Today at Breitbart London our correspondent Virginia Hale has written a superb defence of the notorious comedian Dapper Laughs – a man whom none of us had heard of at the beginning of the week, but is now all over the UK media thanks largely to the concerted chittering of various feminist Social Justice Warrior groups who appear to think he is the living embodiment of that thing they like to call “rape culture.”
I’m glad Virginia wrote it because I wouldn’t have dared. I’m happy taking on the Islamists (not a group noted for their moderation when dealing with their enemies) and I’m not afraid of the environmentalists (though perhaps I should be, given what one of their number – an animal rights activist – did to the late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn) but the neo-feminists are in another category of shrill, vengeful loopiness altogether.
They strike me as somewhat frustrated little poppets and I think I know what the problem is: they were born in the wrong place and the wrong century. Their natural habit, I reckon, would have been the hills and plains of 19th century Afghanistan, where they could have descended, ullulating wildly, onto columns of retreating British soldiers, knives at the ready to remove the poor chaps’ testicles and sew them up into their mouths.
But I digress. Another reason I’m grateful to Virginia Hale – apart from the fact that she has saved me from the above fate by saying on behalf of all us beleaguered menfolk the things that NO MAN DARE SAY – is that she has demonstrated there are still at least a few sensible women out there (I actually suspect they’re the silent majority) who are not buying into this “all men are rapists”/rape culture meme.
Nor is Allison Pearson who has written a cracking – and very brave – defence in her Telegraph column today of the footballer (and convicted rapist) Ched Evans, daringly headlined “Sorry, but all rapes are not the same.”
Here’s a sample:
I’ve spent two grim days reading about everything the former Welsh international did in a hotel in Rhyl in 2011. I have come to three conclusions. The first is that the verdict of the jury was inconsistent and quite possibly unsafe. The second is that the football pitches of England would be half-empty this Saturday afternoon if you removed every player who has done what Evans did. (And so would many of the clubs and pubs.)
The third conclusion is probably the most troubling. We live in an era where relationships among the young have changed beyond recognition. Casual hook-ups and the exchange of sexual favours are the norm. Even “nice” girls allow themselves to be used like inflatable dolls. (If confident enough, they can use men like playthings in return.) In such a free-for-all, what is meant by “consensual sex” becomes more and more blurred.
It’s daring and brave given what happened to the last female public figure to call for a bit of moderation and commonsense in the debate over whether or not Evans should be able to go back to his career as a professional football having served his jail sentence.
Her name is Judy Finnigan (see our earlier Breitbart report for full details) and, merely for the crime of venturing an opinion, she was hounded by the feminist Social Justice Warrior mob into making a public apology. (Free speech, anyone?) Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, her daughter Chloe Madeley ended up being monstered by the Social Justice Warrior lynch mob too. One of them told her on Twitter that because of what her mother had said on TV, his mother had now given him her full blessing to rape Chloe.
So, let me just run that detail by you again for those who can’t quite believe it. A Social Justice Warrior on Twitter was so incensed by the injustice women are experiencing as a result of “rape culture” that he (unless, of course it was a woman hiding behind a male avatar) decided to protest by issuing a veiled rape threat to the daughter of a woman he felt had taken an insufficiently hard line on the “rape is rape” issue.
Hmm. As I suggested in the title: this “War on Women” thing. It has got a bit out of hand, hasn’t it?
And though I do hate it when columnists play the “as a gay man”/”as vegetarian monopede”/”as a fanatical, golfing and morris dancing enthusiast” card, I’m going to on this occasion because I want to explain why I’m so personally invested in this issue and why I think you should be too.
So, as a parent of both male and female children, I’d say that right now it’s my boys’ future I worry about far more than my girl’s.
As Fraser Nelson most persuasively argued here, on almost every metric – from academic performance to the jobs market – girls now get a better deal than boys. Well, fine, I guess that’s just something my boys are just going to have to man up and deal with: it’s not like any of us is going to be able to do much about the entrenched and powerful equality industry, is it?
But what I think definitely does need addressing, nay, fighting with our might, is this culture war which a small but vocal group of feminist Social Justice Warriors are waging right now against men. Not just against the men who deserve it like, say, the organised Muslim rape gangs which have been preying on underage girls in towns of Britain for the last twenty odd years, or the kind of sickos who pursue women down dark alleys and brutally violate them. But men in general: our brothers, our fathers, our uncles, our sons.
Especially our sons. They’re the poor saps who find themselves entering this weird new world where the rules – as defined by cultural commissars like Lena Dunham – are so skewed that what has hitherto been recognised throughout history as fairly routine (if mildly regrettable) laddish behaviour – drunkenness, “sexist” banter, tasteless jokes, clumsy passes, a general lumpen incomprehension as to how to engage with the opposite sex – has now been pathologised as “rape culture.”
Is that what you call Social Justice? I don’t think so. But hey, what do I know? I’m just another of those know-nothing criminals in possession of an XY chromosome.
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