The Web of Evil

The Minister responds to a debate about the voluntary sector and social enterprise:

Lord Wallace of Saltaire [Lib Dem]: We are all volunteers. Volunteering, after all, has a long tradition in Britain. Long before the welfare state grew up there were churches and chapels; philanthropy and charitable activities by the well-off; friendly societies; co-operatives among the working classes; trade unions, of course—

Which is why the welfare state had to be invented. Turned out a haphazard cavalcade of the well-meaning and the tax-evading wasn't a reliable basis—and perhaps was even a shitty one—for ensuring that vital services were provided.

—and, above all, women. My mother retired from her last voluntary post when she was older than a considerable number of the women in the old people’s home of which was chair. She was one of that generation who would have had a career had she not got married and, as we know, one of the problems that we are facing in the voluntary sector has been that nowadays there is not that great pool of capable women who are not able to work because they are married. We therefore have to rely on the fit retired much more than we did.

So not only has David Willetts established beyond question that the rise of working women is directly responsible not only for all unemployment figures but for the dwindling and now even vulnerable position of men in society, but now Lord Wallace is setting out the case for married women not to be allowed to work because otherwise there won't be any publicly provided services at all.

I suppose that in some ways I am one of the fit retired who is a volunteer, as are half the government Front Bench. I work but I am not paid, although that is partly because I have quite a generous academic pension—not, of course, half as generous as doctors’ pensions—which enables me to provide my contribution. [Hansard]

Ha ha ha! It's funny because it's true; doctors are our most wasteful resource. We definitely need fewer of those grasping bastards and more questionably academic ministerial quisling scrotes. The Lib Dems, everybody!

Downing Street is considering cutting the school summer holiday, overhauling child benefit and banning advertising to under-16s as part of a charm offensive aimed at winning back female voters, according to a leaked government memo.

The document reveals a growing anxiety at the heart of government that the coalition is failing to deliver on its promise to be the "most family-friendly government ever" and a worry that its support among women is particularly low. [Guardian]

Women! The coalition's sorry it said and did all those things, like blaming working women for a lack of jobs for men, slashing state services that provide support for women or showing itself to be broadly anti-abortion. How can the coalition make it up to you? The coalition promises to do the washing up for a week, the coalition will hang up the washing as soon as it's done and not leave it getting stale in a pile on the kitchen floor, and if you're really lucky the coalition might bring in a treat for you from the closest 24-hour garage to No. 10.

Look, you're right to feel upset; the coalition has been a bit distracted lately. But don't worry your pretty little heads—the coalition intends to spend much more time with you from now on.

While the main chamber of the House of Lords is debating "the position of women in society in the United Kingdom and overseas and the advancements that can be made for the development of women's potential", committee business is going on in the Moses Room, the smaller debating chamber next door:

Baroness Wilcox [Minister]: My noble friend Lord Razzall has reminded us all about “heavy breathers”, from before this technology was developed. As a woman picking up the telephone, in the days before I went ex-directory, I have had a heavy breather on the other end of the phone.

Lord Razzall: (rakishly) I’m not surprised.

Baroness Wilcox: (blushing) Thank you.

Hmm. Given the subject matter being discussed over in the chamber, I'm sure that those proceedings will prove to be much more edifying.

Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes: There is very often the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. Big companies and big names and big sums of money are brought in the way of damages. I can only say that throughout my career I never experienced such a thing. Probably, in retrospect, I am slightly offended.

Ah. If you have spent your life bobbing about on the smooth and untroubled surface of a particular class, you're going to remain blithely unaware of a few of life's realities, as gracefully demonstrated here.

I point out once again that the Lords is not composed exclusively of people like this. If there were none at all who could be relied on for quotes like these, though, they'd have to change the name of the entire institution; this stuff is exactly what you would expect something called the "House of Lords" to come out with.

On a Question about whether the Government are working to get more women into executive positions on company boards:

Earl Ferrers: My Lords, I ask the noble Baroness the Leader of the House whether she agrees that whatever their merit, both the questions and the answers are very discriminatory?

The Leader of the House (Baroness Royall of Blaisdon): My Lords, I do not think that I am being discriminatory in any way.

Lord Acton: My Lords, I ask whether my noble friend has read the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, of December 1957, on the subject of women, and whether she is aware that the question that he has just asked is a model of enlightenment compared to that?

