Sexual crime is in the news again, so it must be a day ending in the letter ‘Y.’ This time around it’s the news that the Director of Public Prosecutions in the ACT will not be proceeding with a re-trial of the high-profile case against a man accused of raping Liberal political staffer Brittany Higgins. The reaction from feminists and the wider media talking heads has so far been predictable, blaming a broken justice system that has once again failed to bring justice to a victim of sexual assault.
Make no mistake, a failure in the justice system has occurred here, but the blame for this does not lie with misogynistic laws or procedures, but instead with an idiotic juror. He or she not only ignored what was a daily instruction from the presiding judge to refrain from watching or reading any outside information relevant to the case, but made the astoundingly stupid decision to bring an offending document inside the jury room itself, resulting in the mistrial. The expectation is that the charges against the man will soon be dropped, but it’s almost irrelevant. The trial by media has long since delivered its verdict and he will always be tainted with the label of rapist, and whatever you may believe is the truth of Brittany Higgins’ allegation, she too has been denied closure.
Issues with the modern jury system aside (and there are plenty, ranging from the removal of juror property qualifications, to the introduction of majority verdicts), the Higgins trial is a microcosm of a much larger underlying issue at play that is worth drawing attention to, one that is never mentioned in the mainstream media on ABC panel shows like The Drum or Q&A and rarely broached in the Murdoch press.
The years 2010-2015 feel like a lifetime ago, but I still recall the intensity of the debate that raged during that period over the ‘campus rape epidemic’, the precursor to #MeToo, and the drawn-out internet conflicts over sexism and harassment with ‘ElevatorGate’ and ‘GamerGate.’ For a while I was of the opinion that this was all just a hysteria, cherry-picked cases and exaggerated statistics pushed by a new generation of sensitive snowflakes who shrieked rape at any unappealing man that propositioned them; mere political rhetoric drummed up as the flexing of power by what is now the largest voting block in Australia and the West – the Female Urban Professional. ‘We are in charge now and now you must listen and deal with our problems!’ seemed to be the underlying command.
Now a decade later, and with a deeper understanding of the history of the sexual revolution, I am not so sure it is that simple. There are only so many times you can discount or ignore the disturbing child sex abuse scandals and the constant #MeToo events, the government reports on sexual harassment, the many and varied sexual assault statistics, the personal testimony from women in your life or even a critical look at your own past behaviour, before a reasonable person has to see that there is a pattern emerging; that there has been a long-term breakdown in moral behaviour when it comes to men (and also women) acting on their sexual urges. The effects of the collapse in religious belief and the widespread sexualisation of society brought about by Hollywood and pornography are now being properly felt.
I am not suggesting that it always ends up with rape like that has alleged to have occurred to Higgins, but after 60 years of sexual subversion and cultural warfare, modern man has seemingly lost all sense of control of his passions, many taking advantage of every sexual opportunity presented to them. Avoiding sex before marriage is dead and buried, as are all the old moral codes around courtship and treating sex in the most delicate way possible. The highest fulfillment of sexual passion was once a lifelong marriage entered into under the eyes of God; now it is sleeping with as many people as possible or engaging in ‘ethical nonmonogamy’ to use the in-vogue term.
In this liberated world full of dating around, hook-up apps, and transient consequence-free sex that lacks all the inhibitions and restrictions that once defined proper sexual conduct, it is inevitable that conflict and chaos within the realm of sex will increase. Women are subject to sexualised interactions (both wanted and unwanted, verbal and physical) with more different men more often, more intensely, more aggressively and in more different circumstances than ever before. The sexual harassment statistics and the outrage about rape culture are just a reflection of this increase in opportunity. It may only be coming from a small percentage of men, but it is that small percentage of selfish men that has had the most to gain from the sexual revolution.
Certainly, the world wasn’t always like this. Scandalous events such as the Profumo Affair or Abe Saffron’s sex romps, both involving consensual relations without even a hint of rape, used to be shocking to the Australian public of the post-war era. Even in the 1970s, Jim Cairns’ affair with his private secretary Junie Morosi was still a career ending scandal. Now these events are utterly unremarkable and our outrage limited to cases of rape or paedophilia. Barnaby Joyce having an extra-marital affair and a love child with a political staffer gets him a finger-wagging at best.
In response to the Higgins case and the thousand others like it, the Left has no proper answer to this apparent epidemic of sex crime. Their solutions are simplistic, if not terrifying: reverse the burden of proof and abolish the legal standard of innocent until proven guilty. This is no mere conjecture on their part. ‘Affirmative consent’ is already law in NSW, Tasmania and Victoria, where the onus in now on the accused to prove that they in fact received consent, instead of the defendant proving they did not give consent.
As I have written previously, there is a steadfast refusal to see any connection between the sexual revolution with the current state of sexual affairs. No link is allowed to be drawn between the feminist and left-wing victories of the 1960s that freed selfish men from the shackles of sexual morality and the ‘rape culture’ of today. Only pornography is occasionally allowed to take some blame, a blame of course that is never directed towards the group of people most responsible for its legalisation and promotion in Australia (see my four-part series The Plot Against Australia at The Occidental Observer: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4).
No amount of fiddling with consent laws and legal procedure or throwing money at misandrist educational programs is going to offer a meaningful solution. As our world pushes further and further away from faith and the old morals and into the depths of a pornified, hypersexual culture, cases similar to Brittany Higgins will only continue to pile up. All we can say to feminists and the modern Left is, this is the world you fought so hard for, the one that moral and social conservatives decades ago warned would occur, and in response you mocked them mercilessly. You made your bed, quite literally, and now are finding it is not so comfortable to lie in after all.
