Friday, February 22, 2013

Another round of feminist rape law reform in Norway

Criminalizing sexuality, and particularly male sexuality, is the most salient aspect of feminism, in my view. All the other feminist shenanigans pale in comparison because criminalization represents direct, institutionalized violence against men. Witnessing ever more hateful and draconian legislative attacks on sexuality is the primary reason behind my radicalization into an MRA. It has reached the point where even the mainstream media these days report the profound impact of feminist sex law reform. In 1999, sex with very drunk or unconscious women was defined in Norway as a relatively minor crime of sexual exploitation and punished by an average of 4 months in prison. Today the same phenomenon is called "rape" and the usual sentence is 4 years.

And that's just one example from a long list of legal reforms during the past 13 years which includes criminalizing negligent rape (abolishing mens rea), criminalizing johns (but not whores), the introduction of a grooming law and associated police stings, criminalizing bestiality, escalating mandatory sentencing, and so on. But despite these extreme advances in misandry, feminists are far from satisfied with the status quo. Now, for the fourth time since 2000, here we go again with another major round of feminist-driven sex law reform. Definitions and penalties for various sex crimes ranging from stalking to rape are set to escalate, in order to capture even more of male behavior and increase the prison population. Sex with anyone under 14 is now categorically to be defined as "rape," shamelessly instituting a deliberate lie in order to demonize men further. A brand new category of "abuse" of 16 to 17-year-olds will also be invented which effectively raises the age of consent to 18 if only the pigs find a pretext for claiming the girl was in a "vulnerable life situation" -- which can mean practically anything they want it to mean. The statute of limitations for sexual offenses against minors is proposed abolished, and retroactively so, so as to prosecute old men for alleged sex crimes many decades in the past. And bizarrely, they want to redefine masturbation to "intercourse" in order to apply the full force of rape law to men who persuade girls to perform sexual acts on themselves. The government has even managed to propose expanding the scope of child pornography law, which is already so absurdly broad that images of adult women who look young are covered, as are drawings and texts which sexualize "children" under 18. This is not enough for the feminists, so now even more ways to incriminate men for "child pornography" are set to be invented.

All the proposed laws can be found here, and now the NGOs and various interest groups will have their say (and notice they are pretty much all feminist groups -- notorious feminists like Ottar are on the list while MRAs are absent), before legislators decide on the final version.

Out of all this hate the highlight is, as usual, the definition of rape. The legal concept of rape has always been the most central concern of feminists, and now the law is officially intended to match the hate-propaganda promulgated by Amnesty International, the UN and other hate groups against men. The spiteful lobbying of these groups really does pay off, and the changes are happening astoundingly fast. Up until as late as 2000, rape law was still fairly sane in the Norwegian Penal Code. This is a facsimile of rape law (§192) before all the recent reforms:

"Den som ved vold eller ved å fremkalle frykt for noens liv eller helse tvinger noen til utuktig omgang..." -- This defines rape as sex coerced by violence or serious threats, which is a reasonable definition. Simple lack of consent does not make it rape and neither does a trivial threat. The woman needs to be made to fear for her life or health. This definition is also consistent with Common Law ("Carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will") and even with evolutionary psychology (“Human copulation resisted by the victim to the best of her ability unless such resistance would probably result in death or serious injury to her or others she commonly protects” is the definition used by Thornhill & Palmer in A Natural History of Rape). If you dilute the definition to include lower levels of sexual coercion (such as threatening to break up a relationship or start a rumor about a woman), then "rape" ceases to be a heinous crime and pretending we are dealing with the same phenomenon is dishonest.

Yet this is precisely what the feminists have done and, perversely, they have escalated the punishment extremely at the same time as expanding the definition to include trivial levels of sexual coercion. As of 2000 and onwards, any kind of threatening behavior will do, and so will unconsciousness on the part of the woman (which in practice usually means she had sex drunk and later regrets it).

And still, this is not enough. The most vaunted reform in the proposed changes is now to remove the requirement of force/threat entirely, and define rape in terms of simple lack of consent. In practice this means the woman is to be regarded the same way as the law currently treats unconscious women -- even if she is completely sober and feels no fear and is fully able to resist or flee at no risk, she shall not be bothered to do so, because holding women responsible for their actions under any circumstances at all is too much to ask in the current political climate.

If this definition passes, Norwegian rape law will be brought up to the level of the most flagrantly hateful rape laws in the world, such as the Sexual Offences Act of 2003 in the UK. English law went all the way ten years ago and defined rape as intentional penetration of a vagina without consent, and consent is defined as agreeing by choice with the freedom and capacity to make that choice. Violence or coercion does not enter into the definition at all. I have pointed out this trend before as well as the fact that courts tend to convict men according to this radical feminist definition throughout Europe regardless of the letter of the law. In Norway the courts have already routinely convicted men for "rape" without coercion for twelve years now, beyond what the law actually says, as the judges themselves admit. This legal reform is thus more a matter of harmonizing the letter of the law with practice and precedent, but it nonetheless represents a profound conceptual shift in what the feminist state considers to be rape, paving the way for a renewed deluge of accusations against men who will now have even less room to defend themselves.

I would encourage all Norwegians to watch this space for the statements of the interest groups. My regular readers probably know better, but I know a lot of men support NGOs like Amnesty and Save the Children. Do yourself a favor and read the statements from these organizations as they appear and decide if you really want to support such brazen hatred against yourself. I know there are no political parties we can vote for who don't support misandrist sex laws, but you don't need to fund the lobbying for these laws by the odious scumbags in Amnesty and the like also, now do you?