Luke Ford

This is tricky. I don’t believe you should get a free pass if you did your raping and pillaging while you were under age.

On the other hand, if no police reports were filed, if the evidence does not go beyond he-said, she-said, and there is no pattern of the alleged behavior, then I don’t think we should take decades-old accusations seriously. So that is my basic reaction to the allegations against Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Woody Allen. There is little evidence of criminal misbehavior on their part. If Woody Allen, for example, were a child diddler, we’d have serial allegations against him, and we don’t.

On the other hand, other guys such as Australia’s Attorney General Christian Porter do have a history of raunchy behavior, and while raunchy is not necessarily criminal, his randy choices predispose him to allegations of sexual misconduct. If you’re the type of bloke who preys on the vulnerable, including drunk women, you are likely to get a bad reputation as well as increasing your odds of facing civil and criminal complaints. If you live in a bad neighborhood, you are at more risk of bad things happening to you. If you do bad things to others, you increase the risks of other people doing bad things to you.

Men who jump on drunk women increase their chances of blowing up their lives (not to mention doing damage to others). The safest sex is within marriage.

Much of the current hysteria about sexual assault seems like hysteria about reality. CNN reports:

Across the country, thousands of women are planning protests for March 15, when they will present a petition to Parliament House calling for the government to investigate all allegations of sexual assault and misconduct by Members of Parliament and their staff.
Yet their demands go far deeper than parliament. They want structural and cultural change to achieve equity across the country, in schools, workplaces and the justice system…

Australia did have a #MeToo moment, as women around the globe shared stories of sexual abuse in 2017. But it was severely curtailed by the country’s strict defamation laws.
Under Australian law, accusers have to prove their claim is true — unlike the US, where alleged offenders must prove the claim is false. Consequently, many women stayed silent, while other people who shared their stories anonymously ended up being named…

Now, there’s a website with more than 2,000 testimonies from students across Australia, and a petition urging Australian schools to start teaching sexual consent sooner, including what constitutes sexual assault and how to respond…

Contos said they were only taught about consent in their final years of school — and by then, for many, it was too late.
Names have been removed from the stories, so as not to defame anyone, but each entry is tagged with the author’s school. Overwhelmingly, the students say they didn’t give consent, and many times their alleged attackers didn’t seem to know what that meant anyway.
“They think it’s okay to convince a girl to perform oral sex; they think it’s okay to push her head down slightly,” said Contos. “They think it’s okay to guilt-trip them and say, ‘Why did you come upstairs with me if you don’t want to do this.’ They think it’s okay to get a girl really drunk on purpose and have sex with them. They think it’s okay to walk in on their friends doing sexual things and laugh and take photos.
“It’s not okay, but they think it’s okay because it’s what everyone does, and it’s what seems normal.”

…Between 2006 and 2020, Australia’s place on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index dropped from 15 to 44. While the country scores highly for access to education for girls and women, they’re not reaching parliament and boardrooms in the same numbers as men.
“What it means is that the returns to women’s education and educational achievements are actually lost, because they’re not translated into key positions and impact in the political and economic sphere,” said True, the director of Monash University’s Centre for Gender, Peace and Security.
True puts that down to structural issues, including the lack of affordable paid childcare to allow women to return to work. “The workforce is based on that male as the breadwinner norm in Australia,” she said.

When men and women have different talents, we can’t expect them to achieve identical life results.

Why do we need to teach sexual consent? Those who violate norms of sexual consent face arrest and the ruin of their lives. It’s not terribly complicated. I assume this Australian version of the #MeToo movement wants to complicate consent so that women who regret sex can have more weapons to claim victim status.

If a bloke can convince a sheila to give him oral sex, should that be a crime? Do stable sheilas get talked into giving blowjobs against their better judgment?

From Wikipedia:

Porter was listed as a contender for Cleo magazine’s eligible bachelor of the year in 1999.[33][42]

He has described himself as “not particularly religious”.[43]

In the mid 2000s, Porter married Lucy Gunn, but they divorced. In 2008, Porter married Jennifer Negus, a former colleague,[2] and granddaughter of former independent senator Syd Negus.[44] He took paternity leave after his wife gave birth to their first child the day after being sworn in as the social services minister.[45] They later had a second child, but announced their separation in January 2020.[46][2]

In November 2020, it was alleged on Four Corners that, although married, Porter had kissed and cuddled a colleague’s political staffer in a public setting.[8] Porter denied the allegation. He claimed that the staffer in question had also denied to Four Corners that the event occurred, but that the denial was not mentioned in the report.[47] He again denied the allegation on the Perth radio station 6PR.[48]

In the program, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claimed that Porter’s alleged behaviour had caused concern in the party room, although that was disputed by Porter.[8] Not long after he said he had raised the alleged incident with Porter, Turnbull promoted Porter to the position of Attorney-General. Porter attributed the criticisms made by Turnbull to a falling-out between the two men during the 2018 Liberal Party of Australia leadership spills, the event which ended Turnbull’s prime ministership.

