The Crumbling Cornerstone Part 2: Mental Avoidances

Quite a few prominent and semi-prominent persons have been opining about the “marriage strike:” the colloquial term that refers to the declining occurrence of traditional marriage in the United States. A significant amount of the attention comes from Dr. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist and opinion writer for PJ Media, whose book Men on Strike is the current touchstone of the debate. Dr. Helen recently conducted a brief panel discussion of the subject with three other PJ Media luminaries. The range of relevant ideas the group covered was impressive, both for what was addressed and for what the group seemed determined to avoid addressing.

What’s that you say? What was the unaddressed subject? Why, rape, of course. Specifically, the new plague of accusations of rape being leveled against thousands of men, particularly male college students.

Though it isn’t much discussed, that plague of accusations has violated the bedrooms of married American men as well.

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If you’re unfamiliar with the plight of Columbia University student Paul Nungesser, have a little background:

Paul Nungesser and Emma Sulkowicz met during freshman orientation in the fall of 2011, and by the end of their first year of college, they were what you might call friends with benefits. They had sex twice, as well as frequent “sleepovers,” always hugged each other and were close confidants.

The second time they had sex, the two agree, it began consensually. But then their stories diverge. As Young writes, “According to Sulkowicz, he suddenly and brutally assaulted her, then picked up his clothes and left without a word, leaving her stunned and shattered on the bed. According to Nungesser, they briefly engaged in anal intercourse by mutual agreement, then went on to engage in other sexual activity and fell asleep. He says that he woke up early in the morning and went back to his own room while Sulkowicz was still sleeping.”

But two days after this alleged attack, he invited her to come to a party, and she responded affirmatively, adding that the two should have a “paul-emma chill sesh.” A couple weeks later on Facebook, Sulkowicz wrote to Nungesser, “I want to see yoyououoyou.”

There are six pages’ worth of back-and-forth Facebook messages between the two, which Sulkowicz has confirmed are real and not redacted in any way.

Whatever else you can say about social media these days, it has made it awfully hard for women to change their minds about the nature of a sexual encounter from months earlier.

To make a long and ugly story short, Sulkowicz subsequently accused Nungesser of raping her. At least three other Columbia students subsequently filed comparable accusations against the young German student. All those accusations were filed with the university; none went to the judicial authorities. The university investigated and cleared Nungesser unconditionally, despite the low “preponderance of the evidence” standard it maintains about such accusations.

But Sulkowicz wasn’t finished. She took to toting her mattress around the campus with her, as a form of “protest.” Nungesser was held by much of the rest of the university student community to be guilty of rape despite having been cleared, and despite Sulkowicz’s decision not to file criminal charges against him.

These days, the accusation of rape constitutes “proof” in far too many minds.

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If you have an elephant’s memory, you might recall the 1978 case of John and Greta Rideout of Salem, Oregon. On October 10 of that year, Greta accused her husband John of raping her: a crime under recently revised Oregon law. Though John was found not guilty of the charge by the trial jury, the incident became a spark for a new front of the feminist movement: against the supposed problem of “marital rape:” the husband forcibly raping his unwilling wife. Marital rape was briefly a cause celebre, though in recent years it has received little air time and few column-inches.

That it no longer gets a lot of media attention doesn’t mean wives have ceased to level the charge against their husbands. It appears with fair frequency in women’s divorce filings, as do other allegations of sexual misbehavior inside the marriage. (Consider the case of Jack and Jeri Ryan, which exploded during Barack Obama’s campaign for United States Senator from Illinois.) Family Court judges nearly always treat such allegations as true without a requirement for substantiation.

Stephen Baskerville’s excellent book Taken Into Custody describes the prevalent guilty-by-accusation mindset in the social-welfare bureaucracies and among those who work in the Family Courts. Such accusations frequently become the basis for sole custody awards, punitive property settlements, and alimony awards.

The hazards of intramarital sex have become a major disincentive to men thinking of matrimony. Yet that was never mentioned during Dr. Helen’s panel discussion.

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Under the guilty-by-accusation standard, which prevails in far too many minds and is reinforced by far too many media outlets and organs of opinion, no man is safe. Hearken to Dalrock on this subject:

In the wake of mattress carrying Emma Sulkowicz’s claim of rape falling apart, Emma Gray at the Huffington Post has created a chart to detail what kinds of situations would indicate that a man accused of rape should not be presumed guilty.

Outraged yet? How about you guys thinking of “popping the question” to your beloved? Dalrock makes his assessment in the starkest of terms:

Based on this, I would say the only way to not be presumed guilty of rape is to either not be accused, or not exist.

You simply have to have a gander at the Washington Post article Dalrock links. The Post might be reliably left-liberal on its op-ed page, but its reporters continue to do journalism as journalism is supposed to be done, at least some of the time. The same cannot be said for Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who strove to whip the fictitious rape into a major media frenzy.

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Extramarital sex has long been regarded as possessing particular hazards for men. Today, many of those same hazards pertain to intramarital sex, including the possibility of being accused of heinous deeds one never committed. If such accusations are treated as true despite the absence of any evidence to that effect, they can destroy a man’s entire life even if a trial court exonerates him.

If you need a punch line for this farce, consider that under the guilty-until-proven-innocent mindset, the accusation stands apart from any need for physical contact between the accuser and the accused. If he and she were ever at all proximate – that is, unless he was never anywhere near her – gender-war feminists and their media allies will treat such an accusation as plausible, grounds for smearing him indelibly.

Marriage? That’s like baring his throat to a woman, entirely on the basis of his judgment of her character. How often have you been wrong about the character of a member of the opposite sex? Given all the above, the great wonder of our time is that there are any men still willing to talk to women, much less date, court, or marry them. But this is seldom discussed by persons concerned with the dwindling of American marriages.

The crumbling of the cornerstone of American society continues apace.