I love England but I am saddened by her moral decline.

Great speech.

Who benefits from blaming women and girls for male sexual violence committed against them? Not women and girls but males and of course stating the obvious always raises ‘the hackles of men’ who believe they must never ever be held accountable for their crimes committed against women and/or for condoning/justifying/minimalising/denying the fact that it is 99.9% males who are the ones continuing to commit sexual violence against women and girls and these males know their likelihood of being prosecuted, let alone convicted by a jury which believes these women-hating lies are zero.

If these misogynistic women-hating lies were finally to be dismissed as lies this would mean men could no longer claim ‘it was a miscommunication;’ ‘she was sexually provocative;’ ‘she didn’t say no so obviously she was “consenting.” Instead male behaviour and male belief in their innate pseudo right of sexual access to any female would no longer be tolerated and the male rapist’s (s) view would not be accepted as ‘the definitive truth’ because male supremacy claims ‘women and children are innate liars!’

The claims made by those male rape apologists on the BBC Question Time are not new because when the issue of father/daughter rape was once again publicly raised by radical feminists in the 1970′s there was an immediate outcry the female victims are liars and female children supposedly ‘seduce their innocent fathers.’ The aim then as it is now was to ensure the focus was never on the male perpetrators and their actions, but rather to blame and discredit the female victims. Male domination over women and girls is never ever totally 100% maintained and that is why men and male supremacist system has to engage in constant propaganda demonising women and girls and thereby ensuring male accountability continues to remain ‘out of sight and out of mind.’

I don’t like the use of ‘bigot’ in feminism. I feel like it often gets used in a silencing way.

The point is that the Tory party doesn’t care what the rest of us think about them as long as they are winning. Arrogance and misogyny are not a liability per se in the Tory party (in fact it’s the norm) but the Tory hierarchy will turn on Cameron when he’s seen to be a liability to their continued hold on power (cf. the fall of Thatcher). If Cameron can turn things around for the Tories they’ll keep him, if he fails they’ll replace him, and probably give that bastion of political correctness Boris Johnson a go.

The court came to disparate verdicts because the man not convicted is the one whom the drunken woman chose to accompany back to his hotel room; the jury decided that her actions in accompanying him back were enough that, in his drunken state, the acquitted man could reasonably have believed that she consented to sex.

The convicted rapist comes into the picture later – he was invited in by the other man involved, and assured by his male friend, not the woman, that he would be OK to have sex with her.

The difference that the jury picked up on is that the acquitted man could point to a variety of actions on the part of the woman (such as coming back to his hotel room with him having been invited there for sex) that indicated some degree of consent, and given the drunkenness of all parties, those actions created a reasonable argument that she had consented to sex with him at the time, regardless of whether she felt violated by him in the light of sobriety. As a result, the jury decided to find him not guilty.

On the other hand, Ched Evans, when trying to argue that he had a reasonable belief that she consented, could only point to statements made by his friend. He could not point to actions on her part that indicated consent; given this, the guilty verdict was inevitable.

Turning it round a bit, and on the assumption that you’re male – if you go home with a woman, and have sex with her, then fall asleep, does she have the right to tell her friend that it’s OK for him to penetrate you? That’s the analogous situation that Ched was trying to argue would be acceptable; given that I would consider the male friend to be raping me in that situation, I can understand why the jury found Ched guilty.

For what it’s worth (probably not a lot), I think it’s probably true that for every hate-filled, twisted comment coming from some mysteriously damaged, ignorant individuals hovering in cyberspace, there are several other people who have had a positive reaction that gets drowned out in the idiotic cacophony of reactionary spite. It seems to be the reality that people are more likely to be loud and boisterous when they feel hateful or angry than when they feel supportive, receptive and friendly.

I don’t know what can be done to end the culture of violence towards women online and off, other than for members of the online community — male and female — to call people out on their comments (at least public comments) and not ignore them, because by ignoring them they are being granted a type of legitimacy and given space to grow roots and become further entrenched.