Do you ever get the feeling you haven’t lived? I do, every time I read yet another sex-crime story in the papers.
I’ve never considered myself particularly prudish, and I’ve probably done enough in the area of romance to earn the fires of hell in eternity.
What gives me some consolation is the hope that repentance does work, and the thought that quite a few others are bound to be ahead of me in the post-mortem queue to the frying pan. Just witness this morning’s story.
A lesbian university student (let’s call her LUST for short) groomed her silly classmate (SIC) on the net and the phone by pretending to be a man. The SIC girl went along enthusiastically and immediately started sending LUST nude pictures of herself, as one does these days.
Before long the couple began having sex, and you’d think it would be hard for LUST to continue to pass for a man in close quarters. But human ingenuity knows no barriers.
LUST came up with a cock-and-bull story, as it were, that ‘he’ had been disfigured in a car accident and couldn’t let ‘his’ lover see ‘him’. Hence for two years SIC had to be blindfolded during sex. LUST would strap her breasts down, wear a cap concealing her long hair and consummate the mutual passion with a prosthetic penis.
After two years of such amorous activity, SIC got suspicious, removed her blindfold and recognised her indefatigable lover as her female classmate. She screamed and, again as one does these days, went to the police.
At the ensuing trial LUST maintained that SIC had been aware of the charade all along, and the two had been playing an elaborate sex game by mutual consent.
SIC, on the other hand, insisted that she was heterosexual and could cite many sexual encounters to prove it. On balance, she claimed, she’d rather be raped by a man – it would have been less traumatic.
LUST’s defence team tried to convince the jury that SIC’s version was totally incredible, but to no avail. LUST was convicted of sexual assaults, with sentencing put off until a psychiatric examination.
Now, even though I’ve never been on the receiving end of either a prosthetic penis or a natural one, I still can’t help feeling that a sexually experienced woman this side of clinical retardation would be able to tell them apart over two years of non-stop blind trials.
But that’s not the most salient argument against the conviction. Just consider SIC’s behaviour throughout the ordeal. (In our progressive times focusing on the victim’s contribution to sexual assault may itself be an imprisonable offence, but I promise not to tell anyone.)
A university student, a girl from a decent family, is contacted by a stranger and, after a few electronic exchanges, sends him nude shots of herself. She then agrees to have blindfolded sex with the man she has never seen.
Call me a stick-in-the-mud coward, but I wouldn’t accept a similar proposition from a strange woman. What if she’s a murderer? Sadist? Castrator? Cannibal? I mean, I don’t really know her, do I?
One would think that a woman would feel even more vulnerable and demur from such a blind encounter. SIC, however, didn’t. Hence I’d say she has only herself to blame, or at least also herself to blame, and please don’t report me to the cops.
Then again, no physical assault took place. SIC was tricked, not forced, into sex, and was a willing, if misled, participant for two years. LUST was doubtless immoral, but was she criminal?
What happened to the old notion of all being fair in love and war? Open any collection of bawdy Renaissance stories, say by Aretino or Boccaccio, and you’ll read all sorts of stories about an aspiring lover using the cover of darkness to pass himself for a lady’s husband.
Those stories were mostly heterosexual, but in this one the principle is the same, although the details are more Baroque than Renaissance. Even if we, along with the court, accept SIC’s story on faith (which I must admit I don’t), she should have been told to go home, not to be so stupid again and never to plunge headlong into kinky sex with strangers she can’t see.
But we don’t live during the Renaissance, a period that was naughty but still residually sane. We live in a madhouse called modernity, and old certitudes no longer apply.
Everybody is entitled to victimhood and can claim it at the drop of a hat or, in this case, a blindfold. And modern jurors are conditioned by our brainwashing feminist propaganda to accept a victim’s definition of her status, no matter how improbable or insane.
I’d suggest that the sheer improbability of picking at random twelve persons impervious to the moral and intellectual perversions of modernity is coming close to invalidating the jury system. No one can mete out justice without a clear understanding of what justice is.
Nowadays the prosecution can get convictions, or the defence acquittals, by invoking the shibboleths of feminist, racial, homosexual or any other fashionable propaganda as extenuating or even exculpating circumstances. Our adversarial court system is being increasingly reduced to a contest between two fads, not two evidential cases.
Whoever wins or loses such sham trials, the ultimate losers are all of us. You – and a hopelessly square me.