Trigger warning for rape apologism
I confess to having experienced moments of levity in the last few days. This was, I now understand, because I’d forgotten that Brendan O’Neill exists and is still a weeping syphilitic chode.
It’s taken him a while to articulate an opinion on the George Galloway/Julian Assange shit of the last few weeks, and that’s probably because he is so much of an oozing poxy micropenis that he’s had trouble working out what he thinks, because both figures are popular with the stereotypical left-wing person, and there’s nothing Chode of Chode Hall likes more than to shout about how much he hates left-wing people.
I’m surprised it took him so concoct who the real enemy is here. It’s the feminists, of course. Not real feminists, but the imaginary ones that hide in Brendan’s cupboard and eat his favourite crisps in the night but Brendan’s mummy won’t believe they’re real and she thinks he’s eating the crisps and she won’t let him sleep in her bed and that makes Brendan sad.
His line is thoroughly, tediously unoriginal and anyone with a passing familiarity with rape culture tropes will recognise it. Apparently the feminists are trying to redefine rape.
He argues this by, erm, redefining rape.
So it is quite wrong to say “sex without consent is rape”. It is more accurate to say that “sex pursued in defiance of a lack of consent is rape”.
According to the nasty little weeping syphilitic chode, pointing out that not establishing consent during sex can be rape is hard on the poor little men who can’t be arsed to establish consent and we’re lumping them in with criminals, because what really matters is the intention to do it.
And that’s just plain wrong. If you’re going to fuck someone, you have a responsibility to check everyone’s consenting. It’s what makes you a good shag (nobody’s as unsurprised as me that Brendan O’Neill has outed himself as a terrible lover). It’s pretty fucking easy to not rape someone if you make a modicum of effort.
In this particular offering, Brendan O’Neill displays an obsession with the justice system which is prevalent in thinking about rape, and thoroughly unhelpful for the most part. Rape is, after all, far more than just a legal situation: after all, the majority of rape survivors do not ever engage with the legal system as it’s not really set up to deal with rape particularly effectively. When talking about rape, we need to separate the act from the crime, as it is so much more than an abstract legal concept.
A lot of people get this. Many others don’t, and, of course, some of them will purposely miss the point like this weeping syphilitic chode. Sex without consent is rape. And that’s not a radical redefinition of anything.
Another angry woman 
I like this car-crash of an argument:
“In other words, the man must know that there is no consent. He must not believe that consent is present, and therefore must know that it is absent.”
Since Brendan O’Neill knows and is right about literally everything, he’s actually unable to conceive of someone not being sure of something.
That’s how he manages to do this:
“This is a terrible error, because in order for rape to have occurred, it is not enough to prove that the woman did not consent; we must also surely prove that the man knows she did not consent, or was utterly reckless as to the question of her consent, and carried on regardless.
That is, rape must involve an intention on the part of the man to commit rape. The man must have a guilty mind – or what is referred to in law as mens rea – in the sense that he knows he is committing rape. ”
It starts off with a token sort-of-sensible point, as our Brendan usually does – in order to say someone’s committed a crime you have to be able to say they consciously intended to do it. But then, as always, he files his semi-sensible point away at the bottom of a drawer and goes back to assuming every rapist knowingly decides to rape, knowing full well what they’re doing is rape.
Brendan O’Neill isn’t just a weeping syphilitic chode, he’s an deceitful ruptured arsegrape. I’d say the golden rule for consent (and probably avoiding doing most bad things) is if you’re not sure, check or put it away. He pays lip-service to that idea, then he uses it as a springboard to say “didn’t know didn’t care did it by accident” is a legitimate defence.
Incidentally this champion of the poor and the little guy is in this week’s Big Issue squeaking about the politics of envy.
What his article missed, or seemed to skirt around, is the fact that a man who has sex with a woman when consent is unclear is a gaping arsehole. A man who prioritises his desire to fuck above the risk of committing a rape is not somebody we should be making excuses for, it’s somebody we should be jailing. They can think about their attitudes to rape while they share a shower with murderers.
“So it is quite wrong to say “sex without consent is rape”. It is more accurate to say that “sex pursued in defiance of a lack of consent is rape”.”
If there is not consent, but sex still happens, this necessarily requires that it was pursued in defiance of the lack of consent. There is no meaningful difference between the substance of each phrase, just a semantic step back so that he can pretend that the first one is wrong.
D00d be an arsewipe.
Not only is he overly focused on the legal situation, he also gets it badly wrong. UK law does not include criminal intent as part of the definition of rape. What is going through the perpetrator’s head at the time is not relevant – it only requires that a reasonable person in their situation would have understood that consent was not given or has been withdrawn. He is (wilfully?) misinterpreting the meaning of “reasonable belief”. He references the Morgan defence (where the perpetrator genuinely believed consent was present even though it wasn’t) to support his argument, but the Morgan defence was abolish in UK law by the Sexual Offences Act 2003. I submitted this as a comment on the HuffPo piece but it’s been pending for several hours – even though several more recent comments have been approved…
Maybe you should take a break from the Ass-Angels, and deal with, I dunno, the death of Rachel Corrie, Israel’s attempt to sweep it under the carpet, and er, oh look, Brendan O’neill. Being a weeping syphilitic chode. Again. Seriously, he gets around: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100178241/the-secular-beatification-of-rachel-corrie-sums-up-everything-that-is-wrong-with-modern-solidarity-with-palestine/
(Hint: The Palestinians created the original “Martyr of Rafah” posters, and they’re about as secular as the pope is protestant. Also, he doesn’t once say how we should be supporting people in Palestine not getting stomped to oblivion by Israel. Wanker).
((Sorry, I’ll stop using your blog posts as a chance to air my own anger))
This guy is one of those who thinks the default setting for women on any potential sexual encounter is “yes” unless she sends up a flare or something that clearly says “NO!” Uh, no, asshat, it’s the other way around. Always assume the answer is “no” unless you hear otherwise (which he probably never does, which explains his problem).
Sadly, a lot of men think like he does and don’t get that women do not exist to service them in bed, cook for them, do their laundry, and have their children. We may GIVE those things for whatever reason but they are not an entitlement. Oh, and our looking hot is not an entitlement, either. We don’t exist for the male gaze. God knows most of you don’t act like you exist for ours.
(BTW, one of my friends likes to refer to men she doesn’t like as a “penis.” I’ll have to tell her she needs to step up her game because a mere “penis” just doesn’t begin to compete with “weeping syphilitic chode.” Not even close. lol)
Arghghghhhhhhhh. So Angry that people like this exist.
Granted, this is not really the most well put together, insightful comment, but it stands.
How ironic that the fucker is using DPP vs Morgan to support his mansplaining. Morgan is one of the few cases you learn about in law school that I’ll never forget, because it sums up the attitude to consent of weeping, raping chodes past and present:
“Morgan invited three friends to his house, and invited them to have sexual intercourse with his wife. The friends later claimed that Morgan told them that his wife was “kinky”, and would feign protest. The four men forcibly overcame the wife’s resistance and each one had intercourse without her consent. The friends were charged with rape, and Morgan was charged with aiding and abetting the others to commit rape. He was not charged with rape because of spousal privilege. At trial the three friends pleaded that they had honestly believed that Mrs Morgan had consented to sexual intercourse.” (Wikipedia)
What are the odds that O’Neill would have been writing Serious, Brave and Reasonable blog posts about how we should acquit the evil raping fuckfaces because Important Principles were at stake, had blogs been around at the time?