Sunday, July 13, 2014

Yesterday's crazy radicalism is tomorrow's new policy

Back in 2009 I wrote some posts about the most radical feminist I had ever come across, an American who called herself Twisty.

To give you an idea of her radicalism, she wanted women to oppose motherhood, which she believed was a partriarchal construct:
We are desperate for women to stop buying into the patriarchy-sponsored message about women’s fulfillment ... We want women to reject marriage and the nuclear family. We want women to not have kids in the first place.

A world without children? Twisty was quite on board with this:
In light of a remark I made in a recent post ... that women should just quit having babies ... I thought it might be fun to revisit the Voluntary Human Extinctionist Movement.

I've made my point, haven't I? Twisty was one way out crazy radical feminist.

Well, I should have known that society would catch up to Twisty. One of Twisty's favourite themes was that women should be held to be in a state of perpetual non-consent, so that if a woman ever accused a man of rape, that there would be a presumption of guilt:
According to my scheme, women would abide in a persistent legal condition of not having given consent to sex. Conversely, men ... would abide in a persistent legal state of pre-rape.

Women can still have all the sex they want; if they adjudge that their dude hasn’t raped them, all they have to do is not call the cops.

But if, at any time during the course of the proceedings ... or if, in three hours or three days or, perhaps in the case of childhood abuse, in 13 years it begins to dawn on her that she has been badly used by an opportunistic predator, she has simply to make a call.

Presto! The dude is already a rapist, because, legally, consent never existed.

That was Twisty's solution to giving women a perfect sexual autonomy, whilst making sure that men are kept well and truly under the thumb of women.

Enter the New Zealand Labour Party. This party is going into an election with a policy that changes the burden of proof in a rape trial, so that the defendant has to prove that consent took place. Given that there are often no independent witnesses to what happened, this won't always be possible for men who are innocent of the crime. In effect, the accused man is being presumed to be guilty of rape unless he can prove otherwise.

That's still a little different from Twisty's view. I'm not sure that Twisty even wants there to be an opportunity for the accused to defend himself.

But even so, if the Labour Party wins power in the election, then New Zealand will have followed a long way along Twisty's scheme.

3 comments:

  1. Similar ideas have been bandied about in the academic legal community for a few decades in the US, but haven't gotten much, if any, traction in terms of legislation. There's still a fairly ingrained idea of "innocent until proven guilty" in the minds of the common folk -- even as a slogan -- which makes it a hard sell, so far. Inroads are obviously being made in situations where a legislature is not involved, such as college campuses, where the standards of proof for expelling (typically) male students after accusation of sex-related charges have been lowered in most places, and so that's where we're seeing this kind of impact.

    Other, related, ideas that have been "floated" by basically the same group of people would (1) relax the timing element the self-defense defense to murder (which currently requires that the act taken be done as the person is trying to kill or seriously harm you) to permit women to murder the next day or even the next week and still be relieved of liability on a self-defense theory (the idea being that women are not capable of reacting effectively in real time as men are) -- the point basically would be to make it easier for women to avoid prosecutions for murdering their husbands if they can show that it was done in defense "in general", as compared to trying to avoid a specific murderous (or close to it) attack. Also not getting too much traction yet, probably because most juries still are lenient in situations like that even if the SD defense doesn't apply. If we see more prosecutions like Jody Arias, though, expect this to gain some momentum.

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  2. "But even so, if the Labour Party wins power in the election, then New Zealand will have followed a long way along Twisty's scheme."

    This has the completely demented implication that non-Labour parties are any better than Labour parties at combating sexual revolution. Yeah, right, tell that to John Key, David Cameron, Stephen Harper, and other apologists for sodomitic "marriage" ...

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    1. We know that the non-Labour parties are on board with liberal modernity.

      That doesn't mean it isn't possible to criticise a particular policy put forward by one of the labour parties.

      Leonard, there are still large numbers of young people who support the labour parties. It's worth pointing out to young men that these parties have policies that are hostile to them.

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