“Me Too”, ---- You! - Or Perhaps Not.

Unprovoked and awful charges - even so the she-bear fights – Rudyard Kipling

In 411 BC, the war between the Athenian Delian League and the Spartan Peloponnesian League, which had resumed three years previously after the Peace of Nicias finally fell apart, reached its twentieth year. Things were not going well for the Athenians. During the break in the fighting with Sparta, Alcibiades, the leader of the Athenian war party, talked the Assembly into sending a fleet to Sicily, ostensibly to support their allies, but with the goal of conquering the island. The same Nicias who had negotiated the peace with Sparta, in an attempt to dissuade them from doing this told the Assembly that a much larger force would be needed than what they originally intended, but with the only result being that they enlarged the armada and put him in charge, along with Alcibiades and Lamachus. Once there, the generals decided to begin their campaign by establishing a base and launching an attack on the strongest Sicilian city-state, Syracuse. Before the siege began, Alcibiades, who had thought up this strategy, received a summons ordering him to return to Athens to stand trial on charges of the desecration of sacred statues. He opted to flee instead and defected to Sparta. In his absence, the siege of Syracuse did not go well, Lamachus was slain, and Nicias sent away for reinforcements. Athens sent the reinforcements, led by Demosthenes, but this made things worse as the fighting with Sparta, now backed by Syracuse, resumed shortly thereafter and the Sicilian Expedition ended in total disaster for Athens with the loss of most of their ships and the enslavement of their men.

Ultimately, this would cost them the Peloponnesian War, but in 411 the decisive loss to Lysander of Sparta at Aegospotami was still six years away. It was at this point that Aristophanes, the master of Attic Old Comedy, introduced a new play. The play is called the Lysistrata, after its main character, an Athenian woman who with the help of her Spartan counterpart Lampito, persuades the extremely reluctant women of Greece to go on a sex-strike and withhold sex from the men until they agree to stop the war. It is not easy for her to convince the women to either agree to this or to stick to the plan once they have agreed to it. Contrary to a popular misconception, it is women rather than men who are by far the most obsessed with sex, a fact of which Aristophanes was well aware, and which he exploited to its full comic potential.

What makes the Lysistrata so hilarious is that the title character succeeds in her plan to end the war despite her use of a strategy that would almost universally be perceived – it certainly was so seen by her creator – as utterly undoable. There is an old quip, that has been variously attributed to Ann Landers, Henry Kissinger, and a host of others although it appears to be older than all of them, that the battle of the sexes can never be won because there is too much fraternizing with the enemy. It is, however, the current year, and perhaps it is time that the idea of a sex strike be seriously considered – not by women, but by men. Indeed, it is starting to seem necessary not for the purpose of attaining any political end but for survival. This is due to the “Me Too” movement that insists that we treat every Potiphar’s wife as if she were Lucretia. Just be clear, the Lucretia in the last sentence is she of ancient Rome, who committed suicide to protect her honour after her rape by Sextus Tarquinus and not her considerably less virtuous fifteenth century namesake, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who was as ruthless, conniving and bloodthirsty as her brother Cesare Borgia, of whom Machiavelli’s Prince was a verbal portrait.

Indeed, there is evidence that just such a sex-strike is in its beginning stages. The ever fabulous veteran actress and author Dame Joan Collins, in her latest Diary for The Spectator remarks that “if these accusations towards men continue much longer, I fear a major decline in population growth in the near future.” She demonstrates that this fear is not unwarranted by concluding her column with the following illustration:

A 30-year-old single man informs me that he wouldn’t consider dating because he was too scared of being accused of inappropriate behaviour or of being ‘named and shamed’ by social media or the Twitterati. ‘I go out with the guys, drink beer and watch box sets,’ he said ruefully, ‘and friends are doing the same. We’re scared of the #MeToo movement and of being accused of sexual harassment and worse if we even tell a girl she’s pretty.’ ‘In my day we called it flirting,’ I told him.

Today, the line between “flirting” and “sexual harassment” is extremely blurry, making it potentially hazardous for any man to approach or otherwise show interest in a woman. American Vice President Mike Pence was mocked about a year ago for his policy of refusing to dine alone with women other than his wife. The Atlantic published a piece that claimed that this policy “hurt women” using the same tortured excuse for logic that the courts have been using since the 1970s to admit female reporters to men’s locker rooms – the reverse has now been accomplished on entirely different but even more absurd grounds – and to force private clubs to abandon “men only” policies. Vox posted an article claiming that this was “probably illegal.” The New Yorker ran a piece entitled “Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women From Power.” Each of these, incidentally or not, was written by a woman. Half a year later, l’affaire Weinstein broke, the “Me Too” movement was launched, and all of a sudden it was a lot more difficult to laugh at Mike Pence.

