Re-victimisation

Any mere male who sticks his head above the parapet during the prevailing frenzy about “Roastbusters” risks getting it blown off.  I feel safe enough however, since nobody reads this blog anyway.  The Roastbusters are a few adolescent males who have been bragging on line about their sexual conquests of young and under-age girls.  They first get these girls drunk, then gang-rape them. 

Of course it is without excuse.  Now we are having protest marches in all NZ’s main centres and some towns, we have petitions demanding everything up to actual emasculation, we have howls about alleged police prevarication and incompetence, we have endless moral posturing, we have politicians diving for cover.  Two prominent radio talkback blokes on something called Radio Live have been forced off the air.  They had made specious, ignorant, blokeish remarks on the issue, and were immediately crushed by widespread feminist ferocity.

Something else is going on here, at another level, and I wish I could see more clearly what it is.  Is it an anti-men splurge?  Auckland has just been treated to the spectacle of its mayor, a practicing Roman Catholic, caught in adultery.  We have had inane commentary from his girlfriend and her subsidiary lover called Luigi.  All this is less than edifying, and it has brought out all our hypocrites and assorted moralists.  The secular culture seems to have a permanent underlying level of anger.  There is much talk about the need for “heads to roll”, and people “demanding answers”. 

What we are not allowed to do is “blame the victims”.  This is called revictimisation.  Evidently these young women are blameless, which I find difficult to believe.  It is not compulsory to drink at all or to get drunk.  We are being told that these girls, being young and/or drunk, are not capable of consent.  That’s interesting too.  It seems that the females who have long been demanding equality in everything, want to exempt themselves from responsibility when it comes to consent to sexual activity.  The blokes have responsibility for their decisions but the girls don’t. 

Under-age sex is a crime, consent or not.  And rightly so, it seems to me.  Rape is a crime also.  Otherwise, I am inclined to think, the girls have to accept responsibility for their own choices, and so do the blokes.  Crime, if it has happened, should be reported.  If there are problems with that – the police not taking you seriously, or hassles with court procedure or the rules of evidence – then our Justice and Police Ministers should cease posturing and fluffing around and come up with solutions. 

Documenting one’s alleged sexual exploits on the web is unpleasant, juvenile, a kind of public exhibitionism.  Surely there are ways of simply blocking such nonsense on Facebook or wherever it happens. 

But this is an alcohol-sodden culture.  What else do we expect?  The activities that have whipped up such a storm lately are the direct and predictable outcome of our way of life – hedonism, alcohol and drugs, the macho culture, kids leaving school without having achieved anything worthwhile, the collapse of decent family structure, to say nothing of the much-vaunted marae, mindless and pointless sport-ridden secularism.  What we are seeing flows naturally from what has become of our culture.