Bettina Arndt and I were at the Australian National University together, 1969-72. She did Science, I did Economics (where I studied the texts of her father economics professor Heinz Arndt).
I headed off to Europe then China. She headed to Sydney and a storied career in feminist publishing. She was brave then. She’s brave now. Fighting the demonisation of young men at universities throughout Australia. It’s not popular to fight in the men’s corner. For which, you can imagine, she gets hammered by the bien pensants of the Left. For them the demonisation either doesn’t exist, or the ends justify the means; the being to crush the “campus rape crisis” that Bettina shows is more imaginary than real; the means being to demonise young men.
As an aside: I remember my days at Uni back in those late sixties. It was totally what they say: sex, drugs and rock & roll. It was all pretty open. I lived a year on campus and two years in a student house right nearby the Uni. Here’s the thing (which I didn’t think about at the time): if there had been any rape on campus we would have heard of it. We were pretty plugged in. Our place, Elder St, was the place people dropped in. Do we think if there’s been rapes in campus, let alone an “epidemic” of rape, we’d not have known about it? Of course not. We would have known. I’m not saying there was none, or that there is nine; that would be ridiculous. But our experience and the data, as Bettina unpicks it, do not support the hysteria.
/Snip:
What does it say about our country that a student writing to me doesn’t dare give his name for fear his letter could be traced back to him?
Concerned Student wrote to me last month after being asked to complete the National Student Safety Survey, which has just been distributed to over 400,000 random students on our campuses:
“As I was completing the survey, I was shocked and alarmed at how the survey had seemingly been deliberately constructed in a way likely to produce results that will exaggerate perceived rates of sexual violence on campus and thereby distort and manipulate public opinion and policy. The authors have applied definitions of sexual assault and harassment that are so broad they conflate normal interactions between men and women with heinous and brutal acts of violence. This is an injustice to survivors.” [Read more…]