Rape, of course, is a serious crime – and it has been treated as such from time immemorial. Undoubtedly it is immoral and sleazy for an employer, whether he be a Hollywood producer, a corporate executive, or a Cabinet Minister, to offer to advance a woman’s career in exchange for sexual favours. It is just as immoral and sleazy, however, for a woman to accept the offer – and it is by no means the case, far from it, that it is always the man who initiates this sort of exchange. “Sexual harassment” is the preferred charge of the “Me Too” movement precisely because it is so vague and hazy. Virtually any attention that a man shows to a woman qua woman can be interpreted as sexual harassment if the woman so chooses.

Apart from their preference for the comparatively hazy charge of sexual harassment over those of long recognized sexual crimes and misdeeds with more concrete definitions, the “Me Too” wave of feminism insists that accusations be believed on the say so of the accuser, even in a dearth of supporting evidence and if the accusations pertain to events that took place decades previously. Potiphar’s wife would undoubtedly approve. This is a total assault on justice, that is to say true justice, at least as the term has traditionally been understood in the English-speaking world, and not the spurious contemporary substitute that is called “social” despite being utterly corrosive of society, its institutions, and, as we are seeing in feminism, ordinary social interaction between the sexes.

Eventually, the totally irrational and irresponsible “Me Too” movement is sure to self-destruct. Before this happens, however, there is no telling how many lives and careers it will ruin, to say nothing of the damage it will inflict on the fabric of society and relations between the sexes.

In the meantime, in the interests of self-preservation, men need to consider, at the very least following the example of Mike Pence. A reverse Lysistrata strategy would, however, be more effective in securing the downfall of the enemy. It is true that a strategy that eliminates the procreative act has the potential of resulting in a Pyrrhic victory, but women are far more likely to cave against such a move then men. So perhaps the answer to the “Me Too” movement is for men to tell the fairer sex, “futuete vos ipsos”, not as a crude expletive but practical advice, because they are for the time being no longer willing to do it for them.

A Toxic Narrative

Lydia McGrew, a regular contributor to the website What’s Wrong With the World, in a recent post on her personal blog Extra Thoughts, took umbrage with those who have been sharing a particular meme in response to the controversy over the tape of Donald Trump’s lewd boasting of about a decade ago. She described the meme as toxic because it “represents the intrusion of vicious, misogynistic, manospherian attitudes into something more like mainstream culture.” The meme in question goes “If American women are so outraged at Trump's use of naughty words, who in the hell bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Grey.” Among the reasons Mrs. McGrew gives for condemning this meme, the first was that it downplays what Trump said, making it out to be about “naughty words” rather than “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it.”

The question of whether or not that meme is “toxic” is not of interest to me here. There is a narrative, however, one that is prevalent in institutions of higher learning today, that most definitely is toxic. Many of the responses that I have seen in social media over the last week to memes like the one Mrs. McGrew was discussing draw heavily upon this narrative and there is a hint of it in Mrs. McGrew’s own analysis even though it is not a narrative with which she is likely to have much sympathy given her stated views on a number of issues. The narrative I refer to is the feminist narrative of “rape culture.”

People who have shared memes similar to the one mentioned above have been accused of defending “rape culture” by those who accept Mrs. McGrew’s interpretation of Trump’s comments as “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it” rather than bragging that one of the benefits of his celebrity is that women are willing to let him do certain things which is the more natural interpretation of his words.

What is this “rape culture” to which they are referring?

Is rape culture the culture that we find when we drop the e off of rape and get rap? It would make sense to equate the two because rape and sexual aggression in general are frequently glorified in the lyrics of the noise which tries to pass itself off as music under that name. This is not, however, what is meant by rape culture and it is worthy of noting, in passing, that another recent meme has drawn attention to the fact that Michelle Obama, who claimed that the Trump tape “has shaken me to the core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted” and, like Mrs. McGrew, interpreted the comments on the tape as bragging about “sexually assaulting women” is herself a fan of rap music. The Obamas have hosted Common, Jay Z, and Rick Ross at the White House, noted misogynists, all of whose lyrics glorify violence in one form or another, including, in the case of Ross, drugging and date raping a girl.

