Saturday, November 15, 2014
The witch-hunting of all men in the nonsense over Ched Evans
The daft authoritarian calls for the hapless Sheffield United footballer, Ched Evans, to express remorse whilst he is going through a legal process of trying to overturn his conviction is a classic catch-22. The extreme-feminist stance now dominant is not going to relent no matter what Ched Evans does, and he is right to challenge his conviction in the light of cctv evidence contradicting the court's finding that the alleged victim was seriously inebriated – not to mention the inexplicable outcome that others involved were acquitted whereas he wasn't.
Aside from the questions as to the safety of the conviction, and ignoring any complicity by the supposed victim (who had not been plied with drink by Ched or any of the defendants, and likewise got to the hotel of her own volition), the idea that this was some heinous crime is self-evidently absurd. Evans' punishment has already been far in excess of any that was warranted. There is no basis to presume (and no evidence to support) that there has been any sort of significant negative impact on the supposed victim. If she was, as the court accepted, inebriated beyond sense, then there could have been no negative impact at the time. We know that there was nothing more than at most some degree of regret afterwards, because any impact was not just tempered but completely overturned by her apparent joy at contemplating the many thousands of pounds she expects to receive in criminal injuries compensation (as revealed in her tweets). So how does this justify a five year jail sentence?! Taking into account the alleged victim's complicity, then it is hard to see how any imprisonment was justifiable.
The general tenor of the debate over the incident is the stuff of the Dark Ages, predicated on the impact of rape in times past. Pregnancy. This is no longer an issue at all. There is no possibility of any even mild inconvenience from conceiving an unwanted child, give the technology of the 'morning-after' pill, and, failing that, infallible non-intrusive early abortion.
There isn't even mild embarrassment in terms of social standing: going to a hotel for the purpose of having sex with prominent footballers is not something a girl has to live down, if indeed she might not publicise and celebrate. Of course, it may cause problems if she has a boyfriend, but that's an extraneous matter – which is brought in to create many a bogus 'acquaintance rape' scenario, when but for this there would be no retrospective withdrawal of consent
This ridiculous debacle – generically, and Ched Evans' own case – stems from the 'show trial' nature of rape in the contemporary highly politicised climate. Sex in effect has been declared by default illegal for males, who are liable in respect of any instance to be summoned before a court and required to prove they had ensured that consent had been obtained. The legal process has been inverted from what it should be: that it is up to the Crown to prove, and to prove beyond reasonable doubt, criminal wrongdoing. Most rape cases are simply one person's word against another's, with the man's word then presumed, on no basis that is warranted, not to be believable; despite there being often an all too obvious basis for false allegation, and research revealing that this is routinely for the most trivial reasons. Such cases should never get as far as the CPS, let alone court. In Ched Evans' case there was some evidence that the alleged victim may have been too drunk to consent, but this was not clear-cut, and now appears to be undermined by evidence which should have been put before the court.
This abandonment of any semblance of due legal process succeeds – as was the intent – to make the most fundamental activity in life impossibly fraught for boys and men, whilst providing carte blanch for girls and women to retrospectively withdraw consent in the event of the slightest feeling of embarrassment; this at a time when sex has never been less likely to compromise female social standing.
On the fulcrum of 'acquaintance rape', the madness of 'third wave' feminism, and the 'identity politics' of which it is core, surely is set to implode from the weight of its own absurdity; albeit that things might well get yet more absurd in the meantime. Eventually the collective penny will drop that the femascist twitterati at the very least are sixpence short of a shilling.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 9:06 am 
