The empire strikes back!
The British Empire, that is. Or, rather, some male British university students who got fed up with a requirement that they take "sexual consent classes" in which they were supposed to learn the poltically correct way to pursue romance so as to avoid accusations of rape from gender activists.
Brendan O'Neill reports for Reason magazine:
George Lawlor, a student at Warwick University, started a firestorm when he wrote a piece for a student newspaper called The Tab, headlined "Why I Don’t Need Consent Classes." Not only did he tell the "self-appointed teachers of consent" to "get off your fucking high horse"—even worse, in the eyes of the raunch-allergic feminists who staff Britain’s students’ unions, he posted a photo of himself holding a sign saying: "This is not what a rapist looks like."
Cue global media outrage. Pretty much every liberal broadsheet in Christendom asked, "Well, what DOES a rapist look like?," hinting that Lawlor, by virtue of the fact that he has XY chromosomes, does look like a rapist. A Guardian writer suggested every man in the world, including the Dalai Lama, should post photos of themselves holding a sign that says "This is what a rapist looks like." Because, yep, any man might be a rapist. Maybe every woman in the world should post a pic of themselves with a sign saying, "This is what someone who commits infanticide looks like"? No, best not — the women who do that are a tiny minority, as are the men who rape.
A few days later, another Warwick student, Jack Hadfield, announced that he, too, would not be attending campus consent classes. We are witnessing "the demonisation of men," he said, the promotion of the idea that "men are dangerous sex pests."
Then came The Tab’s poll on consent classes. Sure, readers of The Tab, Britain’s spunkiest student newspaper, which often raises a very arched eyebrow at the buzzkilling shenanigans of student unions, might not be completely representative. Yet it’s striking that of the 4,440 people who voted in its poll, 2,708 said they were against consent classes, with 1,732 in favour. That’s 61 percent who don’t think they need to be told how to have sex.
My question is: Why haven't American students staged a similar revolt against the yes-means-yes police? We're the ones, after all, who pioneered the idea of a revolution!