A group of female MPs and women’s rights activists danced in the Polish parliament last week to protest violence against women and to support a law that will signify that any sex without expressed consent will be deemed an act of rape.
Their mode of expression was an insult to women who have actually suffered rape and the dance wasn’t very good either, more Robocop than ballet.
The fact that a minister, Katarzyna Kotula, along with other women MPs danced on Ash Wednesday was an insult to the Polish cultural code too, and marked this out as being especially juvenile. I don’t want to ban anyone from dancing on Ash Wednesday as long as no one criticizes me for exercising my right to condemn it.
However, it’s not dancing on an Ash Wednesday that is the main problem here, it is the turning of parliament into a circus and dance hall, and all with the full acceptance of the Speaker and the fact that this sort of “performance” is greeted with approval by many that troubles me and, in my view, offends the real victims of rape. It marks the trivialization of something serious.
Trivialization helps to overcome reason and our resistance to things that are unreasonable. Those who criticize such acts as the dance in parliament are berated themselves for being against a good cause when, in fact, they are standing up for reason and enlightenment rather than infantile posturing, as well as saying that such acts do nothing for the cause of helping women.
The dance theme adopted in this protest comes from an idea by the playwright Eve Elsener of “Vagina Monologues” fame, for whom dance represented women being in control of their own bodies. But how that helps women who have been raped beats me.
Behind the dance in the Polish parliament lies a toxic proposal to redefine the meaning of rape which will cause an avalanche of false claims and paralyze normal interhuman relations.
There is no empirical evidence that the real number of rapes committed in Poland far exceeds the number that is reported. That is purely an assumption based on hearsay or market research on too small and too select a sample to be representative.
Moreover, its definition of sexual molestation is broad beyond belief and includes flashing, offensive comments, “indecent” jokes, obscene gestures, or a woman’s perception of a man suggesting sex — all highly subjective criteria that make the research of doubtful value.
According to the advocates of the redefinition of rape, it is wrong to expect a woman to demonstrate she tried to resist having sex but that it is the man who must prove the woman consented — a fundamental change in human relations as the onus of proof would be on the man to show that the woman definitely consented. In other words, the man would have to prove he had not committed rape rather than the woman having to prove that he did. This is very hard if not impossible to achieve since most sex acts do not take place in front of witnesses.
MPs, instead of dancing in parliament, would be well advised to dedicate themselves to their legislative and constituency responsibilities. Robocop dances can take place in their free time and outside of the parliamentary building. The Speaker of Parliament would be well advised to ensure that parliament retains a modicum of dignity, and the rest of us should have the courage to call out juvenile behavior for what it is.
