Twisty out of form?

I have to say, Twisty, that I'm a little disappointed. You have long been the most interesting of feminists as you are so fearless in drawing out the logic of liberal politics. No unprincipled exceptions for you. No concern to be pragmatic either. Pure theory applied to the lives of men and women.

And then you went and wrote a post on your "consent scheme". And showed what you're really about.

What is your consent scheme? You don't like the existing law in which a woman must prove that she did not consent to sex for a charge of rape to be upheld. You suggest the following alternative:

According to my scheme, women would abide in a persistent legal condition of not having given consent to sex. Conversely, men ... would abide in a persistent legal state of pre-rape.

Women can still have all the sex they want; if they adjudge that their dude hasn’t raped them, all they have to do is not call the cops.

But if, at any time during the course of the proceedings ... or if, in three hours or three days or, perhaps in the case of childhood abuse, in 13 years it begins to dawn on her that she has been badly used by an opportunistic predator, she has simply to make a call.

Presto! The dude is already a rapist, because, legally, consent never existed.

The cessation of rape would be immediate. Men would begin aligning their boinking protocols along non-barbaric lines in a hurry. It would suddenly be in their best interest to make damn sure that nothing in their behavior ... would cause their partner to believe she has been abused.

How to explain this? It does relate somewhat to patriarchy theory. This is the idea that society has been organised to uphold the unearned privilege of men as a class over oppressed women. Therefore violence against women is thought to be systemic: a form of social control enacted by men in general rather than a specific crime perpetrated by individual men.

If you think that rape is systemic, then you are more likely to favour the kind of radical proposal outlined by Twisty.

But this time I don't think it really has to do with intellectual principles taken to the nth degree. Twisty's proposal is "utopian" in another way: as a means of legalising the control of men by women. It is a feminist assertion of power over men.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Twisty should cast about for such a scheme. Traditionally women gained a measure of power in their relationships with men through marriage and family; a woman could ask things of a man who loved her and who was committed to his role as a husband.

For (self-described) spinster radical feminists like Twisty, though, this kind of leverage over men is not an option. They cannot make claims on men through personal relationships, so they have to use more formal means to assert power over men.

Twisty is none too subtle in her strategy; her scheme would create a tremendous fallout between the sexes. It would be yet another civilisational blow, something which won't worry Twisty as she identifies her society as being an immoral patriarchy.

Twisty, I would rather you kept writing according to your intellectual principles, no matter how misguided I hold those principles to be. It's a much more useful, interesting and admirable exercise than confessing to unwieldy ambitions for power and control over men.