These are the words of a complete fool:

The present movement brings rape centre stage in a national ­conversation that has been unrestrained and insistent.

It has already ventilated views about power and consent likely to have a significant impact on sexual relationships, and indeed all relationships between the sexes.

It’s been both thrilling and confronting. The right for women to freely engage in sex on their terms to know that even when drunk or unconscious they will not be raped, to be protected by our legal system, has never been so clearly articulated on such a national ­platform for so long.

This is from yet another fantasy piece of nonsense in The Oz: This is our time of reckoning. Matched with an even more unhinged article: Australian women are springloaded with rage. Kate, we will not forget in which we find:

From the depths of my being I am rage. For the promising debater, Kate, who took her life in June last year. For all the women who’ve been sexually invaded and carry within them a post-traumatic stress disorder that burdens them for the length of their lives. For the women who’ve been taught to be silent even before they leave school, I am rage. For the schoolgirls stepping forward in their thousands to reveal rapes and sexual assaults perpetrated by their teenage male peers, I am rage. For all of us who’ve been conditioned to excuse questionable male behaviour. For the patriarchal club that keeps women in their place — a quieter, lesser, subservient place — I am rage. For the betrayal of all the good men out there by the odious and insecure few, I am rage; because rape is about insecurity. Power. Misogyny. Control….

Many women will remember these torrid weeks, deep in our bones. We are springloaded with rage. There is power in our anger and we’ve been culturally conditioned to suppress it but this situation is tinder to the flame. We’ve had enough. The ghost of one of us – highly articulate and intelligent but thwarted by a burden she carried throughout her adult life – hangs over all of us. Kate, we will not forget.

Which this letter to the editor tries to deal with, also from today’s Oz:

Melissa Price recycles the unhelpful claim that it is men, in general, who need to “do better” to reduce sexual abuse (“Men hold the key to ensuring women are safe”, 19/3). Research resolutely points away from men in general but usefully pinpoints a dangerous subset.

Australia’s National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey is the world’s longest running (25 years) survey of its kind. In 2013, NCAS concluded that only “ … 4-6 per cent of Australians believe violence against women can be justified.” The 2017 NCAS report found Australians were even less likely to hold such views.

It is obviously unacceptable that 5 per cent — roughly one million Australians (the majority, men) — still believe violence against women is justifiable. Unfortunately, the most likely explanation combines criminology and psychiatry; the percentage of men with mental pathologies giving rise to violent personalities — which place them beyond reason — largely overlaps with the pattern of serious violence (including rape) against women, girls and boys.

The imperfectability of humankind is such that there will always be small numbers of men prone to acts of despicable violence. Regrettably, this means that women and girls must continue to take reasonable precautions to guard against them. Indeed, if we are to base our conduct in the best evidence, Ms Price’s understandable ambition that future generations of women are “confident to walk alone at night” must be seen as sadly unrealistic and unwise.

“The imperfectability of humandkind” of course includes women.

This is from The Oz today: Men hold the key to ensuring women are safe which is by Melissa Price who is the federal Minister for Defence Industry and the member for Durack in WA. She opens with a personal anecdote which I well understand:

Last weekend, as we [ie she and her “partner”] sat in our Geraldton home and shared our thoughts on the gender equality debate and the looming protests across the country, I told him something that — at least in that moment — caught him by surprise. “I am frightened to walk alone at night,” I told him. “And every time I have to do it, I hold my longest key in my hand, sticking out between my fingers. Just in case.”

Many (most?) women live in fear out beyond the household gate, and it is the men in their lives who must take on the major elements in mitigating the risks they face. This is as true today as it must have been way back in prehistoric times. She goes on to write:

Women across the country are rallying against sexual assault, discrimination and harassment. And rightly so. It’s why I joined thousands of women outside federal parliament on Monday. It’s time for things to change.

Rape has always been illegal everywhere and in every society. So what sort of change are we looking for here? These are the specifics I have been looking for since this debate began. And again, empty rhetoric with not a proposal in sight. Instead this:

Let me be clear — this is a bloke problem, not a woman problem.

What could be more empty than this?

We are driving change through the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children — a 12-year strategy that brings together the efforts of the commonwealth, state and territory governments to prevent and address domestic, family and sexual violence.

Last week, we launched the $18.8m third phase of the national campaign to reduce violence against women and their children, called Stop it at the Start.

These are just a snapshot of the measures we have put in place as a government, and are a significant step in the right direction. But we all know more will need to be done, both inside and outside the walls of parliament. It should start at school, where we must better educate young boys about respect for women to ensure they grow into men understanding what is acceptable, and what isn’t.

Really, that is it? You want more men to be aware that rape is illegal and wrong. So this is her big insight.

Too often we hear about the number of women who have been raped, rather than the number of men who have raped women. It is men who need to be better.

And her final word.

As a leader in the community, I am determined to help bring an end to the sexual violence and harassment too many women have had to endure. I want to help ensure future generations of women are confident to walk alone at night, and can leave that key in their handbag.

Maybe it’s good politics but it is a policy vacuum. Maybe we’ll change our mind in twelve years time.