In late February 2021, Australian media reported an alleged rape of a 16-year-old girl [Katherine Thornton] in 1988. It alleged that the male offender was now (in 2021) a federal cabinet minister. She had written a long statement for her solicitor in 2019, and had contacted several politicians and police. She died by suicide in 2020 and her statement was sent anonymously in February 2021 to the prime minister and several other members of parliament.[50][51][52] On 2 March 2021 the police announced there was “insufficient admissible evidence” to secure a prosecution.[53] Porter announced on 3 March 2021 that he was the person named in the allegations. He confirmed he met the woman in Sydney when he was 17, but denied the accusation and any sexual contact with her. He also announced he would take immediate leave to look after his mental health following the accusations.

Heather MacDonald wrote in 2008:

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria…

So what reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

College girls drink themselves into near or actual oblivion before and during parties. That drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests University of Virginia graduate Karin Agness: it frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” A Columbia University security official marvels at the scene at homecomings: “The women are shit-faced, saying, ‘Let’s get as drunk as we can,’ while the men are hovering over them.” As anticipated, the night can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know. This less-than-romantic denouement produces the “roll and scream: you roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” a Duke coed reports in Laura Sessions Stepp’s recent book Unhooked. To the extent that they’re remembered at all, these are the couplings that are occasionally transformed into “rape”—though far less often than the campus rape industry wishes.

…Even if the Harvard victim’s drunkenness cancels any responsibility that she might share for the interaction’s finale, is she equally without responsibility for all of her behavior up to that point, including getting so drunk that she can’t remember anything? Campus rape ideology holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions but preserves male responsibility not only for their own actions but for their partners’ as well. Thus do men again become the guardians of female well-being.

…Unlike the campus rape industry, most students are well aware of those complicating factors, which is why there are so few rape charges brought for college sex. But if the rape industrialists are so sure that foreseeable and seemingly cooperative drunken sex amounts to rape, there are some obvious steps that they could take to prevent it. Above all, they could persuade girls not to put themselves into situations whose likely outcome is intercourse. Specifically: don’t get drunk, don’t get into bed with a guy, and don’t take off your clothes or allow them to be removed. Once you’re in that situation, the rape activists could say, it’s going to be hard to halt the proceedings, for lots of complex emotional reasons. Were this advice heeded, the campus “rape” epidemic would be wiped out overnight.

But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students should behave with greater sexual restraint as a preventive measure, and you might as well be saying that the girls should enter a convent or don the burka.

…To the despair of rape industrialists everywhere, students have held on to the view that women usually have considerable power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse.

Rutgers University Sexual Assault Services surveyed student athletes about violence against women in the 2001–02 academic year. The female teams were more “direct,” the survey reported, in “expressing the idea that women who are raped sometimes put themselves in those situations.” A female athlete told interviewers: “When we go out to parties, and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act . . . and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”

Women who choose to get drunk and allow blokes the opportunity to have a go at them will often be subjected to unwanted sex. The basic nature of male sexuality is predatory and girls should be brought up with this understanding.

Heather MacDonald wrote in 2015:

If campuses were the “hunting grounds” for rapists that the advocates claim, a movement creating single-sex schools would have sprung up years ago. Instead, the stampede of high school girls trying to get into selective co-ed colleges grows more frenzied by the year. Nevertheless, colleges could end what they insist on calling campus rape overnight if they persuaded girls to exercise modesty and prudence, and if they sent the simple message: Don’t get drunk, take off your clothes, and get into bed with a guy whom you barely know.

Were parents to start believing the claim that colleges are “unsafe spaces” for girls, you would see college presidents turn on a dime and point out the obvious: There are few places more congenial, safe, and welcoming to females than the present-day American campus. For now, however, college leaders can self-righteously placate the rape culture industry with more and more “sexual assault” sinecures, while watching the applications for admission roll in unimpeded.

I’ve noticed quite a few women fall apart and become suicidal after they say they were raped. Yet many women who’ve been raped get on with their lives. I suppose some women are more resilient than others.

Heather MacDonald said in 2015:

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Let’s look at these numbers, Howard. The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers.

Detroit is America’s most violent city. Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies—that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery—is 2%. Its rape rate is 0.05%. A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of. Not even in Africa’s most brutal civil wars has anything been experienced in human history like a 20% crime rate. And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in.

