testimony and the sources for these often corroborative witness statements are far better than those for say Hannibal crossing the Alps or the Peloponnesian War. But while faith in Christianity is in continual decline we are supposed to take as proven any unverified or unverifiable claim made by a woman stating that at some point in the past however long ago she was sexually assaulted by a man. The mere assertion that someone assaulted me twenty years ago is proved just by my saying it. This rather looks like a new religion substituting itself for the old.  Are we really supposed to have blind faith in the testimony of women as if women were divine?

What we have had in the past few months is a relentless attack on men for being men. I was assaulted by a man, MeToo, MeToo. With enough MeToos anyone would get the impression that it is in the nature of men to sexually assault and that indeed they  are practically all doing it or thinking about doing it, or intending to do it. What beasts compared to the pure sanctity of the holy blessed woman who only wants to make films unsullied by contact with these animals.

The trouble with these hash tags is that they have real world consequences. There recently was a rape trial in Belfast. The men involved were declared to be “not guilty”. But immediately there were those who thought they knew better than the jury. Trial by Twitter declared “Ibelieveher”. On what basis? Did those who proclaimed injustice sit through the whole of the trial? Are they all law experts? Or is it simply that following on from MeToo they think that women must automatically be believed always, which means that men must always be disbelieved. If that’s not sexism, then I simply don’t understand the word's meaning.

With enough demonstrations, the law will be changed to reflect public opinion. It will amount to this. In any case where there is no evidence whatsoever that a sexual assault has occurred, the woman should be believed. What this will mean is that if a man and a woman go into a room and the next day the woman claims to have been raped, the man will automatically be guilty unless he can prove that he didn’t rape the woman. But under these circumstances I would advise men never to have sex with women. It’s possible after all to rape a long term girlfriend or even a wife. Alternatively every man should install CCTV cameras in his room and should demand that hotels do the same. That way there might be evidence. Do we really want to go down that route?

Until relatively recently in history this wasn’t an issue. No woman would go to the room of a man she had just met that evening after having a few drinks. She wouldn’t do this unless she intended to have sex. Now we have a situation where it is completely normal to meet someone for the first time and have sex with them. But you cannot have a situation where there is permissiveness about sex and the expectation that strangers meet and sleep with each other, but at any point one of these strangers, but not the other, can claim a crime occurred for which the penalty is many years in jail. For a man this amounts to playing феминиская рулетка [feminist roulette].

What do the Ibelieveher believers actually want? I don’t think they want to go back to the time when sex generally did not occur before marriage and where young women had chaperones. Many of them I suspect want to have sex when they please and they rely on the fact that it isn’t difficult to find a willing man. They rely therefore on the nature of men as people who want to have sex. But while wanting permissiveness these Ibelieveher believers want to at any point in time cry foul and send any man they please to jail.  

But it won’t take many instances of men being sent to jail in such circumstances for men to realise that this game is far too risky. They might then begin to find the company of prostitutes more congenial and less stressful than having a girlfriend who wants continually to hold a metaphorical gun to their head. In time we might develop a new way of interacting such that men sleep only with prostitutes until they get married and women apart from prostitutes sleep with no-one. That would begin to look rather like Victorian times. Dresses could get longer, corsets might come back into fashion and it would be like the sexual revolution never happened.

Men and women frequently misunderstand each other, because we have different natures.  This combined with the practice of sleeping with people we have only just met is bound to lead to failures of communication with regard to desire. It is for this reason that traditionally sex was regulated by the Church and by society in rather a strict way. Limiting sex to within marriage meant the couple had to come to an understanding with regard to their desire and had to express their consent publically before witnesses. This is how nearly everyone lived until quite recently. Sexual puritanism limits the opportunity for the sorts of sexual assault that occur in private with no evidence for a crime except the testimony of the participants. But what we can’t have is a combination of permissiveness and puritanism. It is unfair to both the nature of men and women and will eventually cause such distrust that we will have to choose either puritanism or permissiveness.  We can’t have both.

The contradiction inherent in feminism has been exposed. It is overly proud of the virtues of women while overly prejudiced about the vices of men. This is not about equality. It’s about superiority. Feminism’s major achievement will soon be that men and women misunderstand and distrust each other more than ever before. Well done sisters.