Well, Now -- From this Corner the Contender for Prize Hypocrisy -- Female Accusers of Male Sexual Predation

"This development reveals a stunning level of hypocrisy by Asia Argento,"
"At the very same time Argento was working on her own secret settlement for the alleged sexual abuse of a minor, she was positioning herself at the forefront of those condemning Mr. Weinstein, despite the fact that her sexual relationship with Mr. Weinstein was between two consenting adults which lasted for more than four years."
Weinstein attorney, Benjamin Brafman

LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images

"It doesn’t really matter what I want."
"[The message sent to people who have been sexually assaulted after the two-and-a-half year saga is] don’t bother reporting. You are going to spend the next two, three years of your life being wrapped up in a system that really doesn’t care about you."
"[I] never needed any man to tell me whether I’ve been raped or not . . . . I still know what happened to me, and it doesn’t matter what the legal system thinks."
"I’m horrified by this entire system, not just by Zuker’s inadequate analysis of case law. The whole system is horrifying and people should be horrified."
"[Her self-incriminating text message...?] I didn't think it was relevant to him raping me."
Mandi Gray, teaching assistant, York University 

Mandi Gray, right, has said she probably wouldn’t participate in a new trial for Mustafa Ururyar, left, if one was ordered, noting the case has already taken two years of her life.  (Toronto Star / Alyshah Hasham and Anne-Marie Jackson)

Mandi Gray was a teaching assistant and graduate student at York University in Toronto who had an affair with Mustafa Ururyar, also a graduate student and teaching assistant there. Their casual affair in 2015 was of two weeks' duration, when they slept together with no otheer commitment of any kind. Completely consensual. From a party, she texted him, inviting him to come along to the pub: "Come drink and then we can have hot sex". He came, and they did. And she later failed to release the text message to Toronto Police when she accused Ururyar of raping her. He was originally convicted of sexual assault, but ultimately the conviction was overturned.

Another short story of false accusations has far greater repercussions in social media. The storm of revelations and accusations that erupted in Hollywood and then spread everywhere through the #MeToo movement when several actors, among them Asia Argento, accused Harvey Weinstein of raping them set a new standard in women finally getting their own back from men who had propositioned, manhandled, molested and raped them, usually from a position of power. Men in the entertainment business, in sports, in corporate life, high and mighty celebrities and local entrepreneurs alike, were accused and their lives forever changed.

Most of the accusations without doubt were credible, some veered on the edge of absurd with clumsiness being equated with violence. But there have been a number of occasions, such as the earlier court case with CBC's one-time darling Jian Ghomeshi -- whose ego led him to denigrate women and whose sexual appetite steered toward violent kinkiness -- was accused of rape. His lawyer revealed on the stand that the women accusing him sent cloying messages of endearment and conciliation to him, after the supposed rapes took place.

And now, Italian actor-producer Asia Argento, the first woman to publicly accuse Weinstein that led to a veritable landslide of other accusations, began the downward spiral of his life as a celebrated Hollywood producer, to a pathetic wreck of a man insisting he did nothing wrong, appears to have incriminating skeletons in her own designer closet. Child actor Jimmy Bennett was assaulted by her in a California hotel room in 2013; she at age 37, he 17, even while the age of consent in the state was 18.

While she accused Weinstein of rape, forcibly performing sex on her in a hotel room, she had committed rape on a child actor and settled with him afterward to the tune of $380,000 for his silence and agreeing that a photograph of them lying in bed together not be made public. However, once news became public of her accusation of Weinstein, Bennett, now 22, approached Argento to ask for $3.5 million in damages.

Child molesters are usually, but not always, men. Women are usually, but not always, the innocent party in forced violent sex. Women insist, and with good enough reason, that they be believed when they come forward with their accusations of man-handling of their intimate persons. And those women who falsely accuse men of molestation and sexual assault do no favours to the women who have genuinely suffered the misery of sexual assault.

"I Have Done Nothing Wrong"

"Since there was suspicion of sexual relationship, the police sent the girl to forensic medical for virginity test."
Fraidoon Obaidi, chief, Kabul Police Criminal Investigation Department

"The virginity test has been banned. However, it's a long-lasting practice used wrongly by law enforcement authorities, especially police."
"However wrong, it is going to take some time to entirely be stopped and removed. But we are determined to change the practice."
Office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani

"The circumstances of virginity test are never humane."
"In conducting virginity tests, no one asks for the consent of the victim or the suspect -- 99 percent of the virginity tests are conducted by force and without consideration of its legality."
Soraya Sobhrang, commissioner, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission

Violence against women remains a major issue in Afghanistan. File photo of Afghan civil society activist women weep and lie on the grave of Farkhunda, 27 after she was lynched by an angry mob in central Kabul on March 22.

