Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Yet more derangement around rape

It is more than three years since the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, decided to ditch its motto ‘Land of Rape and Honey’. That was how the prairie outpost had been known for 60 years, a consequence of the large amounts of canola produced in the region and the fact that they have lots of bees. But the town authorities now thought the slogan had a certain ominous, menacing air to it, so they replaced it with ‘Tisdale — Opportunity Grows Here’, which is entirely lacking in threat, interest and anything else you care to mention.

A year later the supermarket store Aldi was forced to change the name of a paint it was promoting from ‘Rape yellow’ to something else — probably ‘Bright yellow’, I don’t know. Sexual abuse campaigners had been outraged, you see, and apparently unable to accept that a word can have two meanings.

You can tell when an issue has been dangerously politicised by the screeching that arises whenever its name is mentioned, when people think they have ownership of the word and thus the narrative and you are not allowed to mention it any more, not even if you are referring to a noisome brassica related to the turnip, or rapum as it is known in Latin. When that happens, all sorts of derangements occur and the more deranged you are in kowtowing to the new frenzy, the better you’ll be liked by the campaigners.

That has certainly happened to the crime of rape which long ago joined the copious list of stuff you must never, ever make jokes about. The derangement began in the 1990s, predicated on the perhaps correct belief of feminist campaigners that the police were too often dismissive of female claims of rape and that there were both too few prosecutions and too few convictions.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in