The frenzy of college admissions begins earlier and earlier each year. Here in Manhattan, parents are paying $200 an hour for tutoring for prekindergarten, all in the hope of getting their little darlings into Harvard 14 years later.

The White House Council on Women and Girls says that the survivors—and be sure to use the word survivors—of sexual assault on campus suffer lifetimes of post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts. What are we seeing in fact? Girls graduate at 23% higher rates than men on campus, and go on to lead highly lucrative careers. If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed, we wouldn’t merely have rape administration Title IX bureaucracy sprouting up on campuses because there would be no more campuses. You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning. Why hasn’t that happened? Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.

An article and survey in Ms. magazine started all this in 1986. They reported—at that point it was a one-in-four figure— that 73% of the women who Ms. magazine and their researcher, Mary Koss, declared to be rape victims, when asked directly, “Have you been raped?” said they hadn’t been. Forty-two percent of those alleged rape victims went on to have sex again with their alleged assailants.

Now I submit that it is unthinkable that somebody who has actually been raped would voluntarily have sex again with her assailant. So if it’s not rape, what is going on campuses? A culture of promiscuous, drunken hook-up sex, with zero norms on promiscuous behavior in which girls drink themselves blotto precisely in order to reduce their sexual inhibitions. And this hook-up culture has produced a nervous breakdown in the ethic of sexual liberation.

Let me give you a classic case of a proven and adjudicated campus rape. This occurred at Occidental College, the sometime alma mater of President Obama.

In 2013 a freshman had been drinking all weekend, pre-gaming– drinking before the drinking party. So she’d been pre-gaming, and then drinking at the party and having sexual activity on a bed with a male freshman in his dorm. Her friends shooed her out. Back in her own dorm room, she texted him and they arranged a tryst. He said, “Get down here.” She said, “Okay, as soon as I can evade my friends I’ll get down there.” She texted him, “Do you have a condom?” And then before she left her dorm room to go down to his, she texted her friends back home and said, “I’m going to have sex now,” which is what they did. She got herself back to her dorm room, and the next morning texted him and said, “I think I left my belt and my earrings there.” And she came and picked them up. And they texted some more.

She then noticed that while she felt an emotional pang from their sexual encounter, he was walking around campus seemingly oblivious. It didn’t make a difference to him. And then the campus feminists got their hands on her and persuaded her that she had been raped because she was very drunk. So was he. But the rule now is we are re-importing selective portions of the Victorian ethos. The rule is that males are the sole guardians of female safety. And so he was expelled on the ground that he should have known that she was too incapacitated to consent.

I think if you’re a guy and you get a text message asking if you have a condom, and arranging a tryst, I would assume it’s fairly safe to think you’ve got a voluntary participant, but that’s not the way the rules are going now. So it cannot be overstated how bizarre the situation is on campuses today. Every time I ask a campus sex Title IX administrator, “Why don’t you send the message to girls that you could prevent what you’re calling an epidemic of rape overnight if you start exercising traditional virtues of prudence and personal responsibility? Why don’t you send that message to a person?” I get the answer, “Because rape is never a woman’s fault. I don’t want to suggest that it is her fault.”

So these campus administrators are more interested in preserving the principle of male fault than in preventing what they insist on calling an epidemic of campus rape.

Heather said in 2018:

We have just lived through a month of Gender Studies 101 with the hysteria over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The tribal victimology that characterizes college campuses is now becoming the currency of a surprisingly large sector of the Democratic Party. Many females have decided that they represent an oppressed class and that such traditional Enlightenment values as due-process and the presumption of innocence are expendable. Campus rape tribunals have discarded essential truth-finding mechanisms such as cross-examination in the service of the #BelieveSurvivors mantra. And now that contempt for rational means of proof is entering the public consciousness as well.

…What matters is the dominant narrative, whether or not the majority of people subscribe to it. That narrative sees white males as the source of most everything evil in the world. The hemorrhaging of lower-class, white males from the American economy and civil life, documented by Charles Murray, may be partly influenced by such circumambient contempt.

To further buttress Mounk’s point, the Pew Research Center did a study of so-called gender equity in STEM within the last year and found that the more years of higher education that females had, the more likely they were to say that they had been the victims of sex discrimination.

The reality is undoubtedly the opposite. The more a workplace is dominated by highly educated products of the diversity-obsessed academy, who have been marinated in social justice thinking throughout their schooling, the more its participants will go out of their way to seek diversity throughout the employment ladder. The perception held by the female educated elite of widespread bias against them is ideological, not empirical.