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, I have indeed read the speech by the noble Earl. I did not know whether to cry or to laugh. But I know that the noble Earl has made a huge change in his views since then, and I am glad that he is now the enlightened person that he is.

Earl Ferrers: My Lords, is the noble Baroness aware that at that time—which was some years ago—I was giving the views of the youth and the young generation, which is what everyone wants to listen to? Of course, as time progresses you change your views, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but you are still the same person.

A sample of those "views of the young generation":

Earl Ferrers: Frankly, I find women in politics highly distasteful. In general, they are organising, they are pushing and they are commanding. Some of them do not even know where loyalty to their country lies.

I disagree with those who say that women in your Lordships' House would cheer up our Benches. If one looks at a cross-section of women already in Parliament I do not feel that one could say that they are an exciting example of the attractiveness of the opposite sex. I believe that there are certain duties and certain responsibilities which nature and custom have decreed men are more fitted to take on; and some responsibilities which nature and custom have decreed women should take on. It is generally accepted that the man should bear the major responsibility in life. It is generally accepted, for better or worse, that a man's judgment is generally more logical and less tempestuous than that of a woman. Why then should we encourage women to eat their way, like acid into metal, into positions of trust and responsibility which previously men have held? If we allow women in this House, where will this emancipation end?...

I feel sure that nine out of ten noble Lords have in their heart... that we like women; we admire them; sometimes we even grow fond of them; but we do not like them here. [Hansard]

I have reproduced this speech before, but every so often it bears dusting off and incredulously re-examining.

Introduction to a DCMS leaflet encouraging participation in the boardroom:

All organisations function best if the people running them bring a wide range of skills and experience to the board table. That’s why the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) wants to encourage talented and appropriately skilled individuals, with flair and creativity, to apply to join our boards. And that means women as well as men.

From today's debate on renewable energy.

Lord James of Blackheath: It was brilliantly presented in Budapest by a 28 year-old very attractive Hungarian physicist, who has just got the Nobel Prize. She has got four children already—one wonders what she does in her spare time.

My esteemed colleague rang me on Saturday night. “I hate women,” she said. I told her to come for a pint.

She had just finished her duties as a steward at the Reclaim the Night march in central London. One of her jobs was to ensure that the marchers stayed together and no gaps opened up. “Could you move up to the people in front, please,” she said at one point. The woman in front of her turned round angrily. “Feminists seek consensus,” she snapped. “They don’t tell each other what to do!”

The event was women-only. If any men wanted to show their support they were very welcome to accompany the march but they weren’t allowed among the actual marchers, as my esteemed colleague had to gently explain to one young woman and her grandfather. As they ducked out of the march she said, “I’m really sorry, but those are the rules.” A woman next to her hissed, “Never apologise to a MAN!”

The march started in Trafalgar Square. Before it began, people were coming over and asking what the event was, many of them men. One of the organisers said bitterly, “Why do men always want to know what women are up to?” My esteemed colleague’s reply was, “There are a thousand of us standing in Trafalgar Square holding banners. Enquiring what we’re doing here doesn’t constitute patriarchal oppression.” The organiser ignored her.

There were many banners, but they were poorly made and rapidly fell apart. As the march progressed, banner after banner collapsed and disappeared from view. My esteemed colleague was highly amused by this and couldn’t resist saying to another organiser, “We should have got a man in.” Whatever the diametric opposite is of the funnybone in the human body, she hit it squarely. It’s tough out there for a feminist with a sense of humour who doesn’t automatically hate men she has never met.

A case currently at Inner London Crown Court centres on three 13 year-old boys accused of raping two 16 year-old girls. The boys were vandalising a 261 bus between Bromley and Lewisham before, it is claimed, they followed the girls, mugged them for their phones and said, “Give us a blowjob if you want your phones back”. The girls claim they were then gangraped by the boys who filmed everything on their own phones.

Barrister Sheilagh Davies knows how to stick up for her clients. Representing one of the boys, she said in court today that the girls consented to sex, “maybe to get attention, maybe to gain affection”.

She told the jury one of the girls, who testified via video link, had “slimmed down a lot” since the incident in southeast London last November. The barrister added: “She was 12st 6lb—not quite the swan she may turn into. She may well have been glad of the attention.” [thelondonpaper]

Good point, Sheilagh. When you’re overweight, “Give us a blowjob if you want your phone” is as close as you’re going to get to being sung “Three Times A Lady”. Another great day for women and for the legal profession, then.

