Let's Talk About Sexual Assault.

Suddenly the whole world has been sexually assaulted. Demons from the past are returning to the present to reign down retribution upon men in their late middle ages whom behaved inappropriately back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Touched a knee unsolicited? Guilty! Spoken a word of a risqué nature? Guilty! Career suicide mate. Should have thought about the consequences when you were, err, too young and stupid to think about the consequences. Now before the moronic far left screams out in outrage, be clear that I am in no way underplaying how harassment and unwanted sexual attention can cause recipients real distress. These feelings are real. They are valid. We should listen to every report made. But, we do need to have something close to a sensible attitude. For my part, when I worked as a barman in a pub I had one instance of a former school secretary reaching up under a kilt I was wearing and going in for a grope. She settled for a squeeze of my arse as things turned out, and I laughed it off. It was New Year’s Eve and fancy dress and she was a bit pissed. No biggie. Technically a sexual assault, but even then as a young male in my 20’s I could discern the difference between a drunken moment of ill judgement and a genuine predatory intent. And this is what I’m getting at. There is, whether we want to admit it or not, a sliding scale when it comes to sexual offences, and I am certain that the vast majority of females have experience that would testify to this. And God knows we need to cultivate a climate in which men respect and honour women, respecting personal space and looking beyond the sexual. I’m for this. I consider it critical to societal development. I just want us to be careful that we do not allow histrionics to blur the lines between genuine predatory behaviour and lapses of judgement from otherwise decent people. Can’t we at least acknowledge this might be a discussion worth having? I think men do need to change, and I think we’ve had a lot to answer for down the aeons. We’ve cultivated and some might say nourished an imbalance in which women have been repressed terribly. This is self-harm to be sure; to actively hamstring an entire gender achieves nothing. I want empowered women, confident women. Women who don’t have to think about glass ceilings or concern themselves with the behaviour of idiots. My concern with this particular trend is that it is at the mercy of the current news cycle, which will ramp it up to ten and seek to convince us all that every man is a sexual deviant, that none of us can effectively triage our impulses. Most of us aren’t, you know. We’re really not. We’re too caught up thinking about inane nonsense and probably spend less time thinking about sex than you might imagine. You know something, even as I write this I know, just bloody know that some people will perceive me as insensitive, unaware of the deep suffering my gender had wrought upon the women of the world. And to a degree they might be right. I cannot walk your road, and I can glimpse your experiences only through a glass darkly. Forgive me, but I can do nothing to rectify this. What I can do, and what I try to do in most situations is to tread the sensible middle ground. I acknowledge the problem but I won’t escalate it to the levels of hysteria we currently seem to want to. It’s bad, but it isn’t apocalyptic. Change is needed, but it won’t be an overnight thing. Culture and the zeitgeist are often a beast slow to revise old habits. I want a respectful dialogue about this, a balanced and reasoned discourse. Let’s just not be bewildered by the headlines, for that way madness lies.