Alright, if rap culture is not included in rape culture, how about a culture which encourages male family members to kill female family members who have been victims of rape in order to save the honour of the family? Last year, on New Year’s Eve, members of one such culture, Islamic culture, who had been foolishly admitted as refugees by female Chancellor Angela Merkel, ganged up on women in major cities all over Germany and sexually assaulted them. Is this the rape culture that everyone is talking about? Unlikely, given that it is Hillary Clinton who wishes to repeat Merkel’s mistake in the United States, and who has condemned as bigotry Mr. Trump’s call for members of this culture to be banned from entry into the United States until they could be strictly vetted.

No, what is meant by “rape culture” is nothing more or less than our culture, twentieth and twenty-first century Western culture, as seen through the lens of a narrative drawn up by the radical wing of the second wave of feminism. These radical feminists have been given an inordinate amount of influence in the halls of academia. The “women’s studies” and “gender studies” classrooms which have been established in major universities over the last fifty years serve little to no real academic purpose but exist solely to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with the message of feminism. The idea of rape culture is central to that message.

In 1975, Susan Brownmiller, a journalist who had been involved in several left-wing causes in the 1960s, including the more radical version of Second Wave feminism of which she would later write a history, had a book published entitled Against Our Will: Men, Women & Rape, which contained all of the main elements of the rape culture narrative: that rape is about power not sex, it is an instrument by which men as a class intimidate and oppress women as a class so as to keep power in the hands of men, and that Western culture normalizes and legitimizes rape in order to perpetuate the male power structure. The same ideas were put forward in other feminist writings at the same time but Brownmiller’s was by far the most influential.

The narrative, which relies heavily upon presuppositions drawn from Marxist theories that were long ago debunked, is itself utter nonsense. Western culture has condemned rape from time immemorial. One of the legends of Ancient Rome was that of the rape of Lucretia, the daughter of a Roman nobleman, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin Superbus the last king of Rome. Lucretia, after exposing the crime to her father which led to the revolution in which the Senate drove the Tarquins out and formed the Republic, plunged a dagger into her heart. Lucretia’s final act was honoured by the Romans as the ultimate evidence of her chastity but St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo presented a very different view of the matter in his De Civitate Dei. Having argued that the guilt of rape is imputable only to those who commit it, leaving the chastity of the souls and bodies of its victims intact, he argued that suicide is a completely inappropriate response to rape for it imposes the ultimate penalty upon the innocent party (Book I: Chapters 17-19, the last of which specifically addresses the case of Lucretia).

St. Augustine’s view, which could not be further removed from that of the cultures which think that a victim of rape should be killed to save the family’s honour, was informed by the Holy Scriptures, for the Book of Deuteronomy prescribes the death penalty for the man who commits rape, adding that “unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death.” Writing in the aftermath of the sack of Rome by the Goths, his ideas became foundational to Western Christendom.

Western civilization has changed a lot since the days in which it could be credibly called Christendom but the changes, while many of them are lamentable in my eyes, have mostly been ones of which feminists like Brownmiller would approve – women have been given the vote, access to higher education, recognized rights to own property in their own name, and access to careers outside of the home. Furthermore, all of this took place long before Brownmiller penned her tome. Yet it was the Western, and specifically North American, culture of the late twentieth century that the feminists indicted as rape culture.

Anybody who had two brain cells to rub together would not take this narrative seriously for a second, which is perhaps the reason it is so ubiquitous among academic intellectuals. It has only survived this long because feminists, by interweaving their ridiculous accusations against Western culture with the testimonies of actual rape victims have welded the two together in such a way as to make opposition to the narrative's interpretive grid seem like an attack on the personal experiences of rape victims ensuring that those indoctrinated with the narrative will undergo a negative emotional response to any criticism of it The narrative is passed on in an environment in which it is isolated from opposing viewpoints, ostensibly to create a “safe space” for victims, but more realistically to shield the narrative from criticism. It is completely toxic in its effects. It is used to transfer the guilt of a crime traditionally regarded as a capital offence off of its specific perpetrators and onto the entire male sex while condemning as encouraging rape the culture which is arguably the least condoning of it that the world has ever known. Feminists use this evil narrative to justify their insistence that those who make accusations of sexual assault have a “right to be believed” – to call their claims into question is supposedly a part of rape culture – an insistence that contradicts and undermines the fundamental Western right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Those who have been evoking this toxic feminist narrative ought to be ashamed of themselves for doing so.