A young footballer who filmed a friend having sex with a 14-year-old girl before distributing the mobile phone images has walked free from court. Callum McKinlay passed the video round among school friends after the incident at a party in Perth.

At the town’s sheriff court, the 16-year-old, who earlier admitted making and distributing indecent images, was admonished. McKinlay was told he was being treated leniently because of his future career.

The schoolboy, who was 15 at the time of the offence, and two of his friends, recorded a 16-year-old youth having unlawful sex with the third-year pupil during the drunken party in May. When footage of the incident was distributed to several youngsters at a school in Perth, police were called in to investigate.

McKinlay, from Bridge of Earn, who has played for Scotland Under-16s, Rangers and Hibs, was told he would have had his sentence deferred, had it not been for his potential career. Sheriff Michael Fletcher told him: “I think there’s a whole raft of things you can learn from this whole sorry experience... You might develop into a good footballer and if that did happen to you, imagine what it would be like if you were in the situation these people were, and people took photos and sent them on to magazines or newspapers.” [BBC]

Clearly the judge here knows his football, and has made his judgment on the basis that when McKinlay grows up and joins the big time, he’ll need the time and experience necessary to become a successful premier-league rapist.

Talking of which, research last week showed that rape convictions have stood still and that changes brought in by the 2003 Sexual Offences Act are having little impact or just aren’t being implemented in the first place. As unexpected news goes, this is right up there with “Earth revolves around sun”, but it doesn’t change the fact that with a 5 per cent conviction rate for reported rapes in England and Wales, right now this is a bull market for rapists.

There are, inevitably, opposing views on this. First, still frosted with intellectual fairydust from the enlightenment wonderland that is the BBC’s “Have Your Say” forum, here’s James from Durham:

Part of the problem is the fact that so many women are falsely accusing men of rape nowadays. A woman gets drunk and gives consent, yet in the morning can accuse the male of rape. Add to that cases of women accusing celebrities of rape, yet the first port of call is Max Clifford, then the local police station, doesn’t stand to reason. A judge and jury have to take these in to account before establishing ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

Thanks for that, James. Sue from London appears to disagree:

The myth of women crying rape, whether after bad sex or for whatever reason, is crucial to the condoning of rape. The problem is not that women falsely report being raped but that most women do not report rape at all, and those who do are subjected to a process of character assassination which leaves them bewildered.

The phrase ‘false allegations’ needs unpicking. The malicious woman who concocts a false story to take revenge on her past lover would not get very far in the legal system, where a past sexual relationship usually precludes cases even getting to court. Temkin (1987) points out that there is no evidence that fabricating allegations happens more often in rape cases than in other types of crime. In a Home Office study, the police decided that they had evidence of this in only seventeen of the cases reported to them from two London boroughs over a three-year period. There is no evidence such cases reach court. According to a Scottish study of police response published in 1983, although some officers talked about a high rate of false allegations, they found it very difficult to recall particular cases they had dealt with that were unquestionably false. When I asked the director of one of the regional CPS offices who had worked for the CPS since 1985 if he had ever come across a case in which a woman had made a false allegation, he somewhat sheepishly admitted that he could not think of one. *

Come on, love, call yourself professor of women’s studies at the University of London? You don’t even begin to address the massive epidemic of celebrities being accused of rape. After all, why on earth would you behave badly if you were a celebrity?

Even if the man is convicted, there may still be questions about his accuser. The case that caused the phrase “date rape” to be coined, that of Angus Diggle in 1994, became a cause célèbre for the right-wing press. The Sunday Telegraph at the time, lambasting what it saw as the latest manifestation of political correctness, said:

The conviction only makes sense on the basis that Diggle was being punished not for what he actually thought would be Ms X’s attitude to his advances, but for what he ought to have thought.

Since the jury agreed with Ms X that she had been asleep on the couch at the time when Diggle started having sex with her, he seems a curious choice as a hero for these guardians of law and order, civil society etc. Telegraph columnist Minette Marrin was particularly incensed on his behalf:

The whole date-rape nonsense, of which this is the worst example in this country, was the direct result of political correctness... what Diggle did was something that most of our sons and lovers have done, though, it is to be hoped, with more style.

