VICTIMS USURP STRONG WOMEN

IKNOW there are strong women in Australia. So why are our new female heroes so often passiveaggressive victims instead, competing to show off their trophy wounds? Why are these hero victims so determined to seem damaged and fragile, crying as if promised a candycoloured world where it rains only sugar?

EXAMPLE 1

LAST week, the University of NSW sent an email to staff and students warning of a sexual assault near the campus. Yes, the university was doing its best to keep everyone safe, but its email offered tips to help women be even safer, particularly at night.

“Walk to your destination with friends,” it suggested.

“Don’t walk with your head down looking at your phone”, and “keep valuables out of sight”.

Good tips. Even as a tall bloke, I do the same in some streets. There are bad people among us and always will be.

But to gender warriors, this was way too much reality. Way too much responsibility. Anna Hush, a UNSW staffer and director of End Rape on Campus Australia, protested that she’d been offended by this well-intentioned advice. “The email … is the latest in a long tradition of victim-blaming statements made by universities,” she complained. “These messages put the onus on potential victims to manage their behaviours, and thus suggests that they are responsible when they experience violence.” Community lawyer Fadak Alfayad agreed: “Here we go again with the victim blaming.” Seriously? So I guess these women don’t just refuse to look around them when entering a dark park, but likewise refuse to lock their homes or cars because that would be to blame themselves for being burgled. They must likewise complain when airlines check for bombs because it is victim-blaming that shifts responsibility from the terrorists not to blow the plane from the sky.

What world do such women live in? One where everyone must take responsibility for these women’s safety but themselves? One where a #MeToo hashtag will turn rapists into saints?

EXAMPLE 2

ONE strong woman I know, psychologist and author Bettina Arndt, this month started a speaking tour of campuses, at the invitation of Liberal students wanting to hear her research into the dodgy Human Rights Commission survey used by activists to claim universities have a “rape culture”.

I’m amazed anyone ever believed this survey’s improbable finding that 51 per cent of Australian university students were sexually harassed in a single year.

In fact, only 10 per cent of students responded to this online survey — they were presumably the most committed and political — and their allegations weren’t tested.

What’s more, those allegations included incidents said to have taken place off campus. And the most common complaint was merely of “inappropriate staring or leering”.

Yet socialists and feminists are so determined to believe that students face a rape epidemic that Arndt has faced an astonishing campaign to stop her from speaking.

At first, La Trobe University banned her. Then, Sydney University demanded its Liberal students pay nearly $500 for security before letting her come. Once on campus, Arndt and her audience faced bullying from Leftist protesters, many of them women.

At La Trobe, Arndt’s speech was drowned out by heckling, a fire alarm and banging on doors.

At Sydney, protesters blocked the entrance until riot police cleared them.

Why are female protesters so desperate to seem bigger victims than they are? Why insist on being too fragile to even let another woman express a contrary opinion?

EXAMPLE 3

FOR more than three weeks, female MPs from the federal Liberals’ Left have claimed that they, too, are victims of a bullying culture.

Lucy Gichuhi, Julia Banks, Kelly O’Dwyer, Julie Bishop and other MPs claim this bullying is “toxic” and, adds Bishop, could even involve “illegal” acts.

Reporters, particularly women on the ABC, have treated these MPs as hero victims, even though none of those MPs will publicly give a single example of how exactly they were bullied, let alone by whom.

In fact, Senator Gichuhi last week admitted she had not been bullied in Canberra, after all.

What makes these female politicians so keen to pose as victims?

And what makes female reporters so keen to believe them in the absence of any evidence?

Would Margaret Thatcher have sobbed and sighed like this?

Aah, Thatcher. Now there was a woman to admire. But when we do get her kind of Alpha female here — a Peta Credlin, say — how do many female opinion-makers and activists often respond?

By smearing, sneering, and belittling. It seems only victims are wanted now. Is the age of strong women dead?