…We have a bizarre hybrid of promiscuity and neo-Victorianism, which is characterized by a belief in ubiquitous male predation but which also looks to males to be the unique guardians of female well-being. When you destroy the traditional restraints on the male libido as sexual liberation did—those restraints being chivalry and gentlemanliness on the one hand and female modesty and prudence on the other—you’re unleashing a force that the female libido can rarely match. Sexual liberation was premised on a fallacy that males and females are identical in their sexual drives. They are not. Nor are they identical in their emotional (and hormonal) responses to intercourse.

…Just as a female can, with almost 100 percent certainty, avoid becoming what is viewed on campus as a rape victim by acting prudently and not getting blackout drunk, by not taking off her clothes and getting into bed with a guy whom she may or may not know, so, too, can every college male usually avoid the predicament of being falsely accused of rape by walking his girlfriend home after a date, kissing her goodnight, and writing her a love poem back in his own dorm room. If the bureaucratization of campus sex, with campus rape bureaucrats promulgating preposterous ten-page legalistic rules for coitus, results in less campus sex, there is simply no social cost, unlike, say, the over-regulation of natural gas production, which results in less of a socially useful product and activity.

…I would say that I don’t agree with the characterization of these incidents as rape, but you do have males acting boorishly and taking full advantage of the drunken hook up culture, in which females are voluntary co-participants. But unless we want to resurrect Victorian values, making the male the sole guardian of female well-being—and believe me, I’m not necessarily opposed to that—unless you want to return there, it makes sense to say females have the power to protect themselves virtually 100 percent of the time.

Perhaps we need to return to the days where men become guardians of female well-being. In Orthodox Judaism, it is a sin to be alone with a female who’s not family. By contrast, one female friend of mine who left Orthodox Judaism complained to me about getting raped all the time. How did these things happen? She’d climb naked into bed with guys and expect they’d obey her wishes of no sexual intercourse. Or she’d go over to her ex-boyfriend’s place to say goodbye and he’d maneuver her into bed. If you don’t want to get raped, don’t seclude yourself with men.

Brittany Higgins, an Australian political staffer, has become a celebrity in Australia for her tale of getting drunk and allegedly being raped in Parliament. Well, she chose to get drunk and to seclude herself with a bloke. What did she think would happen?

The New York Times reports Feb. 24, 2021:

The woman told the paper that she met the man last year for dinner. She said that after he bought her several drinks, they went to her home, where he had sex with her without wearing a condom, despite her telling him they could not have sex unless he wore one. She told The Australian that if Ms. Higgins’s case had been properly dealt with by the government in 2019, “this would not have happened to me.”

Another woman, whose accusations were published by The Australian on Monday, said the same man had sexually assaulted her days before the 2016 election. The woman said she had just finished high school. The man bought several rounds of vodka and tequila shots for her and offered to “look after” her in his hotel room, she said. The woman said that after falling asleep, she awoke to find herself half undressed and the man lying on top of her.

She told The Australian that hearing Ms. Higgins’s story made her think her attacker “has a pattern of behavior.”

Another woman, whose account was made public on Monday, said the same man “reached his hand under the table and stroked her thigh” in 2017, during drinks with colleagues at a bar in Canberra, the ABC reported.

Dennis Prager wrote June 25, 2007:

The rape of a name can be as vicious a crime and as destructive an act as the rape of a body. Sometimes the rape of a body is worse, sometimes the rape of a name is worse. But they are both rapes. And morally likening the two is in no way meant to lessen the horror of rape; it is meant only to heighten awareness of the horror of intentionally destroying the name of an innocent person…

Upon first hearing a comparison of name-rape to body-rape, most people are likely to recoil. But upon reflection, it becomes clear that the two are morally comparable. In fact, I have had women listeners to my radio show call and e-mail me to say that they have been raped — one woman had been gang raped — and felt they were better able to go on with their lives than men they loved who had been falsely accused of rape or molestation.

If you are a woman and this seems far-fetched, imagine that a man you love — such as your father, brother, husband or son — were publicly accused of a rape he had not committed. Imagine the pain he and your family would endure. Why is that pain not comparable to the pain suffered by at least some women who are raped?

What do we have in life, after all, that is more valuable than our name and reputation? What do good people work hardest at maintaining, if not their good name?

The lying woman in the Duke lacrosse case, Crystal Mangum, raped three men. Generally speaking, it is meaningless to speak of women raping men’s bodies; it is men who rape women’s bodies. What women can rape is a man’s name.

It is a symptom of the major sexism of our time — against men (see Christine Hoff Sommers’ “The War Against Boys” for a detailed discussion of this sexism) — that not only is the rape of men’s reputations not considered anywhere near as serious as the rape of a woman’s body, but the women who perpetrate such destruction are protected by feminist, politically correct news media. That is why, to this day, The New York Times and most other liberal newspapers refuse to publish Crystal Mangum’s name, let alone advocate that she be tried or punished for her cruelty.