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Sunday Star Times
July 14 1996
Women know they must say no, no matter what
by Frank Haden
What Justice Morris said in that wildly misreported New Plymouth rape case
was 100% correct. The world would indeed be a strange place if every man
proposing sex stopped the first time the woman said no. The human race would
never have got started.
In the New Plymouth case, there never was a rape, as the jury quickly found
out from the evidence. But Justice Morris should have known that people with
axes to grind would quote him out of context to make it appear he had said
something he hadn't. Every shrieking virago in the pressure groups and on the
radio stations seized the chance to make political capital out of
misrepresenting him.
He should have realised that such a remark from the High Court bench would be
taken by potential rapists as endorsement of their attitude that women NEVER
mean no when they say no. It's not what he said, but it's what they would
convince themselves he said.
I have conducted exhaustive inquiries, and I have yet to find one man who has
ever stopped the first time a woman says no. The reason is simple: We train
our young women from puberty that they must always say no when first asked,
never mind their real feelings.
Every girl hears this from her mother, her aunts, her sisters: "Never
let him do anything the first time, otherwise he will think you are cheap. He
won't respect you if he thinks you are easy. He will think you have done it
with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the neighbourhood, and he won't want to
marry a girl who has been with a lot of men."
The first rule a girl learns from her friends when she starts her social life
is blunt: "Never have sex on the first date." And she has to be
pretty thick not to work out that the ban applies only to the first attempts
to get them into bed, the back seat or the long grass. Once she has proved to
the boy that she is not "easy", she is free to make up her own
mind.
Young men are well aware of all this. They know what the girls have been
told. They know they are expected to survive an obstacle course of rejections
if they want the girl to consent eventually.
So they discount the first indignant "No!", and if necessary the
second and the third, because they know that fortune favours the brave,
nothing ventured means nothing won, who dares wins and all the other popular
sayings that humans have thought up to encourage enterprise in the bedroom as
well as on the battlefield.
Justice Morris has been warned off, and probably will be more circumspect in
future. But he has done a valuable service by spotlighting the fatuity of the
feminists' creed that a woman's no always means no.
It often does mean a firm and intractable no, but a man has no way of finding
out if he runs off the course at the first hurdle. He'll find out only if he
pursues his goal -- gently, persuasively and considerately, but nevertheless
persistently.
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ANYWAY, we shouldn't get too worried about Justice Morris's indiscretion,
when there are far more important judicial errors to concern us.
An exhaustive new investigation into the mistakes that led to Peter Ellis
being imprisoned for crimes he could not have committed, in the infamous
creche sex abuse trial, is due to hit the streets in Christchurch,
accompanied by expensive publicity, within days.
It is expected to lead to the setting up of a Peter Ellis Trust, and a Privy
Council appeal against the Appeal Court's inexplicable refusal to overturn
the trial jury's manifestly wrong verdict.
The continued incarceration of Ellis ranks with the greatest miscarriages of
justice ever perpetrated.
In the Arthur Allan Thomas case there was at least a chance that he killed
the Crewes; in the Ellis case, there was no possibility that he committed the
bizarre catalogue of crimes against those sadly misdirected children.
The impact of the investigation will be greatly strengthened by the
revelation that of a group of 30 five-year-olds who had been secretly
videotaped in the care of a male volunteer in Hamilton, almost all made up
imaginary tales when asked what had occurred.
That's what children of three, four and five will do at the drop of a hat,
and it is time we ordered social workers, counsellors and all the rest of the
Satanic ritual sex abuse claque to stop saying that children always tell the
truth.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.
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