A course of strong anti-hallucinogenic medication will be prescribed for this patient, along with behavioural rehabilitation. Serious consideration should be given to electroconvulsive therapy for its well-known calmative effects. I await your further instructions.

Kind regards,

Lydia Bascombe

That’s not real.

I wrote it.

I am untrustworthy. But I’m the only access you have to this story. My lens is the only one through which you are permitted to peek. Does that make you feel unsafe?

I bet you’d prefer a calm, authoritative, third-person narrator to set the facts out for you. Neutrality is a man’s job, after all. One needs an implied male narrator to cut through the hysteria of the feminine perspective and bring balance to the story. The testimony of women is not to be trusted. They are like children in that regard. And when you bring sexual assault into the mix—well, it makes the uncertainty worse.

Women regularly accuse men of rapes that never happened. It’s a well-known fact. We used to have a law that took this into account. It was called the “cautionary rule.” It didn’t apply only in South Africa, although we were among the last countries to get rid of it. Most Common Law countries had some version of it. The idea was that judges and juries were required to take into account the fact that sexual complainants were inherently unreliable witnesses. This was particularly so where there were no corroborating witnesses to support the allegation.

And that’s the pesky thing about sexual assault, isn’t it? There often are no other witnesses besides the victim and the perpetrator. Defenders of the cautionary rule (and there were many) used to say that it wasn’t specifically targeted at women. It applied to children, too. Children who claimed to have been sexually assaulted were assumed to be inherently untruthful. Female complainants could take comfort from the fact that the law regarded them in the same light as children when it came to their reliability and veracity.

South Africa got rid of the cautionary rule in 1998. Courts are no longer allowed to work from the presumption that sexual complainants are lying, but the legacy of that presumption lingers. “To cry rape” is a phrase that still exists in our lexicon. We feel automatic sympathy for the legions of men falsely accused of rape by their wives, girlfriends, colleagues, and random women on the street.

The #MeToo movement has caused this to run out of control. How are men expected to defend themselves when a single woman’s testimony is enough to put them in jail? It is terrible the way all the world’s legal and political institutions are skewed in favour of women.

Enough of that.