A human rights abuse and indignity of the highest order, virginity tests are conducted in a small chamber at Kabul's forensic center. The room has much in common in appearance with a storage space. The government's deputy director of forensic medicine, Khalil Ahmad Pashtoonyar, hastens to give his assurance that women are never forced to undergo the examination. Should a woman refuse, his facility simply returns the appropriate file to the police with the notation that the subject failed to give consent.

Entirely overlooking the very fact that in this fundamentalist society extreme public pressure and social expectations weigh heavily on a family's honour and the end result is that a woman has little option but to submit to the test. The social devastation of censure and isolation that can result from a refusal to accept the pressure and submit to authorities' demands that the public morality be respected ensures that few women have the courage to defend themselves against such an intimate intrusion.

Rights groups have repeatedly warned against the lack of basic rights for women in Afghanistan [AP]

Yet, even if the test is conducted as social mores demand, and the woman is found to be without the moral blemish of a disturbed hymen, the very fact that she has been submitted to such a test is indication enough of her presumed moral failure in this backward society. A 17-year-old girl and a young man she had been linked with were sitting in a vehicle when a mob descended on them, setting fire to the car. The two young people managed to escape. When police arrived on the scene it was not the lynching-prone mob that interested them.

Instead they arrested the teenage girl. She was ordered by police to undergo the standard virginity test at the forensic medical centre. The completed test verified that her hymen was intact; nonetheless, she was held for 40 days at the detention center meant to hold children under suspicion. And the public shame of the accusation against her by the ravening mob compelled her father to send his daughter out of Kabul, to be with family in a different province. "I have done nothing wrong", she wrote to her father.

Afghanistan's president had acceded to the demands of rights activists that forensic virginity tests be officially abolished. Regardless, the examinations remain forced by officials upon women and girls who in many instances have been raped or who have suffered some manner of sexual abuse. In other words, they are held responsible for the violent attacks rapists subject them to, guilty for being women inciting men -- by virtue of the fact that they are women -- to attack them.

Just Lie Back and Enjoy It?

"Why didn’t you just keep your knees together?"
"Why didn’t you just sink your bottom down into the basin so he couldn’t penetrate you?"
 "Sex and pain sometimes go together… not necessarily a bad thing."
Justice Robin Camp, 64, 2014 sexual assault trial, Alberta Provincial Court

Federal Court Justice Robin Camp arrives with his wife Mariaan, right, and daughter Lauren at a Canadian Judicial Council inquiry in Calgary. (Canadian Press) 

He is (presumably) contentedly married, and he and his wife have a daughter together, possibly just a few years older than the complainant he was interrogating during the trial when he emitted those lines, among others toward the 19-year-old Cree woman who charged she had been raped at the venue of a party. That the man she accused of rape had done so over a sink in the apartment washroom, despite her pleas that he stop and the pain he was inflicting on her.

He was also recorded as having stated his distaste for updated rape laws that were meant to protect women from the kind of institutionalized bigotry that penalized them through penetrating questioning meant to demonstrate that their lifestyle, their habits, their relationships and above all their mode of dress predicted the outcome of such violence perpetrated against them. According to the judge, rape shield laws "hamstring" the defence and were unnecessary.

"It clearly is part and parcel of his resistance to changes in the law meant to protect vulnerable witnesses, to promote women's equality and to bring integrity to the way in which sexual assault cases are dealt with by the justice system", stated a five-member enquiry committee of the Canadian Judicial Council in the wake of hearings taking place in Calgary.

After complaints were lodged against this man's bearing and comments to the injured party who must have been utterly demoralized, but carried on irrespective of the personal responsibility placed on her for her miserable predicament, the justice was nonetheless elevated to the Federal Court of Canada. His past has caught up with him, however, and the enquiry launched, which has now concluded that he should be removed from that federal post.

His acquittal of the accused whom the judge advised that he and his friends in future become "far more careful" as well as "far more gentle" with women in order to "protect" themselves, did no credit to justice in Canada. But it was in particular the judge's comments on the amendments, now many decades old, recognizing the unequal status of women in the law that they found incredibly offensive.

Leading them to the observation that "His comments showed disdain for the law", an obvious "antipathy" to the law, with more than a whiff of nostalgia and the hope that the pendulum in law might "swing away from the reforms back to the former ways", among them the demand that women rigorously physically resist attack. 

His "harshness" toward the complainant, the remarks made that "belittle and trivialize" her allegations led also to the unanimous agreement that he should no longer sit on the Federal Court bench. His chagrin at losing that $314,000 annual salary will no doubt sting, but he has the option of either resigning or submitting an argument to convince authorities that he continues to merit his judgeship.