Is it too much to hope that men falsely accused of rape by drunken women might
one day be treated with ordinary courtesy and remain anonymous until proven
guilty? Last week it took a jury a mere 45 minutes to throw out an
accusation made by a woman in her forties, whom we must, maddeningly —
because she is automatically guaranteed anonymity – refer to as Miss X,
against Peter Bacon, a 26-year-old student and chef from Canterbury, Kent.
After an evening at the woman’s house, during which Miss X, Bacon and a friend
had drunk at least five bottles of wine, Bacon and Miss X retired to bed and
had sex. Next morning Miss X, a solicitor, was so hungover she did not even
remember what had happened, then claimed Bacon had raped her because she was
too drunk to have consented to sex. The way Bacon tells it, Miss X was
“giving me the come-on”. When they started kissing, “she did not say no.
There was never any indication of her saying, ‘What are you doing?’ She had
plenty of time to say, ‘Oi!’,” he told the jury.
Winchester crown court also heard that after the woman, who described herself
as “a recreational binge drinker”, woke up, she started shouting and asked
Bacon to leave: “She asked, ‘Did we have sex?’ I said, ‘Yes’, and she
started shouting, ‘Rape!’ She said, ‘It’s because of f******s like you that
the law has been changed’ ”, referring to a 2007 Court of Appeal ruling that
someone who is drunk may not be able to give consent to sex.
Bacon said he had endured a “nightmare” 13 months from the original accusation
to his eventual acquittal. This farce has cost the taxpayer an estimated
£90,000.
Stories such as this have been driving me absolutely mad for years. For a
start, they undermine genuine rape cases, which are still woefully
underreported to the police and of which only a tiny minority come to trial.
How a woman who wakes up next to some bloke she was too drunk to remember
having sex with is able, in the cold light of day, to compare herself to the
victim of a genuine sexual assault is beyond me. It’s repellent – the most
grotesque embracing of faux-victimhood. It reminds me of celebrities who
blame something that elicits sympathy, such as “exhaustion” or “depression”,
for their stay in rehab rather than the fact that they’ve been up all night
smoking crack.
I have nothing against “recreational binge drinking” — well, I have, since I
dislike the sight of puking 16-year-olds as much as anyone. But in this
particular case Miss X was surely describing something we adults are all
familiar with, which is to say drinking to excess and waking up with a very
sore head – but only doing it once a week or once a fortnight or whatever.
Leaving alcoholic children aside for a moment, “recreational binge drinking”
is how most grown-ups consume alcohol.
They work hard all week, look after their children and maybe go out on a
weekend evening and drink a great deal more than they should. Unless I move
in unusually louche circles, this is simply how adults drink. So no
brickbats for Miss X from me on that front: if she wants to describe her
drinking habits in honest terms, good on her. But what on earth happened to
the notion of personal responsibility?
I remember being amazed when cases like this one first started coming to light
a decade or so ago, usually bunched together under the umbrella term “date
rape”. Now, obviously, I realise that some women do indeed get raped on
dates. But I also know that going out, drinking too much and waking up with
some random bloke hunkered under the duvet is not rape. It is nowhere near
rape and to suggest that there is any common ground with rape is shameful.
Waking up and thinking, “Cor, don’t fancy mine much,” is called a mistake.
It is embarrassing, cringe-making, humiliating – but feeling a bit
surprised, or ashamed of yourself, or sickened at your lack of taste, or
whatever normal human emotions you feel when faced with the snoring
non-stud, does not make you a “victim” of “abuse”. Women who think that it
does need their heads examined.
Bacon told the court he was after a one-night stand. This is not especially
romantic, but neither is it depraved. People feel frisky, they go out
looking for someone who feels frisky also, they get it on, they go home. I
spent much of my university career cheerfully jumping into bed with people –
this is perhaps too much information, I realise – whose names I would be
hard-pressed to remember, although occasionally I meet them socially and
they kindly remind me of our sometime intimacy.
At the time, some of the names became elusive within days of the deed being
done. There was usually alcohol involved – I’m trying to think of an
instance where it wasn’t but I’m drawing a blank. And there you go. So what?
In a handful of cases my choice of partner seemed wildly injudicious next
morning, but haven’t we all been there? All that happened was that my
girlfriends would tease me and we’d all fall about laughing. I was a
student, I was unattached, I liked having sex, there were lots of people to
have sex with and if there was never an official moment of consent it never
bothered anybody.
I think what often happens in these cases is that women sober up and feel a
sort of retrospective terror at what might have happened and want to punish
somebody for making them feel scared and ashamed – even though they were
neither scared nor ashamed at the time. “He could have been an axe
murderer,” they think. “I was alone in my house with him. He could have
robbed me, murdered me – oh my God.”
This is a completely understandable reaction: alcohol blunts one’s sense of
vulnerability and sobriety brings it screaming back. This is the point at
which a sane person thinks: “This is no way to live my life; perhaps I’ll
ease up on the drink next time.” It is also the point at which a
mean-minded, dishonest one thinks: “Nothing to do with me, not my fault, I
am completely blameless. I was raped.”
The latter view makes women look like lying, self-deluding imbeciles. Miss X
destroyed Bacon’s life for more than a year – and she didn’t have a leg to
stand on. Why do we know his name and not hers?
+ I’d been slightly worried that the new series of The Apprentice,
which started last Wednesday, would somehow seem irrelevant or tragically
unzeitgeisty in the current climate. Actually, the fact that making money is
harder than it was this time last year, since people are less willing to
spend money on having their shoes shined or their car washed (as we saw in
the would-be Apprentices’ first task), only adds a delicious extra dimension
to the show.
I watched the opening programme with one eye on trusty Twitter and was amused
to see that a “trending topic” – the thing that everybody is talking about
at any given moment – was “upside down”. This referred to Anita Shah, the
first person to fall foul of Sir Alan Sugar’s exacting requirements and be
fired. During the show Shah’s mouth was completely and distractingly upside
down throughout: a perfect inverted smile, like a child's drawing of a sad
face or Beaker from The Muppets.
“I have a natural frown,” Shah said, with some understatement. Lots has
happened in the past week, but the water-cooler subject has been the mouth
shape of a business strategist from Birmingham.
Such is the power of The Apprentice, which remains the best reality TV show
anywhere, ever.
