“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.

Abortion: Who is to Blame?

The campaign of entrepreneur and entertainer Donald Trump for the American presidency has had a most salubrious effect on public discourse in that topics which the liberal left has long attempted to exclude from the discussion, at least as far as opinions dissenting from the progressive consensus are concerned, have been placed back on the table. Similarly, we are now seeing attention being given to some interesting but seldom discussed facets of ongoing debates.

The abortion issue is a debate which the left considers to be closed and the right considers to be ongoing. Easy, affordable, safe and legal access to abortion had been one of the demands of the feminist movement when it was revived by Betty Friedan and others of her ilk in the 1960s, and activist judges on the Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada accommodated these demands by striking down all the laws against abortion in their respective countries in 1973 and 1988. The liberal left believes that this has settled the issue, that abortion is legal and should remain legal, and that discussion of the topic should be considered closed. The right believes, or at least professes to believe, to varying degrees, that the present status quo is unacceptable and that anti-abortion legislation ought to be reintroduced. Some seek criminalization only for late term, partial-birth, and/or sex selective abortions. Others, of whom this writer is one, would like to see a total ban on abortion reintroduced. Since abortion involves the deliberate termination of human lives, in circumstances and for reasons which do not meet the traditional criteria whereby the taking of human life can be justified or at least excused, it is by definition murder. In this, as in so many other ways, King Solomon’s words “A wise man’s heart is at his right hand: but a fool’s heart at his left” (1) prove true albeit in a different sense from that which their author intended.

Donald Trump, at one time a liberal on this issue, has declared himself to be on the pro-life side, and when asked by CNN’s Chris Matthews, last month, what exactly this entailed, he, said at first that if abortion were made to be illegal again, a woman who had an abortion would have to be punished. He later retracted this remark and said that it was the abortionists, the doctors who perform the procedure, who would have to be punished.

Trump’s initial declaration resembled that of the boy in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale about the “Emperor’s New Clothes” in that it was a blunt statement of something which was obvious but which the more politically savvy carefully avoided saying. Many spokesmen for the pro-life position were quick to denounce his remarks, to say that he had put little to no thought into the matter, and to declare that women were the victims of abortion too. With regards to Trump’s having put little to no thought into the abortion issue, that may very well be the case, but the implications of this are not necessarily those his detractors have in mind. They meant, of course, that because he had put little thought into the issue he therefore had little understanding of it. Another way of looking at it would be that because he had not thought the matter through, he lacked the blinders that inhibit most pro-lifers from seeing or asserting the plain and clear implication of the fact that abortion is murder, namely, that a woman who seeks an abortion is as much a murderess as the doctor who supplies the abortion is a murderer.

That a woman who seeks an abortion is a murderess is the real issue here beneath the surface question, interesting enough in itself, of whether she ought to be punished for it under law. Many, if not most, pro-lifers shy away from acknowledging this implication of their position. Perhaps they consider it to be unchivalrous, although I know of no part of the code of chivalry that forbids us from pointing out the murders committed by Queen Jezebel, Lucrezia Borgia, and Lizzie Borden and requires us to treat Medea as if she were the Virgin Mary. More likely it is due to the fact that they have been using the language of liberalism – universal human dignity and rights, etc. – to frame their arguments for so long, that they have lost the ability to think outside of the liberal paradigm of which feminism, in which women are the universal victims and men the universal oppressors, is an integral element. While they might argue that framing their arguments this way is a practical necessity in a political environment that is heavily steeped in liberalism this might very well prove to be fatal to the pro-life movement for it places them in the difficult position of having to try to argue that the ideals of liberalism support their side rather than that of their opponents.

Attempting to prove the pro-life position to be truer to liberalism than the pro-choice position is hard enough, but judging from some of the responses to Mr. Trump’s gaffe some are trying to go further and argue that the pro-life position is truer to feminism than the pro-choice position. If, however, the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy that she does not want flows naturally from the starting point of liberalism, the sovereignty of self over self, it is absolutely required by feminism which starts from the premise that women ought to have the same degree of sovereignty over self as men but that this has historically been denied them because society has been arranged to the benefit of men at the expense of women. It is true enough, as quasi-feminist pro-lifers argue, that women are not always the instigators of abortion but are often pressured into it by their boyfriends and family. The pressure to legalize abortion, however, came from basically two sources, the sexual liberation movement that sought to free sexual intercourse from both societal restriction and regulations on the one hand and personal consequences on the other and the feminist movement. Of these two, legal and accessible abortion was always more important to the latter than the former, because cheap and effective contraception and treatments for many STDs were already available when the sexual revolution began and indeed helped bring about the revolution by allowing liberals to argue that the practical reasons for the old rules were no longer valid. The true nature of abortion-on-demand has always been that of a weapon – a gun, held to the head of the next generation by a movement purporting to speak on behalf of one of the sexes, and holding that generation ransom to obtain its demands as it unilaterally renegotiates what Edmund Burke called “the great primaeval contract of eternal society.”

While it would be a gross mistake to blame women as an entire sex for the actions of feminism, neither is it reasonable to excuse our modern day Medeas (2) and to make them out to be as much victims as the children they have had killed. (3) Until the majority of women have repudiated feminism and the power of this movement has been broken forever, it is foolish in the extreme to do so.


(1) Ecclesiastes 10:2. The quotation is from the Authorized Bible. The English Standard Version renders the verse this way: “A wise man's heart inclines him to the right, but a fool's heart to the left”
(2) Ironically, the original Medea of myth actually was a victim of cruel treatment by her husband Jason.
(3) I subjected this claim to the ridicule it so richly deserves in my story “Justice for Minnie?”: http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/04/justice-for-minnie.html