Um... remember the part where she was asleep? Look, just don’t spend the night at Minette’s house. Lord alone knows what she’ll be getting up to once you nod off.

The right-wing press was, however, as it so often likes to claim, ahead of its time. Sleep has been downgraded in recent sexual offences legislation from a reason rape will automatically be judged to have happened to a factor that can be argued over. Essentially, the fact that you were asleep when attacked does not now necessarily mean that you weren’t giving your consent. Presumably defence counsels will soon be regularly consulting Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in court.

Meanwhile, the original version of this story (though not the update) quoted a woman who was recently challenged by a judge: if she couldn’t remember exactly what time she had gone to sleep, how could she possibly remember whether or not she had given her consent for sex? A reasonable question for someone to ask—if they have never, for example, had sex. Or sleep.

Also, case history has repeatedly established that if the complainant has previously had a sexual history with the defendant, there is no way that a jury will countenance that he could later have raped her. It turns out that I could at any time, under any circumstances, have sex with any woman I have previously slept with and, she and her boyfriend or husband might be rather surprised to discover, no court would ever think of convicting me.

Still, if you have been so ungallant as not to revisit an old flame, it is important to remember, as a man, that you’re statistically more likely to find yourself up before a male judge, a man of the world who’s been around. He’ll understand.

In court [the defendant] agreed that he had asked the young woman if she would like to wait for her boyfriend in his flat. He claimed that when she had disappeared, he had gone to look for her and, to his astonishment, had found her naked in his bed. He said she had invited him to join her and claimed she had agreed to intercourse. At this point the judge, who had given the impression that he found the complainant very attractive, intervened with the following preposterous question:

JUDGE: Did you find her attractive as a woman, a girl?
DEFENDANT: She was attractive enough.
JUDGE: When you went into the bedroom you must have thought it was Christmas and Easter put together when you found her naked in your bed. *

---

* Extracts taken from Sue Lees (professor of women’s studies at the University of London), Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial, 2002. This edition makes it plain that it does not take into account the changes that were due to be enacted by the Sexual Offences Act 2003—but as it’s now clear that precious few of those changes have actually happened, it looks pretty much as relevant as bloody ever, doesn’t it?

Beyond the Veil, Fatima Mernissi:

[For hardliners] the sexual act is considered polluting, and is surrounded by ceremonials and incantations whose goal is to create an emotional distance between the spouses and reduce their embrace to its most elementary function, that of a purely reproductive act. During coitus, the male is actually embracing a woman, symbol of unreason and disorder, anti-divine force of nature and disciple of the devil. Hence a dread of erection, which is experienced as a loss of control and, according to Ghazali [11th century], referred to as darkness in verse 3 of sura 113:

Say: I seek refuge in the lord of daybreak
From the evil of that which he created
From the evil of darkness when it is intense.

In an attempt to prevent a complete merging with the woman, the coital embrace is surrounded by a ceremony which grants Allah a substantial presence in the man’s mind during intercourse. The coital space is religiously oriented: the couple should have their heads turned away from Mecca. “They should not face the ‘holy shrine’ in respect for it” [Ghazali]. This symbolism of spatial orientation expresses the antagonism between Allah and the woman. Mecca is the direction of God. During intercourse, the man is reminded that he is not in Allah’s territory, whence the necessity to invoke his presence.

It is advisable for the husband to start by invoking God’s name and reciting “Say God is one” first of all and then reciting the takbir “God is most great” and the tahlil “There is no god but God” and then say, “In the name of God, the high and powerful, make it a good posterity if you decide to make any come from my kidney”. [Ghazali]

At the crucial moment of ejaculation, when the physical and spiritual boundaries of the lover threaten to melt in a total identification with the woman, the Muslim lover is reminded:

It is suitable to pronounce, without moving the lips, the following words: “Praise be to God who created man from a drop of water”. [Ghazali again]

(Other reports on the words a Muslim is supposed to pronounce during coitus are in Imam Bukhari, al-Jami’ al-Salih, and Imam Tarmidi, Sunan al-Tarmidi.)

They’re not just any old sacred recitations he’s muttering to himself as he ploughs away—they’re incantations specially chosen to protect him because he believes you’re the embodiment of evil! That’s got to make any girl feel special.