ANOTHER VOICE
Rape: between the female whinge and the male cringe
AUBER ON WAUGH
My heart had been bleeding for Angus Diggle all week, and then this account of rancorous English academics belabouring Shakespeare with their own chicken- brained political obsessions set it off again. Diggle, it will be remembered, had a previ- ous ordeal to the one on Friday when he was mysteriously convicted for the attempt- ed rape of a 25-year-old female lawyer who, he claimed, took him to her bedroom, removed all her clothes and sat naked on the bed with her legs apart, staring at him.
On the earlier occasion this distinguished 37-year-old Bolton solicitor was travelling on a train from Manchester to Bolton when he struck up a conversation with two young women sitting opposite him. Let one of them, Miss Ilona Singer, 21, take up the story:
1 and another girl passenger totally ignored him and I held a magazine up to my face. But he started quoting Latin and Shakespeare. He was being very smarmy and obviously try- ing to belittle me ...
He asked my thoughts about the idea that three-quarters of the human race was com- plete scum and ought to be exterminated.
Singer ran to her waiting father in fear when the train arrived and later reported him to the police. He was fined £50 by Manchester City magistrates after pleading guilty to 'interfering with the comfort of passengers' and lost his job in the legal department of the North Western Regional Health Authority.
I was not aware that in the North of Eng- land it is now an offence to recite Shake- speare in case the other passengers suspect you are trying to belittle them. Now he faces a possible prison sentence, as well as being struck off, for having climbed on the young woman's bed, in the circumstances he described, wearing only a green condom and the frilly cuffs of his Highland costume. An Old Bailey jury found him guilty of attempted rape by a 10-2 majority, although he swore he desisted the second he realised he had misinterpreted the young woman's messages. No evidence to the contrary was reported in the newspa- pers, and a man sleeping with his girlfriend in the next room confirmed that Miss X was naked when she emerged to complain about Diggle's behaviour.
Both participants must have been as drunk as skunks after drinking and dancing Highland reels for five hours. I suspect that one reason why this ludicrous prosecution was brought was feminist rancour, another class animosity. The policewoman called to the scene alleged that Diggle said, 'I have spent £200 on her. Why can't I do what I have done to her?' The girl friend next door said that Diggle asked her to dress him, saying 'A man should never dress him- self.' The boyfriend claimed that Diggle said: 'This is so ordinary and you people are so boring. You obviously did not go to public school.'
Diggle, who went to somewhere called Bolton School, agreed that he did not have a lot of sexual experience, and that it was 'some time' before this incident that he last had sexual intercourse. But his words which stick in the mind were these: 'After six sec- onds I suddenly realised I had made a mis- take. I got quite a shock when I realised I had made an error. I made a conscious decision that I should not be there.' So he rolled off and fell asleep, wearing only his frilly cuffs and his green condom, hoping it would all sort itself out in the morning.
Poor man. It is not just that he may feel himself to be the victim of an injustice that makes my heart bleed. So, after all, does Michael Tyson, the boxer. It is not even that he is a fellow ex-public schoolboy, and almost certainly, with his interests in wine, stained glass and calligraphy, a Spectator reader, although I do feel we lonely old fogeys from another era should stick together. What makes my heart bleed is to see the system break him down. The small- est punishment he can expect, a stiff course of counselling, is also the most humiliating.
In a recent article in the Telegraph, Les- ley Garner argued that rape cannot be traded into bad and less bad. Rape is an absolute offence, and absolutely bad: rape by a friend can be just as bad as rape by a stranger because it is likely to destroy a woman's trust in human nature.
Obviously it is possible to construct cases where rape by a friend is more upsetting than rape by a stranger, but in the generali- ty of cases date-rape will be a less terrifying experience; it is obviously a judge's duty to make infinite gradations in the offence of rape, not just between rape by a friend and rape by a stranger. Garner is a careful and intelligent writer; I can only suppose she wrote this piece because she wished to emphasise what she saw as a female point of view, although the date-rapist concerned received three-and-a-half years.
If it is really the female point of view that there is nothing to choose between being assaulted and sodomised by a violent stranger — possibly homicidal, possibly Aids-ridden — and the husband or lover who slips it in while the female mind is on something else, then I can only say the female point of view is wrong and there is no reason for judges of either sex to pay the slightest attention to it.
Garner reckons that some form of male solidarity — 'There but for the grace of God' — may operate, before falling back on the tired old half-true sound-byte 'No means No'. I fear she misunderstands the male point of view. I have never raped nor attempted to rape anyone, and do not have the slightest fear that I ever will — although I suppose it is always possible, in the present climate, that I will be accused and convicted on class grounds, as poor Angus Diggle may have been. What resent most is the way the whole debate is used to make men cringe and apologise for existing, allowing women to advance the most preposterous opinions from a position of moral advantage. For a woman to be raped is a barbarism, but so is it a bar- barism for a man to be sent to prison for what may be a comparatively trivial offence (of awkwardness or discourtesy) or one he did not commit. Until the female viewpoint is prepared to admit that, it cannot expect its own anticipatory whingeing noises to be heard with much sympathy.
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