Ginx "OLO is not-IS NOT:- currently a forum that is female friendly. I made a comment about female members 'circling the wagons', which has already been thrown back at me,-but I meant exactly what I said.

If we defended from the female prospective we were roundly condemned!
Does that sound familiar?"

That's hardly consistant with your rejection of Foxy's calls for posters to moderate their own behaviour or you response to me in defence of Foxy's position
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2718#61979

There are posters who are anti-feminist, some are quite prolific but they are few. There are others of us who disagree with extremist positions and or positions which would seem to blatently sexist.

- It's not anti-female to suggests that a woman's right to say "yes" is as vital as her right to say "no".

- It's not anti-female to support the idea that women are as capable of making good and bad choices as men.

- It's not anti-female to oppose the dilution of terms such as victim and assault.

Despite your allegations very few of those with a different view to you have condemmed the woman involved, we don't think a crime was committed just poor personal choices by all involved. The crime has occurred since, the attempts to destroy the lives of the individuals involved.

R0bert

*OLO is not-IS NOT:- currently a forum that is female friendly. I made a comment about female members 'circling the wagons', which has already been thrown back at me,-but I meant exactly what I said.*

Now now Ginxy, there you go, playing the "I am a grlll, so I am a
victim" thinggy. Sorry, no tears for Ginxy lol. Go on admit it,
you were right at the front of the queue when it came to hurling
abuse around, calling Belly and others names etc. You seemingly
enjoyed it, I personally have no problem with a bit of light hearted
banter, a bit of mud slinging, all meant in good humour.

Yup, it was me who gave you a hard time about your circling wagons,
I thought it was quite amusing.

Yup, admit it, you were outreasoned fairly and squarely.

Perhaps all this is a clever female tactic. When you are losing,
you do the tearjerker job about being a victim, women are known for
their acting talents and false tears are part of it.

Very clever Ginxy, but it won't work this time!

Robert-: Nothing that I’ve seen of this case suggests that her expressed wishes were ignored.

Something I saw and heard Matthew Johns say on the news made me suspicious though,

“I APOLOGISE TO CLAIRE FOR ALL THE OTHER PLAYERS IN THE ROOM”

How Noble of him.

Taken another way that could also mean I apologise to you Claire because you didn’t know all the other players were going to be in the room.

I think this girl was set up by these football players even to the point of taking her home so that it would look less like rape if a complaint was made. They all knew damm well that it would be her word against 11 of them.

I wonder if they’ve got away with this before?

The first reaction in a crisis is often a flat emotional state, this is shock. Could be why the girl didn’t protest. It is a hollywood fantasy that people always scream and cry when faced with immanent danger, makes for more action on the screen

Firesnake

Your post brings up a lot of issues surrounding victimhood, and highlights many aspects of our society’s love/hate affair with victims themselves.

Some states of victimhood challenge the social power hierarchy, e.g. injustices committed against Aboriginal people – while others entrench it, e.g. young men who’ve died in past wars. A lot of shame attaches itself to the former, while a lot of idealisation attaches to the latter.

Some victims are easy to define, e.g. children sexually abused by adults, because the power hierarchy is clearly delineated. Others are less easy to define, e.g. spousal abuse, because the power hierarchy between two adults living together is less clear.

Enter the litigation industry and the media, who make massive profits from the victim industry … and the whole issue of victimhood can descend into mawkishness, exploitation and even farce.

On a personal level, I don’t think that being a victim and taking responsibility for one’s own risks and choices are mutually exclusive. Just because someone took a certain risk and paid a terrible price does not make them any less a victim – especially if the price they paid was due to factors beyond their control.

To me, the right to access feelings like despair and outrage when you are damaged by life’s predators or random acts is essential to the healing process. Unfortunately, because of the stigma that surrounds some types of victimhood, many people are denied that access.

Anyway, thanks for an interesting post.

Well said SJF

I am disappointed that a number of OLO posters see women only as predators on men who can't help themselves when offered sex, to the point where any consideration for the "predatory" women, who apparently should know that if they choose to sleep with a sportsman that includes the entire team. The majority of men can and do have self control - why make exceptions for the men who quite deliberately ignore this?

It is the same old, same old:

1. She should not have been drinking
2. She should not have been flirting
3. She should not have have wanted to have sex
4. She should have known in advance what would happen
5. She is to blame for male behaviour.

Well, "she" certainly made a mistake but in the blame game there are other parties involved; the men who thought it acceptable to enter the room where "she" and Johns were.

We, men and women are responsible for our actions - not just women. As I have said before and was surprised to note that Yabby said this on another thread: we live in a sexually repressed society, there is insufficient education for both girls and boys. This is why there is such confusion between the work of Henson and straight out porn.

Until all women have complete self esteem in themselves they will continue to be preyed upon by some men who have believe that women are to be taken rather than respected.

We can lay the blame on many: women, men, media - but labels are irrelevant, we - all of us owe it to our children to teach them about one of the most fundamental drives of humans beings - our sexuality.

Antiseptic

'It's nice that you've made it perfectly clear that you see feminism as something to be imposed on a community, regardless of the wishes of the community.'

That is the complete REVERSE of the point I made. So, in that case, I will just reverse everything else you said to me.

Ginx

I strongly relate to what you say about the 'OLO Boys Club’.

While they love to get all hoity-toity about women ‘being victims’, this doesn’t stop a lot of these guys from churning out their own 10-hankie weepies about being victims of ex-wives from hell, female-biased divorce settlements, frivolous DVOs, heart attacks at 50, Gallipoli, the Femonazi menace, misandry, female dishonesty (an Antiseptic fave) and a lack of men’s shelters (and I don’t mean garden sheds).

Although the gender (and other) articles on OLO are fairly eclectic, the commentary section is all too frequently dominated by a small band of gender-conservative, rhetorically obnoxious men [sic], who seem to have an extraordinary amount of time and stamina to post and post and post and post and post … thus scoring a kind of last man [sic] standing victory.

Resistance is futile. For anyone who takes them on, expect a slow death by OLO-posting exhaustion or exasperation – whichever comes first. However, along the way, you can marvel at the sheer capacity of these posters to obfuscate, misrepresent, paranoid-project, distort, demonise, derail and generally dysfunctionalise everything in their path. (If ‘dysfunctionalise’ wasn’t a word before, it is now).

As they say in the classics … Don’t let the you-know-whats get you down.