What is Rape?

The front page of today's Metro screams "One in 4 women 'is rape victim'" based on a report from Havens.

This is clearly a shocking figure, and it's clearly intended that way, but is it actually meaningful? Have 25% of women been forced down an alley at knifepoint and abused? No. It turns out that the definition of rape they're using is "having sex when they did not want to".

So, yeah, "Not tonight dear, I've got a headache. Oh, go on then..." is rape. Who knew? Not feeling horny makes you a rape victim. Wonderful. So a substantial number of men will have been raped, too, when their wives were in the mood but they weren't.

Sometimes people have to do things they're not keen on, but which mean a great deal to someone else. It's hard work, and people are not entitled to happiness or effortless utopian relationships.

Why are these morons conflating a heinous life-destroying crime with harmless relationship obligations?

This sort of idiocy is why rape convictions are so "low" - the term has been devalued to the point where any doubt or remorse can count as "an offence", causing the number of reports to explode, but the number of actual rapes prosecuted (substantially all of them) is about the same. And that number is very low because the vast majority of the human race finds rape abhorrent.

- KoW

Old Professions

Last week, Harriet Harman insisted that a foreign government take action against a website that's legal both in its jurisdiction and ours.

As far as I'm aware, prostitution is still legal in the UK. Having an opinion about a service most definitely is! And yet here we have one of the most powerful politicians in the country creating an international incident over something she personally dislikes, on the flimsiest of excuses (very few prostitutes are trafficked...).

Tom Miller, Labour PPC for Woking, has suggested that since the site isn't doing anything wrong and is in a foreign jurisdiction, Ms Harman should take matters into her own hands with an illegal (in both jurisdictions) Denial of Service attack. WTF? Is that not Hate Speech?

I wonder how long before the Internet Watch Foundation is either replaced, or leant-on, to block access to Politically Undesirable sites such as PunterNet. As most ISPs in the UK - covering something like 98% of users - accept the IWF blacklist, that would be a rather trivial step... and yet another towards 1984.

Here's a radical notion: websites don't create demand for prostitutes.

A review site simply makes the existing market more efficient by providing a basis for price information, and might even reduce consumption by adjusting the supply curve. Not that I expect our business-illiterate government to understand that argument...

(Hat tip to Dizzy, for Tom Miller's imbecilic contribution to the debate)

- KoW