Human nature is a strange wee beastie. Understanding how some women can be fooled by men promising fidelity or to protect them with their lives, just to win their trust/get into their pants, is almost as difficult a task, as conception while standing in a hammock!

If you want to go out to have fun/get plastered, you need to follow a few simple rules. Make sure you go with a friend, and have a fully charged phone and taxi fare.

Never drink from a glass brought to the table by a relative stranger, but rather ask for a bottle/can of your favorite tipple, and a clean glass.

Take both with you to your comfort break(s)! Well if either is sus? You can jettison the contents in an appropriate receptacle, without creating offense and don't forget to flush!

Because having a drink spiked takes seconds and stuff like rohypnol can make someone look like a two/one pot screamer, and paralytically drunk/fair game!

If you believe that casual sex is acceptable and you as a grown adult have a right to choose who you sleep with or sleep around?

Then if it's not on, it's not on! Carry a couple of emergency condoms in your purse, even if that makes you a slut in some judgemental eyes.

And if that's so, then those eyes belong to the sort of assholes who believe an intoxicated woman is fair game, as opposed to someone a fair dinkum friend would protect, even from herself. Almost as if she were, your very own kid sister or daughter!

And blokes, if you need "relief"? Try lady palmer and her five daughters, it's immeasurably safer! Err in haste, repent at leisure! Often every which way! STD's, an unwanted tin lid, and much worse!

I mean, you can't judge a book by the brightly colored glossy hard cover and you don't know where it's been. Or if it's a well planned, tender trap?

It might sound quaint and old fashioned, but makes even more sense today! If you want to keep it? Put a ring on it!
Alan B.

Thanks, Killarney; thanks, Alan.

The ever-present threat of being lumped, broke, with those 'tin lids' after making a commitment to some bloke, partly-sight-unseen, might make heterosexual marriage just that little bit more attractive for women, just a small insurance that the bloke won't piss off - not that it would stop any bloke if he was determined.

We've forgotten how much more vulnerable women used to be, without reliable contraception or the right to abortion AND no single-mother's benefit, a sort of Trifecta of discriminatory rules, and bad luck, for women. Yes, this has all changed since the 1960s. Which, to me, means that there is even less need for bourgeois marriage of any sort, especially for anybody who purports to be 'Left' and thereby devalues marriage per se. Come to think of it, half of my siblings and siblings-in-law are, or have been, in de facto relationships, they haven't bothered getting married at all. So it has even less purpose than it did in the 1960s.

So marriage isn't even the small insurance that it used to be for women. Except for those wanting church weddings, mainly for family tradition, there is little need to get married at all. So perhaps the notion of State-sponsored civil unions can safely be abandoned as an out-dated relic, leaving the churches to carry out weddings, i.e. traditional marriage, that bourgeois institution, alone, according to their quaint customs.

Joe

Killarney, "The thugs in question were not from the neighbourhood. In fact, they came from one of Brisbane's top private schools"

If you want to really raise the stakes it is very easy to come up with examples of youthful female bullies who could slice and dice those male brutes (and they would already have done a real job on the girls around them).

The girls and the mothers who model female thuggery to them will always win. Because girls, women bullies, act out consistently, while the males take advantage as it presents, opportunistic. Of course they are some males whose 'feminine side' is seemingly well developed. I reckon most of them found careers in law and politics. LO

Joe (Loudmouth),

Apologies, our posts crossed. However in a quick response to yours I imagine we are already living in a post-marriage Australia. Yes, along with destruction of 'traditional'(sic) family that is what the feminists were always looking for as a goal and yes, they won.

Now women have to reckon up the tab to see if it was all worth it. But at the same time they should know that there is no going back where the 'baby has been tossed out with the bath water' and yes, the experiment continues and is even ramped up where ordinary women and men allow the political elite their head. democracy, more to the point freedom of speech, needs constant vigilance and defending by everyone.

It is interesting for instance that feminists now war on the femininity of the breast while pretending to help women.

'Free the nipple' and the breast, 'equality' with men mantra, will culminate in a large reduction in the areas of the body that women can hold private. Now, I don't mind and say 'whatever'. But if my own daughter asks I'd be saying keep the mystique, the privacy, respect and the safety. Otherwise soon there will be men on public transport who know they can have a feel with impunity. And of course it could be their cultural inheritance to boot, so here comes the mob! Try getting that genie back into the bottle.

Sexual consent relies on the group, national, understanding and consensus on morality. Is that even possible in 'Progressive', multiculturalist Australia?

Hi Leoj,

Let's be honest - if a bloke can get it up, he's sober enough to know the difference between a drunken woman/girl and a sober one, and the consequences of trying to have his way with someone who isn't really able to say yes or no.

Clearly, from many of the above comments, we're all a lot more aware of each others' rights now than fifty years ago. Relationships are better understood, rights are (arguably?) better protected, safeguards like marriage are less salient, and more likely for sentimental value than added insurance for the woman.

Obviously, even if State instrumentalities eventually scrap the notion of 'civil unions', the churches would still be able to celebrate marriages as they perceive them separate from the State, much like Mass, and thereby maintain the hard-fought separation of Church and State.

So, how do you reckon I'll be voting in the plebiscite ?

Joe

Joe:

"Relationships are better understood, rights are (arguably?) better protected, safeguards like marriage are less salient, and more likely for sentimental value than added insurance for the woman."

Which shows what a complete and utter waste of time and money the whole SSM push has been. Governments pouring millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain to satisfy some immature sentiment. If it is sentiment for one then it is sentiment for all regardless of your 'sexuality'.