Twisty out of form?

I have to say, Twisty, that I'm a little disappointed. You have long been the most interesting of feminists as you are so fearless in drawing out the logic of liberal politics. No unprincipled exceptions for you. No concern to be pragmatic either. Pure theory applied to the lives of men and women.

And then you went and wrote a post on your "consent scheme". And showed what you're really about.

What is your consent scheme? You don't like the existing law in which a woman must prove that she did not consent to sex for a charge of rape to be upheld. You suggest the following alternative:

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.

The cessation of rape would be immediate. Men would begin aligning their boinking protocols along non-barbaric lines in a hurry. It would suddenly be in their best interest to make damn sure that nothing in their behavior ... would cause their partner to believe she has been abused.

How to explain this? It does relate somewhat to patriarchy theory. This is the idea that society has been organised to uphold the unearned privilege of men as a class over oppressed women. Therefore violence against women is thought to be systemic: a form of social control enacted by men in general rather than a specific crime perpetrated by individual men.

If you think that rape is systemic, then you are more likely to favour the kind of radical proposal outlined by Twisty.

But this time I don't think it really has to do with intellectual principles taken to the nth degree. Twisty's proposal is "utopian" in another way: as a means of legalising the control of men by women. It is a feminist assertion of power over men.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Twisty should cast about for such a scheme. Traditionally women gained a measure of power in their relationships with men through marriage and family; a woman could ask things of a man who loved her and who was committed to his role as a husband.

For (self-described) spinster radical feminists like Twisty, though, this kind of leverage over men is not an option. They cannot make claims on men through personal relationships, so they have to use more formal means to assert power over men.

Twisty is none too subtle in her strategy; her scheme would create a tremendous fallout between the sexes. It would be yet another civilisational blow, something which won't worry Twisty as she identifies her society as being an immoral patriarchy.

Twisty, I would rather you kept writing according to your intellectual principles, no matter how misguided I hold those principles to be. It's a much more useful, interesting and admirable exercise than confessing to unwieldy ambitions for power and control over men.

Is a woman's word enough?

Should a woman's testimony alone be sufficient to convict a man she accuses of rape or domestic violence?

Most of us would answer no, as there is a possibility that the woman might be making a false accusation.

Back in 1994, though, when third wave feminism was at a peak, it wasn't so easy to raise this objection. There was an idea around that women never lied about such attacks and that it was sexist to assert that they might do so.

It was in this climate that California began to require jurors to be instructed that a rape conviction could be based on the accuser's testimony alone, without corroboration. Similarly, in some cities in the US "excited utterances" by a woman alleging an assault were considered proof of the attack: for example, in 1994 Jennifer Mantz, head of the Seattle domestic violence unit, told reporters:

If the officer describes the victim as so agitated she can hardly speak, then she's considered too upset to have made up a story.

As it turns out, a surprisingly high percentage of allegations of assault are unfounded. In 1984, a research team studied 556 rape allegations. When using the most strict criteria to judge allegations as false (an admission by the accuser and polygraph testing) 27% of the allegations were found to be false. When, in follow-up research, three reviewers were asked to judge according to a set of criteria whether the allegations were false, in 60% of cases all three found the allegation to be false.

Similarly, a survey in Washington D.C. revealed that 24% of rape charges were unfounded; a 1994 study by a researcher at Purdue University concluded that "false rape allegations constitute 41% of the total forcible rape cases reported during this period"; and studies at two large Midwestern state universities covering the period 1985 to 1988 found that 50% of the 64 reported rapes were false.

Which brings us to some recently reported news items. A Melbourne court has been told that a woman who claimed to have been kidnapped and threated with rape was attempting to extort money from her parents to pay off a drug debt ("Kidnap was a con" Herald Sun 14/09/2006 - note, though, that this is an allegation by the defence.)

In English news, a woman has admitted making up a horrific story about how she was brutally raped on an Oxfordshire road. This follows the jailing of two Bicester 16-year-olds in November for falsely claiming they were abducted and raped.

Last week also saw the acquital of an English man, Warren Blackwell, of a conviction for rape (after he had already served his prison sentence). The police appear to have brought the rape case against Mr Blackwell, despite being aware that the woman accusing him had a history of psychiatric problems, had convictions for dishonesty and had made similar allegations against a series of men.

Mr Blackwell's accuser made her first allegation of rape when she was only 14. The 16-year-old boy she had accused was exonerated when a police investigation found she was still a virgin.

So false allegations against men remain a real problem. Some thought will need to go into measures to better protect men within the legal system from being falsely accused.