In the meantime, let us turn to another woman who somehow seems to stand up to the hideous pressures that politics brings. Read this to find out part of what she has faced, but also read this which highlights some of the conclusions she has reached.

The fact is that the way evolution has worked its way through the millennia, men do everything they can to accommodate women. “Women and children first” was, and probably still is, the mantra in any emergency where lives are at risk. Men die so that women can survive and bring on the next generation. There is not necessarily a lot of gratitude that comes with the actions taken by men, but that is how it has always been.

Which brings me to this, which is hard not to take as a parody, but apparently it is real. ABC 7.30 anchor Leigh Sales’s honest words about sexism in Australia. Everything you read below is in quotes:

“I do think, from speaking to a lot of female friends and colleagues, there are also just what I would call minor little slights, that happen all the time and which constantly make you feel like the world is designed mostly for men to be in key positions.”

“When it happens individually it’s nothing, but when it happens all the time, taken together, it can be a lot.”

So what are these horrors she has had to endure?

As an example, she said wireless microphones often used during public speaking engagements were designed for men’s clothes, and required a sturdy lapel, a heavy belt and a coat to cover it up.

“I’m always made to feel a little bit inconvenient,” she said.

There were other examples as well — such as being made to feel annoying for needing to use the toilet and being told her male counterpart never had that need; and male colleagues setting up windy filming locations suitable for men with short hair, but not women with long hair.

“Nobody involved in any of these incidents do I consider sexist, or bad people, or anything of that nature. In isolation, (the incidents) are all totally minor,” Sales said.

“But it’s also the fact that all of these things can be immediately skewed to make me sound like the world’s biggest pain in the arse … It’s very easy for women in these situations to turn into the person who is ‘the problem’. When actually, the problem is that this is designed for men.”

Oh how she must suffer! But then there is this to add on to the rest: Now Chanel’s petition is leading a sex education revolution. I have to say that I find this story quite incredible and not charming in the least.

“She rang her father first, to give him a heads up. ‘He was at a party, and I said: “I have to tell you something. I’m about to do an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald. By the way, I got sexually assaulted when I was 13. Bye!” He was like: “What?” It was confronting for dad at first.'”

Was it the man who lived next door, her uncle or some fellow teenage lad who was trying to work out how to approach a young maid?

She believes there has been some tangible change: from the people who have told her they have understood, for the first time in their lives, that they experienced sexual assault and it wasn’t their fault.

How could they not have known that they had been sexually assaulted? But what I am most interested in is what ought to be done. I do not doubt that young women find the going more difficult than in my time, but I cannot picture what the rules are or should be, and who is supposed to enforce them.

So here is another vacuous bit of empty rhetoric with nothing there about what the rules should be. If Chanel was assaulted when she was thirteen but never mentioned anything to her father for more than a decade, seriously, what specifically does she want done? This will not help at all: Embed consent education in school curriculum, Liberal MP urges.

Dr Martin said education about protective behaviours should begin as soon as children started to talk, in an age-appropriate way such as reading a picture book like Tess Rowley’s Everybody’s Got A Bottom. Protective behaviours include teaching young children the proper names for body parts, what is private and how to respect and protect their bodies.

Relationship skills could also start being taught to preschool children through conversations about who their friends were, who they played with and what made a good friendship, she said. As children got older, this could evolve into assertiveness training, giving them the confidence to speak up against bullying or about other unhealthy relationships.

Consent means a girl gets to choose which boy she will pair off with, not that there will be no pairing off at all.

BTW Leigh and Chanel, if you were on The Titanic, would you get into the lifeboat first? I bet you would.

Feminism as in equal outcomes for men and women is a dead letter. This was the kind of feminism I was brought up on. And the reality has been that girls can do anything a boy can do once a boy has done it first and then shown them how. And even then, only a handful of girls will even be interested.

The feminism that works for me is where women should be free to attempt anything they like but should not be given an easier ride and must be held to the same standards as men. Second stage feminism argued that women were not given the opportunity to succeed. However true that might once have been it is true no longer.

But you know, in its own time, this was just as incredible: Oldest woven basket in the world found in Israel, dates back 10,000 years.

And 10,000 years from now?

Just came across this today which is an article published in 1920 by Winston Churchill. He used the term “International Jews” no doubt because he identified them with the Communist International. None of this is in the slightest way anti-semitic. And even a century later, it is an issue that has not gone away.

Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world. And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical. The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honourable and successful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia’s economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organisations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain.

International Jews In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world.

This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Terrorist Jews There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek — all Jews.

In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

“Protector of the Jews” Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people. Wherever General Denikin’s authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews. The Misses Healy, nieces of Mr. Tim Healy, relating their personal experiences in Kieff, have declared that to their knowledge on more than one occasion officers who committed offences against Jews were reduced to the ranks and sent out of the city to the front. But the hordes of brigands by whom the whole vast expanse of the Russian Empire is becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expense of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs.

The brigand Makhno, the hordes of Petlura and of Gregorieff, who signalised their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupefied, half-infuriated population an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms. The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated.

A Home for the Jews Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism. Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.

Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, page 5.