Monthly Archives: June 2024

Feminism, Law, Radicalism

THE IRRATIONAL CONSENT LAWS

APRIL 23, 2024

There have been few feminist projects more irrational and unfair to men than the bundle of consent laws got up around Australia. Fundamentally, the laws say with punitive clauses that if a woman says ‘no’ while the sex act is underway, the man must immediately stop what he is doing – no matter what. In the article below, Bettina Arndt convincingly argues the insanity and nastiness of it all. What do I think?

At the risk of having the feminist thought police at the door, I think that once the act is underway – that is, the woman has allowed penetration – that’s consent enough. If for some perverse reason, the woman suddenly wants to stop, then good luck. If the man completes the gargantuan task of stopping, well and good. Otherwise …

That’s the experience of the ages.

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Coitus interruptus

– When a woman presses the eject button, men can’t be expected to immediately withdraw, says human factors science.

BETTINA ARNDT, 1 FEB 2024

Frozen, Disney’s highly successful animation series, captivated little girls across the world. So too, the feminists have had huge success in promoting their own version of “frozen” – instilling in criminal courts everywhere the notion that rape victims often suffer a physiological state known as “tonic immobility” which renders them incapable of resisting their plight.

No matter that the science behind this theory is problematic – as Emily Yoffe explained in her article on bad science supporting prosecution of sexual assault. “I froze” has become the uniform description covering every oddity in the rape victim’s behaviour and flawed memory of events – a description that’s invariably accepted, totally unchallenged.

But men’s physiology is seen as irrelevant. There’s zero interest in examining men’s capacity for response in varied sexual situations let alone any pressure for science on male bodily processes to be considered in criminal investigations and proceedings.

Yet this issue is central to determining guilt or innocence in a critical area of criminal law – the issue of revoked consent. With the introduction of affirmative consent laws, not only is consent required throughout sexual activity, but women have the right to pull the plug whenever they feel like it. And men are expected to immediately snap to attention and withdraw.

Easier said than done, you might say. Well, that’s the issue. Most judges seem to assume that there’s no problem in expecting an immediate retreat from the male in response to the female red flag. Never any consideration of whether he even noticed the flag, or realised what it was, or whether she was waving it clearly, or maybe that he might have been frozen, rendered immobile due to surprise and shock.

There’s a fascinating article on the legal issues at play here – Consent Interruptus: Rape Law and Cases of Initial Consent, by University of Western Australia law lecturer, Theodore Bennett. He spells out the legal arguments resisting any notion of allowing a reasonable time to withdraw after revoked consent, with feminists objecting that this “primal urge’ argument perpetuates the myth of the unstoppable male who can’t be responsible for his rampant sexuality. Kansas State feminist scholar Lois Pineau says the claim that men don’t have immediate control is “factually unfounded.”  

Not so fast, says an expert in Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) – which is the science of how humans behave and interact with each other in various environmental contexts. I’ll call this Australian expert “Anton Crabtree” – unfortunately he’s decided he needs to disguise his identity due to the tricky ideological climate in today’s academic world.

Dr Crabtree also has expertise in aviation medicine which is precisely the area we usually associate with HFE, given its vital role in investigations of human error in situations like plane crashes.  Crabtree makes a compelling case that this type of examination of neurocognitive and physiological limitations also has bearing on whether men crash and burn in the bedroom.

“The absence of the rigorous assessment and well-established scientific considerations of Human Factors analysis is a glaring omission to any claim of a fair system of justice for persons accused of sexual assault after revoked consent.  Ignoring the science inevitably risks further miscarriage of justice which can be catastrophic to individuals and families and damaging to society,” writes Dr Crabtree in an academic paper he is preparing for publication on the subject, which examines case law revealing this ongoing deficiency in our justice system.

I’m including a draft of this groundbreaking research article here and hope you will help circulate it and ensure it receives proper attention – particularly in legal circles where there is such a dire need for education to address the ongoing injustice occurring in these cases. This research should also have a place in the sexual consent courses being taught in our schools and universities.

Read the rest here . . .

Culture, Feminism, Law, Radicalism

Feminism has been a disaster for women

APRIL 23, 2024 

More and more women are saying it. Despite the great promises and despite the real freedom and advancement in opportunities women have achieved, they are not happy. Some are even admitting that most men aren’t all that bad and are turning to youtubers, like The happy housewife, for advice on how to make their husbands or boyfriends happy.

Nobody puts the case against feminism better than Janice Fiamengo.

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The Goddess That Failed

On International Women’s Day, we should admit that the feminist movement has not been good for anyone—even its alleged beneficiaries.

JANICE FIAMENGO, 8 MAR 2024

Feminist magazine Nasty Women's Press launches at Glad Day Bookshop - NOW Magazine

A recent poll has shown that a majority of young people think feminist laws and policies have gone too far and now discriminate against men. It’s good to see reaction against anti-male discrimination.

For International Women’s Day, let’s also consider feminism’s impact on women, and recognize that it’s been very bad there too.

Not just radical feminism. Not just the hateful or fringe variety. The whole thing, with its sob stories and sentimental celebrations, its exaggerations and cover-ups, its relentless focus on the demands and alleged needs of one half of humanity at the expense of the other, has been a monumental disaster.

For over 50 years, the movement has been mired in fraudulent claims, myopia, special pleading, double standards, abandonment of principles, manifold hypocrisies, and emotional incontinence.

It has continually misrepresented the situation of women and men, and has induced in its female adherents an unhealthy mix of wounded self-regard, festering resentment, and self-righteous indignation, often overlaid with an unfounded conviction of moral superiority and contempt for the unenlightened.

And despite its energetic stroking of the feminine ego and repeated assurances that women are innocent of wrongdoing; despite also the various perks and exemptions, the fawning media representations, and the outsized public sympathy; despite steady exhortations of “You go, girl!” and promises of all that must still be done to protect, promote, succor, and bless the female of the species, the movement has not managed to make women happier or more satisfied than when it first took hold in the 1970s.

In fact, the opposite has occurred. Women are significantly less happy than previously.

An article in Neuroscience News for September, 2023 sounded the alarm, calling it “The Paradox of Progress: Why More Freedom Isn’t Making Women Happier.” In the same year, CNN reported that the Population Reference Bureau was identifying a marked decline in well-being among millennial women. In 2022, David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson declared that across time and space, “women are unhappier than men […] and have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep.” Oft cited is a large meta-study from 2009 called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” which demonstrated the persistence of women’s decreasing happiness across the decades.

What these feminist academics and journalists call a paradox may seem fairly straightforward to the rest of us: movements based on assertions of angry victimhood are not likely to produce happy customers. But before fleshing out that conclusion, let’s take a look at the pundits’ attempts to deny the obvious.

“The Paradox of Progress” in Neuroscience News outlines the problem thus: “Despite having more freedom and employment opportunities than ever before, women have higher levels of anxiety and more mental health challenges, such as depression, anger, loneliness and more restless sleep.” The article is typically feminist in its teeter-totter balancing act between two conflicting priorities: to assure readers that women are superior to men—in this case, “more emotionally resilient,” with “more intimate” friendships, greater “capacity for personal growth,” and commitment to “more altruistic endeavors”—while also stressing that women have it worse than men—in this case, are more depressed, lonelier, and more anxious.

It would seem that both cannot be true—capacity for intimacy, for example, ought to decrease loneliness—but the article attempts to resolve the contradiction by falling back on a third feminist chestnut: that women are (justly, of course) “unhappy at how society treats them.” All the emotional resilience in the world, it seems, cannot make up for that.

Read the rest here . . .